The Threads of Her Making

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

Emily Dickinson

I held off on sharing this blog post for well over a year.

These are my thoughts and memories, and it felt a little too personal.

It discusses my mum and her passing; it is an untangling of my introspections.

I also questioned if perhaps I was not honouring her as I should.

Relationships are complicated, and no two families share the same story. Actually, no two siblings will share the same family. We all see, hear and live our own individual experiences.

The words below have been sitting patiently for too long now, each time causing me to pause and ponder. I have often gone to write something else, yet I kept coming back to my mother.

So, I have decided to hit 'publish’ and let it out into the world. I am pretty certain she would have given her approval.

As my mum often said ~ she did her best. And I can now acknowledge that is exactly what she did.

I am also sure my mum would be giving me a fairly decent eye-roll right now … one of the many things I learned from her.

It’s been almost two years since my mum passed away. When it happened, my first feeling was relief.

It was over.

Her final weeks were horrific with catastrophic falls, unimaginable pain, surgery, and puzzling incompetence from the aged care facility. Mum had dementia, and those last days felt unbearably cruel. She could be abrasive and cranky, but she didn’t deserve that ending.

After the Relief Came the Weight

Once that initial feeling left, the heaviness of loss took hold. Even though we had already lost the mum we had known some years earlier, her physical absence left a quiet chasm. I felt rudderless. Everything in my life looked different.

What was it all for?
Why do we bother?
Who really cares?

Grief has a way of stripping life down to its bones, leaving only what matters most.

A Life of Precision and Quiet Creativity

I started to recall mum’s life in snapshots.

Her own mother was her Guiding Light, and her five siblings her best friends. Her three children were a source of pride and often frustrations. Her seven grandchildren were her greatest joy. And two great granddaughters she got to meet but never hold in her memory. Mum collected a variety of friends over the decades, and she remained in contact with many until her mind started to deteriorate.

There were a multitude of happy times, but Mum tended to dwell on the negative. The hardest time was when our father left her. A blow that shook our whole family, redefining how we all moved from that point. Mum never truly recovered.

Mum had led an intelligent life of purpose and quiet creativity. She left school at 14 to help support her family, setting aside her dream of becoming a teacher. In her first clerical job at Coles in Melbourne, she rose quickly, learning new skills and then moving to a new company where she eventually met my father.

Marriage, as it did for so many women of her generation, redirected her path. I don’t think motherhood was ever high on her list of ambitions, and her frustrations often spilled into home life. If the mundanity of her life was bringing her down, she found an escape by being active beyond it.

At some point, she used to draw. I never actually saw her with her pencil and notebook, but found beautiful sketches of ladies in stylish dresses, each a potential new outfit perhaps. Why she stopped drawing is a question that will now never be answered.

Mum sewed and hemmed clothing, sports uniforms, theatre costumes, curtains … anything that needed mending or making. She would hem our Nanna’s nightgowns and then use the excess fabric to make new pyjamas for us children. Nothing was ever wasted.

She taught herself macrame and then ran night classes to teach others. She used the original Artex fabric tubes to decorate our t-shirts and other fabrics, and was soon asked to do the same for her friends.

Mum helped my dad with his second job of home-based tax work, typing late into the night. Initially on a manual typewriter and then the ‘luxury’ of an electric one. Documents with carbon paper in place were rolled along the platen, and her elegant fingers flew across the keyboard. Typing errors were rare; they cost money.

Everything she did carried her signature precision.

Seeing Myself More Clearly

When she died, I mourned not only her but the mirror she held up to my own life. Her absence became a reminder that time is finite and fragile.

I began asking questions I’d long avoided: What do I want to leave behind? How do I want to be remembered?

We didn’t always see eye to eye. She held my siblings and me to impossibly high standards, ones I still hold myself to. As a child, I often felt apprehensive around her; as an adult, I see how much of her toughness was founded in her own lived experiences. Mum enforced discipline, hard work and good manners. I now understand that all she truly wanted was the best for us.

Her eye for detail shaped my own pursuit of quality, and this has often been to my detriment. I’m still learning to soften that voice, to be kinder to myself.

I never considered myself creative. I’d always longed to paint or draw, but Mum’s voice echoed in my head: “Christine doesn’t have a creative bone in her body.”

I was the clever one.
My sister was creative.
My brother, the blue-eyed baby.

Labels given without malice. I can see that now.

It just took me far too long to realise that clever and creative aren’t mutually exclusive. (I wasn’t that clever after all!)

The Lessons That Remain

For all our differences, I am grateful. Mum taught me about perseverance, about noticing the small things, and about doing them well. Those lessons linger in the way I design, in the way I live.

Grief isn’t linear; it has a way of hitting at the most unexpected times. A scent, a word or phrase, a dust-covered memory… When a parent dies, it feels as though a protective layer has been peeled away, leaving us exposed to our own impermanence.

In the quiet that followed her passing, I began to look differently at the small details of my daily life. It is strange that even after her death, the lessons from Mum continue. But I have started choosing the ones to carry forward and which to gently let go.

Creating as a Way of Remembering

These days, when I design patterns, I often think of her and the whir of her sewing machine, the smell of freshly pressed fabric, the way she would unpick a seam and sew it again, making sure it was perfect. The buttons (oh, those beautiful buttons!), the lace and ric-rac wound around cardboard, the many (so many) spools of thread, and the sewing cupboard stacked not only with fabric upon fabric but with decades of memories.

Creating surface pattern designs has helped to bring clarity to my thoughts as I process the hows and whys of my life. It is through colour, line, and pattern, I tell stories. And occasionally, these stories feel like fragments of my mum and her legacy, memories uncovered and brought to life in my designs.

In some ways, the act of creating is my answer to mortality. A way to leave behind something that perhaps weaves its way into another’s story.

We all carry fragments of the people who shaped us into our creative work. Whose hands do you see in the things you create?

Do let me know, I would be honoured to hear your stories.