This weekend marks the start of Sugar Holiday, Şeker Bayramı, the end of Ramazan, and with it comes visiting family and delicious food. This usually entails a freshly cleaned house for visitors, too, and new outfits for the kids. Tomorrow I’ll be cleaning and baking (looks like I’ll make a brunch cake with blackberries), and I’m already hungry thinking about it. I managed to squeeze in one last project before fall cleaning takes over, though, and it turned out to be a (tiny) pillow.
I stitched this Babar pattern when I was pregnant with Lina and needed a quick project. I think that if I just did rows and rows of x’s without any pattern at all, I would be just as happy as a real pattern because a good, long row of uninterrupted stitches is as close I get to meditation these days. But it’s hard to gift projects with random stitches. I read somewhere, several years back, about how really truly subversive stitching has been for women at various points in history, because in the act of stitching, one has contemplative thought and makes room for imagination and desire. That could, of course, be dangerous if you were not encouraged to think. My friend Tara talks about this regarding the intricate ‘oya’ lace patterns traditionally done by village women in Turkey in her blog post Needlework and Crystals.
Today I made the little pillow and stuffed it, propping it on Topi’s bed where I hope he’ll discover it when he comes home from nursery today.
Happy Bayram! Iyi bayramlar!
