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Scraps
Alice Hattrick
2.2.2
For weeks, I spent evenings stitching scraps of fabric, sometimes well into the early hours of the morning. I had accumulated these materials – once useful things, tablecloths and bedsheets – years before, dyeing them with the pigments steeped from plants foraged from the neighbourhood and vegetable scraps: buddleia, onion skins, hawthorn, yarrow.
I drew the outlines of animals from books produced to teach children about the nature of the British Isles – the migration of the Death’s-head Hawk-moth, the breeding behaviours of the Common Toad. Every night, I thought about how such a piece of stitching could represent many hours of labour, that it could contain all my thinking and be so small. I had already spent several years thinking about what happens you spend time with embroidery rather than more serious kinds of work, hopeful for the new patterns that might emerge.
First, I pressed plants, and then I dyed with them. The stitching came later, and happened slowly, over the kind of time that passes unnoticed, not linear, or straight; not forwards and backwards, but spiralling, warping, slipping and sliding, the way time can break off and tumble away when bent by illness.
I began to reclaim time for the ornamental side of life, the side that does not make you any money, as an act of hope and repair. I wanted to imagine a better life, a more permanent home. To imagine a future I had to stitch one myself, even if the pattern was unclear.
If I could only mine the past, a history of known and unknown queer embroiderers and their embodied knowledge, I thought, I would be able to imagine a different future. Embroidery – also known as ‘fancy work’, fancy meaning not necessary or needed – is just something that I am doing, a joyful addition. It is resistant to linear, productive time.
*
My book Fancy Work, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in June, centres on the embroidery designer May Morris, daughter of William and Jane Morris, and her relationship with MF, a gender non-conforming land worker, who moved in with May during the First World War. There were rumours MF slept in May’s room, with a gun by their side. But what if the rumours were true? A rumour is a kind of scrap. The pattern only emerges when fragments are stitched to other fragments
In her middle age, having left her position running the Morris & Co. embroidery department and divorced her husband, May made a useful distinction between play work and serious work:
Serious work was spent on things like embroidery commissions, writing and meetings, whereas play work was freer, less determined by straight time. This distinction felt important to me, that I too could find freedom in stitching.
Textiles are bound to the body and everyday life. They are the most domestic thing – quilt, shelter, bed cover. They are worn out, stained, patched and replaced. They are degradable, and intimate. Embroidery represents an excess of labour, a practice in which the all the hours and energy it takes to make something can’t be monetised. It is work for yourself or someone you love. It is sewing a banner for a march, making a memorial quilt, or embroidering a protest dress because you can’t hold a flag. Embroidery and other kinds of hand-worked textiles carry all the labour it took to make them, all the time lost to stitching. Like writing, they make something in the present from what remains of the past, a hope for a freer future.
I write in scraps of time.
*
MF arrived in the village of Lechlade in the summer of 1917, posted as a ‘land girl’, but soon moved into Kelmscott Manor with May. Mary Frances Vivian Lobb, or, as May called them, MF, would live with May for the last twenty years of her life.
The record of their togetherness is sparse but occasionally vivid. They are often outside, working together. ‘MF is very hot, and is puffing about, poor dear,’ May writes to her friend Katie. They have all their meals together outside and live almost entirely on asparagus and salad. May longs to get at garden work but can’t take the time and ‘must leave it for MF’.
They did more than garden together. Beyond their domestic arrangements and shared travels, MF operated the magic lantern at May’s lectures, which she recorded with personal pride: ‘I’m very proud’, wrote May. ‘Miss Lobb worked it and it all went without a hitch.’
It’s unclear why MF left their post soon after arriving.
It is rumoured that they laughed and swore too much, acted out of turn, fell asleep under a tree, or argued with one of the other workers. Regardless of the reason MF quit their land girl position, they didn’t go far. May made space for MF at Kelmscott. By April, the couple had decided to work and live together. As May wrote: ‘Miss Lobb and I are going to run the place.’
The image above is from a photo album at the National Library of Wales that opens with around 200 postcards of trains and railways. The more personal photographs show MF’s life before the war in the village of Trenault, Cornwall. They are attentive to machinery and movement, to animals and work, to landscape and travel. They suggest pleasure and competence, even ease. Another scrapbook of MF’s using Army & Navy stationary contains endless clippings from the Times. In the archive, their presence is everywhere but never as the narrator of their own life.
‘She was very handy, very good with machines’, the curator of Kelmscott Manor, which is run by the Society of Antiquaries, explained to me during one visit, referring to MF’s position of outsider and assimilator, making themselves useful through practical skills while residing on the margins of village life. ‘Being good with machines’ sounded like code. Like ‘artistic’ and ‘unconventional’, it’s another way of saying ‘queer’.
