What is it that prompts us to take up needles, fabric and yarn? It’s not about necessity. None of us needs more stuff. Nor do we need to make more stuff. The landfills are groaning with weight of the excess stuff we throw away daily. Yet, here we are fitting quilt squares together, fashioning another wool sweater, or stitching a new prom dress of spangled tulle and satin.

Those of us whose eyes crave color are simply, without apology, seduced by the scrumptious fabrics and fibers that are available to us in stores, in catalogs and on the Web. We want to be tangled up in all that fiber, its swirling color, its potential to shift its shape at our command. We crave that tango.

Making all that stuff flaunts our power to choose what pleases us most, to spend our hard-earned money on stashes of yarn, bins of fabric, containers of embroidery floss. It struts our ability to take our ideas in hand and put them in service to our creative inclinations. We rule in the kingdom of needlecraft, but we are not tyrants. We rule only ourselves. We like to share our materials, our ideas and the things we make.

Perhaps the urge to make more stuff is firmly embedded in the primitive urge to feather a nest, to make it warm and homey, a place of comfort and safety where our loved ones may find shelter. The more we feather a nest, the more we want to feather it, especially when in every season we find that trends change, and new colors, textures and patterns come along to dazzle our oh-so-receptive eyes.

Perhaps the urge to make more stuff with needle and thread surfaces because, after we peck away at keyboards all day, our fingers want the smoothness of silk, the roughness of wool, the softness of cotton. We want to do more than make black specks appear on a computer screen. We want to see more than the gray and black tones of text.

Perhaps the urge to make stuff overtakes us because we want to solve problems other than the ones we encounter in the work world. We want to know how to fit a curved shape into a quilt design, how to make a brash yellow thread work against a simmering purple background, or how to decipher a pattern for an intricately lacy mohair shawl.

It would be easy to assume that those urges are just woman stuff driven by maternal instincts to make our homes pleasant and comfortable, to nurture our loved ones – or the desire to shop. But I believe the impulse to make stuff has its roots in the need to engineer and fabricate, and is driven by a desire to figure things out – to do the math to make the quilt come out right, to decipher the secrets of the color wheel to make the embroidery vibrant, to move the shapes around to make a pleasing whole, to make artistic choices about which threads, beads and buttons to use as embellishments. It’s about making functional and useful things. It’s about hand and eye working harmoniously together.

But even if the urge to make stuff was only some primitive nesting impulse, so what? We need beauty in our lives, beauty that is immediate, accessible, and most of all ours; beauty that is individually defined, beauty we keep around us as a reminder that the world has its softer, glittery and colorful side.

Making stuff is a way to lose ourselves in something that is far removed from the stresses and demands of daily life, a way to be truly in control. When we sit with our knitting needles or crochet hooks, our crewel needles, our needlepoint frames or at our sewing machines, we get to choose what happens next and when. We are our own bosses. What we make belongs to us unless we choose to give it away – as many of us do. For to make stuff is to think of others and what they need, what they want. It is another facet of our power. We who wield yarn and fabric have the ability to provide what is needed. And in the process, we find pieces of ourselves which we stitch into the intricate, evolving fabric of who we are, who we wish to become.

Snippets

. Kent Wakefield, 90, a resident at Stillwater Healthcare in Bangor, called to say that he would like to learn to knit. He hopes that a By Hand reader might volunteer to teach him. Call him at 947-1111, ext. 311.

Ardeana Hamlin welcomes suggestions. Call 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.