ARTable

The 12th episode of the 4th season of Young Sheldon, a sitcom about the brilliant prodigy of physics, finds the hotshots of science teaming up with the unlikely, not-a-scientific-bone-in-her-Texan-body Meemaw (Sheldon's maternal grandmother) for her crochet skills : to create a porous sleeve to suspend a sphere in a buffer solution. Of course even as a physicist I have no idea which exact experiment this is, but that's an exploration for another day. We often think of science as this detached set of observations and rules floating around in a vacuum but that's not the case. Science is regular. It's a set of regular, everyday phenomenon, observations and conclusions derived thereon.

Archaeologists theorize that early humans across Asia and Europe would sew fur and skin clothing with needles made of antlers and threads made of animal sinew. An art with such humble beginnings has found its way into every moment of our lives. Thirty seven thousand years after the first human sewed themselves a piece of clothing to fight off hyperthermia on a cold winter night in Europe, another performed a simple suture on an open gash on a human shoulder in Egypt, saving another life. Humanity has since trekked a long way to develop a wide variety of stitches – for a wide varity of applications. Clothing and surgery are probably the biggest industries that uses the skill of sewing but related industries like taxidermy, book binding, fashion accessories, soft toys, beddings, upholstery also use some particular sewing methods. Whether it is a continuous stitch, discontinuous or a combination of two, all of the places they belong in, all the pieces of flesh or fabric they hold together is determined by one simple thing: tensile strength.

The “pulling force” that each stitch applies on the stitched medium and the thread needs to find the perfect balance. Tight stitches will lead to puckers – a bane we've moulded into a boon and created the perfectly easy way to create texture in fabrics. Embrace the pucker further and you end up with ruffles! How ingenious! Stitches when too loose will barely hold your fabrics together. Yet again, we found a way to make lemonade out of the metaphorical sewing lemons and invented the basting stitch! Finding the perfect tension while hand sewing is like the story of Goldilocks- it takes time, practice and observation to find the tension that’s just right. The main way to regulate the tension in your thread is to observe the way it feels when you pull on it by pressing your thumb of the fabric+thread junction. Another way of regulating the tension is to find the right length of thread. I find waxed thread that just reaches above my shoulder to be the perfect length for book binding, unwaxed polyester thread that reaches just till my shoulders to be the right length for hemming and joining stitches, embroidery thread that reached right beyond my forearm to be the right length for embroidery. A simple continuous stitch can hold a teddy bear from spilling it's stuffing and a human from spilling their guts. Many would call this a morbid juxtaposition but I find beauty in it. Sewing is often overlooked as an art form, or maybe it is overtook by its prettier sibling, crocheting in recent years. The true skill in sewing is to learn to make “tension” obey your instructions.

The two most basic stitches to play around with (specially if you're learning to sew by hand for the first time in your life) are : * Straight stitch / run stitch – lay your material down. Use your needle as though it were a dolphin jumping in and out of the waves of the ocean, only your fabric is the ocean. You will soon recognise that this is not the best way to stitch fabrics that unravel at the ends. That's when you experiment with different hems (Check out French hems). * Back stitch – again, lay your material down. Use your needle dolphin to go into the fabric and come up for air. Once you're up, backflip to the exact middle of your last dive and come up for air again. And there you have it, a continuous stitch that is a little more secure.

(Tell you a secret, back stitches are one of the strongest hand sewn stitches to exist! It doesn't unravel easily and is easy to repair.)

There's a lot more to sewing than meets the eye. Once you know how to sew you'll have to learn posture and lighting to work in. If you're taking up sewing as a hobby, remember it is an art and it deserves your respect.