MF was large, brusque, mannish. They wore their hair cropped short, worked outside and dressed in masculine clothing. In 1986, an Icelandic man recalled meeting May and MF as a child: ‘[O]ne was rather small, slim and grey-haired [,] the other was tall and rather fat with short, black hair that curled around her chubby face. She did not change for dinner except putting on a different kind of trousers.’ There was a kind of wildness to MF, loud and laughing often – a joy that could be summoned in a wild place like Iceland.
Jane Morris purchased Kelmscott Manor, first rented as the family’s summer home in the 1870s, just before her death in 1914. Ten years later, May moved almost everything she owned to Lechlade to live at Kelmscott year-round. For a long time, I wondered what made May want to give up the lease on her London house. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the answer was MF.
*
At the William Morris Gallery Reading Room, I found myself poring over small photographs May took of the house and garden at Kelmscott in April 1923. On the reverse of one of the pictures, she has written:
Above front, our bedroom
I felt like May had made this note for me to find, as if she was telling me to find the bedroom they slept in together. ‘Our bedroom’ would be the closest I got to a record, a piece of evidence in the hardest sense – who else would this note be for? José Esteban Muñoz describes this kind of evidence as ‘the remains left hanging in the air like a rumour.’
When I started writing Fancy Work in 2021, I had hoped to see thirteen travel journals written and illustrated by May, records of the couple’s travels around the UK and Iceland, which shortly disappeared from the Society of Antiquaries’ online catalogue. There is rarely new material in an archive, only a change in approach. And sometimes that material is unavailable.
For months and then years, I was angry about not being able to see the journals. I didn’t know how I would write the story of May and MF. I thought that if I could read May’s records of their conversations and arguments away from everyone else, and the way they were seen by other people, I would be able to evidence that they were queer.
Loss is embedded in material evidence of queerness. There are so many gaps, partly because queer people in the past meant to leave no trace.
I attempted writing a fictionalised version of their lives. I thought it was more interesting to see if I could acknowledge the gaps without filling them in.
Any pursuit of knowledge of the past involves some form of speculation, not fictionalization or ‘filling in the gaps’, necessarily, but writing as a form of documentation, a form of embroidery. It is attending to the ephemeral gestures that survive across time to imagine a future of queer possibilities. These are the scraps that remain, the things that are left, the rumours left hanging in the air.
I can’t stop thinking about the scraps that didn’t make it into the final draft. I was too focussed on May and MF, and what I couldn’t access. For some reason, I missed out that George Platt Lynes stitched an embroidery with pubic hairs donated by his friends. I can’t help thinking that if I had stitched the pieces in a different arrangement, a queerer picture would emerge. I can’t help wanting to unpick all the stitches I have made.
*
MF didn’t sew, but they did make scrapbooks, pasting from gardening magazine supplements and horticultural catalogues after May died in 1938. The scrapbook, perhaps begun when May was alive, was a way for MF to remember decades of gardening together, and to grieve her death.
Scrapbooks might be a mass-cultural form, made from reproduced printed media, but they are also unique to the individual making them. The meaning of each image is encountered through touch and movement, the turning of each page revealing the visual order designed by its creator. As Susan Tucker and her co-editors write in the introduction to The Scrapbook in American Life (2006), ‘It is the self that guides the scissors and assembles the scraps.’
Scrapbooks capture ‘lived time’ in a material form. Scrapbooks can also be ‘a method of resolving the conflicting claims between the real and the imaginary or remembered.’
Tucker describes the scrapbook as a ‘poor family’s cabinet of curiosities’, ‘created not so much to serve the memory as to enact rituals of consumption and the hoarding of treasure’. MF’s garden scrapbook is evidence of both a continued ritual of hoarding memory and an attempt to resolve the conflict of living on without May, their passion for growing plants itself a form of nurturing.
As I turned the pages, I noticed that the scrapbook still smelled remarkably smoky, like a fire recently burned, the way birch or another kind of scented wood lingers for days, but surely not decades. It was as if MF had just stepped away from their desk for the night to go to bed.
*
I started writing through the metaphors of embroidery stitches, the chain stitch that loops, the backstitch sewn backwards. They carried potential for thinking about life writing and queer histories, of living on crip time – a bended, slow, flexible time – with a body that doesn’t work on straight, productive time.
‘Chain-stitch has been so called because it imitates, more or less, the links of a simple chain’, May wrote in her instructional book on embroidery called Decorative Needlework (1893); ‘it will be seen that each little loop grows out of the last; the needle follows the exact direction in which the line of stitches is to lie.’ This action must then be repeated thousands of times; every stitch working with history, tracking back to make a new stitch in the chain.
