Weekend Review: With Her Own Hands

 

With Her Own Hands / Nicole Nehrig
NY: Norton, c2025
278 p.

Reading some more dense books about textiles, history and sociology this month. Starting with With Her Own Hands, a collection of reflections and stories about sewing, weaving, embroidering, and related textile arts.  

It's a hard one to summarize, as it moves across the world and across time to reveal how textiles have played a role in women's lives, offering intellectual and emotional outlets, community building, financial resources, trauma processing, social activism, and just simple enjoyment, too. 

It's broken out into seven chapters, and includes many stories -- some of them I was aware of, as I have read quite a bit in this area, but some were new to me. I enjoyed her writing style, too. She's academic (a PhD in psychology) but she's also a knitter herself, which you can tell from how familiar she is with the nuances of her storytelling. The writing has a historical density, but it's also engaging and full of great anecdotes. 

I enjoyed the parts about embroidery and social activism quite a lot, as I am familiar with those areas, and it was great to learn more -- from artists recreating lacemaking from their Armenian background to an Egyptian woman who took up needlework as her medium after she was barred from painting classes because she was a woman, to the contemporary artist Michelle Kingdom (a favourite of mine) -- so many fascinating makers are shared here. 

Each section has lots to learn, and the range from mythology to present day is well handled. There is enough here to keep you reading, and it will give you lots of tidbits to add to conversations too! 

It's an enjoyable read, not necessarily a quick one, but really satisfying.