Here’s the very belated Christmas present I mentioned in my post on selfish knitting.

It’s for my dear friend Jill, who gave me some really beautiful vintage clothing after she moved from Minneapolis to the D.C. area last spring.

One of the pieces was her wedding ensemble—embroidered linen, since apparently she was a bit of a hippie! I knew I wouldn’t wear the blouse, so I asked her if it was okay to cut it up and turn it into something else, and she was cool with that. On our Turkey trip we were reading about Lucretius in a New Yorker that got read cover to cover at least twice, so this project was inspired by a line from De Rerum Natura:

As I ruminated on this line in particular, I became enchanted with the idea of one form of love turning over into another—one kind of love creating another. Elliot and Spencer’s parents, like ours, are no longer married, and as a child of divorce I think about this from time to time: that my parents had to come together because we wanted to enter into the world through them, and that in a cosmic sense they may have had very little choice in the matter. (I don’t actually believe that, but it’s always fun to ruminate on these Big Questions, right?)

So as I stitched, I enjoyed the symbolism in cutting up Jill’s wedding blouse to make something completely different (and equally pretty, I hope).

I did the embroidery 100% freehand. I didn’t have a plan, and I didn’t trace a design onto a piece of Sulky Solvy (though that was my original intention). I wanted to see how it would turn out if I took a more organic, “type B,” anti-perfectionist approach. Actually, I can’t see that it would have turned out any nicer if I had sketched something out beforehand. I’m very happy with it!

I used my all-time favorite calico for the backing.