Thirty Patches: A Ramie Patchwork and Thirty Years of Marriage

 

In two days, my husband and I will celebrate thirty years of marriage. Thirty years doesn't feel like a number; it feels like fabric—layered, varied, some of it worn thin, but all of it continuous. To mark the time, I decided to make us matching vests, sewn from scraps of mosi, Korean ramie, I had collected over the years. It seemed the right thing to do with my hands while I was thinking about time.

Mosi is an ancient, delicate textile, traditionally woven from the fibers of the Boehmeria nivea plant through a painstakingly laborious process. It is the fabric of Korean ceremony and grief, reflecting the full range of a life. Patchwork, to me, is an optimistic art form, one that begins from the assumption that even damaged cloth contains good cloth. As I arranged the pieces, I cut away sections that were frayed or worn thin, like the years of illness or misunderstanding that I would rather remove. The remaining good cloth, combined with other good cloth, can make something whole and beautiful.

I am not a trained seamstress. I sew the way I cook: with instinct, improvisation, and a willingness to adjust when things do not go as expected. The foundation for this pattern came from the first couple vests I made for us last Christmas—a project I worried my husband would refuse to wear, thinking it tacky. To my surprise, he loved the attention they brought. 

A couple's Christmas Vests I made last December

I picked those up, keeping the basic structure, but for this summer version, I adjusted the design with bigger, straight armholes. What made it complicated was the patchwork: fitting together pieces of different widths and lengths so that the finished surface looked intentional rather than accidental. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Patchwork is like life. Even if you plan well, sometimes you just need to improvise. If some are too short, you just add another color. You try to see the whole before you can cut any part of it; but the process itself, as you go along, often provides better ideas and lets you explore possibilities you hadn't initially considered.

After completion, I realized that the colors I had unconsciously chosen to represent our years together also mirrored the preferences of the people who make up that life. The Butter yellow of abundance is a shared favorite of my husband and our eldest daughter, a color that reminds me of the settled warmth that accumulates in a long marriage. The soft Pale pink of tenderness is my younger daughter's favorite, embodying the quiet, gentle moments of intimacy. And the various shades of Blue—the deep Navy that holds things together and the bright Sky blue of our early family days—are, simply, my own favorite, representing the constant, clear presence I strive to be.

A vest seems to keep the core protected. It covers the vital organs and leaves the arms free. I have been thinking about this as a description of what I want from the next thirty years, if we are given them. I want us to be warm where it matters most. I want us to keep each other’s cores protected from the cold that comes, inevitably, from loss and age and the diminishments of time. And I want us to be free where we need to move — free to be separate people inside a shared life, free to pursue what interests us, free to be different from each other and find that difference interesting rather than threatening, as we have mostly managed to do for thirty years.

A mosi vest in summer is light enough that you barely feel it. That is the other thing about ramie: it is protective without being heavy. It does not press down on you. You wear it and forget it is there, and then a breeze moves through it and you are grateful for it in a way you could not have predicted. I think this is what I am trying to make.