To embroider, you don’t need much. The materials are earthy and common in the environment; maybe a little preparation is needed but not too much. Thread and needle exist in every home, and usually some piece of fabric as well. You can embroider on any fabric. On anything made of interwoven threads—anything ready to accept a third or more threads. It’s a forgotten mother tongue that was spoken in almost every home years ago.

I have few memories of embroidery—actually, I don’t remember complete embroidered works but rather fragments, potential unrealized. Large boxes with many layers and floors full of threads, patterns, buttons, and needles that belonged to Grandma Ruti, may she live, and to her father, who owned a small shop. When he died, he left her a treasure trove of crumbling brown cardboard boxes with no hint of what was inside. All identical and dusty, disappointed that they remained full. My grandmother is a very practical woman, and her language is sewing more than embroidery. As a child, I didn’t have anything made of fabric that she hadn’t had a part in creating—dresses, costumes, curtains, dolls, and more. Everything she created and everything that wore out—she fixed (and still fixes!) with love.

There was one sewing box that belonged to my mother from the time we lived on a military base in the United States in the 1980s. Large and white, with a pattern of a woven basket, made of plastic, with a golden clasp. What else was a 25-year-old “stay-at-base mom” to do besides embroider American Hobby Lobby cross-stitch patterns? (Raising three small daughters. Mostly alone. At 25. In the desert of the United States). Each girl received a small wooden hoop with a delicate small embroidery of an animal inside. Mine was a sheep. There were years, during adolescence, when I was ready to swear the sheep was black. It was comfortable to think that way, but the truth is the sheep was a creamy, white-yellowish color. It took me a few years to reorder that memory, to agree to send the black sheep on its way and to call again for the first time, hoping it would return after the injustice done to it. It saddens me to think I don’t have that embroidery and I try not to think about it. Sometimes I feel there’s a reason it wasn’t kept.

I am almost sure I embroidered as a child but I don’t remember it clearly. I was a diligent child, a collector of everything that was customary to collect and also of less standard things. I don’t have a clear memory of myself embroidering, but I am quite convinced I did because from the beginning of my twenties—when I embroidered a lot—it felt more like remembering than learning a new skill.

I had a friend who said something that stuck with me; he had a girlfriend then who forgot a bracelet at his place. The bracelet was made entirely of black beads—seven rows of black beads connected by a long bead with seven holes. Only up close could you see that in each row the beads were slightly different in shape—seven textures and shapes of black beads. One day he was playing with that bracelet in longing (we were in the army then) and suddenly the bracelet broke, all the bead types mixed and scattered. He panicked and brought me all the beads he collected, asking me to fix it (just then my beading period began). I sat and fixed it; while beading I got to know the many different shapes of beads that at first glance looked identical. Still, I continued to string them randomly, by sight. When I gave the bracelet back to him, he was horrified and said, “There’s no logic to what you did, is this the logic of it?”

Maybe it sounds like a harsh remark but the truth is that when I think about it, there is comfort in it, and it also characterizes much of what I create, not only embroidery. There is no logic—there is immediacy, randomness, movement, chance, freedom. To me that sounds very logical indeed; it’s my inner order, and it works great for embroidery as well, no less than for painting or working with materials perceived as freer, more associative, and fluid.

There’s something about crafts that are a little Sisyphean that affects me positively. The need to look at things at the pixel level, connect point to point, line to line, to be curious how the next move will look without planning too far ahead, what will sit next to what, to know this will take a lot of time and there is a chance I’ll give up along the way, and that’s okay, maybe it’s not yet time to finish, maybe a certain fabric will remain half-finished for a long time and then one day I’ll understand more about it and how it should be. Maybe I’ll cut it and turn it into a different work, maybe I’ll unravel it, start again. It’s not failure; you don’t have to eat everything on your plate if you’re not hungry. The thing will be something, it will be what it is, maybe that’s its beauty, that it’s not “finished.” Maybe that’s its fullest finish. Maybe only for now—and in a few years I’ll return to it and see some beauty in it. In any case, I decide and I do what seems right to me; it’s not a chore, it’s not a mountain of laundry or homework or standing in line at the licensing office.

I embroidered in fast-forward around the births of my three children. I started in earnest toward the end of each pregnancy. I embroidered for myself, not for the children not yet born, not to decorate their rooms. I embroidered and thought about them, imagined them, passed the time until they entered my life, imagining the moment of completion inside the round wooden frame I defined for myself without knowing how and when it would happen, how I would feel, how it would look. I feared I wouldn’t finish in time, hoped I wouldn’t finish too early.

In the days after birth, I returned to embroidering to regain my illogical logic and a sense of continuity in life. To mend what unraveled. I would embroider and tell myself, “You see, this is something you did before and here you are doing it again now, continuing from the same point, everything is fine, the basket waited for you, it’s your place in the corner of the living room, and you’re still the same person.” Especially in that chaotic postpartum period, even if the births went smoothly and quickly (two out of three did for me)—I missed rules and created them through embroidery. That’s how I slowly healed my pieces of myself and felt that though it would take time it would happen, there is order, the body will remember and all the pieces will find their place and stop hurting.

For example, I would define “the color of the day” for myself, search during the day for things of that color, and embroider in that color only. Another time, I measured the length of thread stretched in my outstretched hands, or the circumference of myself, or the thread from the floor to the top of my head, cut it and embroidered with it—only with it. Sometimes I outlined a small area in pencil and filled it without planning how or what to embroider. Sometimes each round lasted just a few minutes, but it was enough for me to feel I did something today besides diapering, washing, nursing, again and again and again.

Now that I sit and write this, I sound a little crazy to myself. I try not to be judgmental and to remember that indeed it was a crazy time, so all means are fair—and it simply worked. It worked, it made me happy, gave me a sense of achievement, and made me think of myself in a time when it’s not easy to remember that there is a self, that I am me. When every outing from the house (or every shower!) is a production—just a small accessible stand to return to each time for a little while, that’s a lot.

The embroidery I made after the birth of my third child I framed and hung in the center of the house. It’s very colorful and strong, has a belly like texture of heavy fabric or even a rug. I made sure it had lots of space and air inside the frame. Beyond it being pleasant to look at, between me and myself it’s like a diploma, framed and proudly hung, testifying to an exceptional achievement. I look at it and say, “This must be how excellent students or war heroes feel, decorated with these colorful pins. I really did something special here; I know I will never do exactly this again, it’s unique.”

During stressful or just crappy times, I enjoy looking at it and remembering that I managed to do something to make myself feel better and more beautiful. I look at it up close and see many small happenings and details, pause a moment on “less successful” areas that I like less and say, “At least I did. I did it for myself. I wasn’t always at my best, and most of the time I didn’t know what I was doing, but I kept going, my hands worked, my heart opened, my head cleared, most of the time I enjoyed it and finished. I completed a circle, and in that alone—there is a lot of beauty and meaning.” And for all that—you really don’t need much: thread, needle, and a base ready to receive whatever will come by itself.