Fancy Work is a queer stitching of time — a reclamation of living, of historical losses, of queer temporalities. But more than anything it is permission: to rework, to backstitch our own fancy work, to realise we are made of scraps. The ephemera and gossip of those who came before us, more than anything else, is what we are. Each stitch a pull toward the past, present and future in one deft, gentle move. Living in this world is nothing short of an unravelling, and in this book Hattrick shows us the stitches and patches that people have sewn themselves back together with. A queer stitched ancestry. We are the scrap collectors.
ˆˆˆnowˆˆˆletˆˆˆmeˆˆˆunpickˆˆˆ
I’ve been thinking about backstitching:
how the thread goes forward
by returning,
how a seam is strengthened
by revisiting
what has already been pierced.
Alice Hattrick’s mother taught them the backstitch as a child. Why would we go backwards to make a new stitch, Alice wondered. You can do a running stitch, go forwards, it’s quicker. But to go backwards, to pierce what has already been pierced, makes a stronger line.
Alice told me about Heather Love, who writes that rather than turning shame into pride, grief into progress, we should stay with the backwardness, those painful, unresolved feelings that don’t resolve neatly. To go backwards, to pierce what has already been pierced, makes a stronger line. To stay with what has harmed you rather than converting it into something else is a radical act. The stitch is the staying.
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At Kelmscott Manor, Alice found a photograph, a scrap. On the back, May Morris had written the names of all the rooms visible in the image – the loom room, the sitting room, the guest room – and then, of one window: our bedroom. Alice read it as a letter addressed to them personally, written a hundred years before they arrived to read it: this note, she wrote this note for me.
‘Our bedroom’ – May Morris and MF, her gender-nonconforming partner. Their life together memorialised in the outbuilding, in the stable where horses were kept, while the temporary exhibition in the room that was once theirs was called Behind Closed Doors.
I sat with Alice in their house and they told me this and I thought: you have daylighted their bedroom. You have brought what was buried back into the air. The room might not be restored but the bedroom is no longer behind closed doors. I will never visit that house without seeing it, a note left on the back of a photo, the stories of our queer ancestors being held in the walls, behind doors, our historical gossip ready, waiting to be heard.
History, backstitched.
A scrap finding its pattern.
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There is something beautiful
and terrible
in certainty arriving late.
Alice writes in the book of how their mother told the benefits assessor that she could embroider, meaning: this is the most I can do, this small and precious thing. The assessor heard: she has enough dexterity to cook herself a meal. Fancy work as evidence against the person doing it. The creative practice that sustains her, and that she turns outward, into banners, into protest quilts, used to prove she doesn’t need sustaining.
This is what Section 28 did to children in the name of ‘protection’. It taught people that saying nothing was safer than saying the wrong thing, until silence itself became a form of violence.
The same violence appears again and again throughout Fancy Work: institutions mistaking care for productivity, creativity for capability, survival for evidence that no support is needed. Hattrick keeps returning to these misreadings, piercing the same fabric until another pattern becomes visible.
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I need time
to lay down
what was never mine to hold.
Not forever—
only until the thread
stops pulling taut
through my hands.
Then there is the AIDS Memorial Quilt, not a metaphor this time. Cloth carrying names, fabric doing what monuments could not. Every panel both singular and stitched to another, grief refusing to remain private because someone, somewhere, sat down with thread and made mourning visible. A quilt is never one story, it is accumulation, often added to across time, helping us reach across time. Time travellers caught in our grief time. To be queer is to be inherently creative. To stitch together is a collective act. We have to learn to hold each other in our grief, because it is too much to hold alone.
Fancy Work understands this, that memory is rarely preserved whole. It survives as scraps, passed from hand to hand until someone recognises that they belong together, a living archive.
We are the scrap collectors.
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This grief
belongs to me.
I will carry it
through the longest day,
through its turning.
The light at its fullest.
Already beginning
to leave.
This is what Fancy Work does: it catches you at the fullest point of the light and shows you, gently, that it is already leaving. That the leaving is not failure. That to go back before going forward is not regression. That every quilt is organised around its scraps, the pieces that seem not to belong become the pattern that holds everything else together. They are what remains.
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Since reading Fancy Work, I find myself distrusting straight lines. I keep looking for where the thread doubles back, where returning is not failure but the way the seam is made to hold.
We are the scrap collectors.
Tash Walker is a writer, poet and audio producer whose work centres on LGBTQ+ lives, history, and the radical act of listening. They are the co-author, with Adam Zmith, of The Log Books: Voices of Queer Britain and the Helpline that Listened and are currently working on a series of poems and essays that ask what queer history sounds like when it travels through the body, and what it costs to receive it.