I first heard the phrase “A stitch in time saves nine” from the book by that name by Madeleine L’Engle, so it’s no wonder I assumed it had an esoteric and possibly magical meaning. I remember asking someone to explain it to me — my older sister? My mother? It was a woman who knew how to sew, and she said something about, “You make one stitch in time and then you don’t have to make nine others,” and I didn’t understand and assumed that “in time” was some piece of sewing jargon, a neat trick involving folding or perhaps the name of a part of a garment, like if I made the stitch at the top, it was worth nine stitches at the bottom.
Much later I learned the real meaning of the phrase, that if you make a repair quickly you won’t have to do a larger repair in the future. It’s a truism I’ve experienced many a time as I put off sewing rips in clothes and curse myself as I stitch together two tears where there had been one.
Yet I still feel weird about the phrase, like there’s a hidden meaning still in it, and I think it’s telling that child-me assumed it was a Secret Mystery of Art That Would Unlock Ease. After all, every ad for a product or morning talk show promised me “one neat trick” that would solve everything from my acne to my career.
When I first learned to sew, doing the running stitch on scrap fabric, I remember thinking, “That can’t be it.” The basic mechanics were so crude, so understandable… I had expected, I dunno, advanced geometry to be involved? I annoyed my mother by asking, “But what goes between the stitches?” and “But how do I make them disappear?” and other questions that missed the point, and the limits of what my mother could teach me. (It would be decades before an older man taught me to make the blind hanky edge stitch and a website explained the mysteries of French Seams, techniques that created the stitchless-seeming edge I was expecting. But even then, the basic mechanic is still pulling a thread through a hole, over and over.)
Most things in life are pretty simple. Most problems can be solved through tedium and brute force. That’s often all it is. No neat trick, no clever tuck, no fold in the fabric of the universe, just one stitch after another, in timely fashion.
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