May’s chain-stitch diagram depicts the needle and thread, which seems to enter the paper it was printed on. It is a diagram without the body – showing only what it can learn.
It took me a while to get the hang of chain-stitch; it was so unfamiliar, the way to hold the needle in my fingers, sewing in the direction of the stitch, how to manipulate the fabric, to keep the chain going. While I practised chain-stitch, I thought about the threads that link generations, and how easily untrained hands can get the stitches all twisted up, how the needle can miss the loop and break the chain. I thought about chain-stitch while my hands learned to work the needle, how I am linked to my mother, that I am the little loop that grew out of hers, and how I will not produce a child, how I am making a break in the chain. I had to practise enough that my hands knew the stitch better than my mind ever would.
*
In 2025, my mother had points taken off her Personal Independent Payment assessment because she ‘reported she could sew’. Having disclosed this activity, the assessor determined that she demonstrated ‘adequate grip and dexterity’ to cook herself a meal. The assessor had been trained to find the reasons to deduct points in among the reports of inactivity and fatigue, the inability to work, wash or cook a meal, let alone have a social life or a relationship. What my mother really meant was: stitching was all she could do.
My mother had been making a nightdress in linen, embroidered all over with her own words about her body and the medical neglect she has experienced since the 1990s, when she first got ill. She thought it wouldn’t be finished in time, that she would have to show it in pieces. When she started, my mother told me, she didn’t know what she wanted to say. The words came to her as she spent time working on the dress with her hands.
The words she chose to express her feelings around ageing and illness were stitched in a very light yellow, almost invisible, which was intentional but also rendered the words unreadable, which felt like a cruel irony.
Disconnected, missing from queer spaces, missing lovers, missing friendships, grieving her own sexuality, diminished by chronic illness and disability, her stitches almost disappear –
Fragile
Fading
Faded
Aged
Dyke
On the breast, she had stitched a spiral, the words in red circling her heart, labelled by pain and grief.
My poor sick empty heart beats so slowly I cannot stand
*
I remember my mother teaching me back-stitch as a child. It seemed so counter-intuitive, to go backwards rather than forwards.
Back-stitches are made backwards to the general direction of sewing to create a continuous solid line. It makes for a much stronger throughline, one that cannot so easily be torn apart or unpicked.
As queers, we look and feel backwards. We can’t help but gaze into the past in search of understanding our losses as well as gains, and indulge our stubborn attachments to lost objects, our need to turn them over and over in our hands and our minds.
*
Every piece of needlework, every loop of thread, is connected to the past, the way each new chain-stitch is connected to the one before.
*
Eventually, I arrived at the process of making a ‘crazy’ quilt, piecing together precious scraps of material and embroidering all around the joins. It is the type of piecing that doesn’t follow a regular or orderly pattern.
Saving clothing and keeping scraps is part of working with fabric, whether making clothes or furnishings. Worn clothing of loved ones, unwanted hand-me-downs, charity-shop finds and factory seconds – each intimately tied to their previous wearers and makers but also with waste – are mixed up in the process of making. Every piece of clothing is potential trash, out of fashion, out of time, one slip away from landfill. Waste is often used to strengthen worn fabric with appliqué, to make new clothes or pieced patchwork, because even rags can be made into rugs, transforming mass-produced textiles into unique objects that have deep associations with their maker. Cutting up and stitching together, stitching over, is a kind of life-extension and a form of vandalism.
*
The process of piecing a ‘crazy’ quilt and then stitching over the seams satisfies my need for irregularity and unproductivity, for living a life in layers of work, play-sewing and writing. I work on bended time, slowly and with purpose, towards a finished piece. Every line is definite, and every form explains something, to me at least. This is how I imagine MF making a quilt if they had stitched – a wild assembly of leftovers and souvenirs. As in a scrapbook, each piece is not precious until it is pinned to the others and embroidered around.
This play-work allows me to think, to process, to document, to invent. After all, it is me that guides the scissors and assembles the scraps, a self that is made and remade in the arrangement and assembly of leftovers.
*
It’s a fallacy that stitching keeps an idle mind free of impure thoughts. Stitching is time to spend with fantasies and dark thoughts, time with all the versions of ourselves, past and future.
For a long time, I thought I had to draw the pattern before I started to stitch. Working with scraps opens possibilities, for joining them with other scraps, for stitching the seams to be more secure, and more beautiful.
Alice Hattrick is a writer and lecturer based in London. They are the author of Fancy Work (2026) and Ill Feelings (2021), both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.