Every Scar Tells a Story
Where needlework and Kintsugi coincide
As an incoming text dinged on my phone, I put down my knitting and checked the screen.
“Are you familiar with the concept of kintsugi?” the message asked.
The question was my son Wes’s response to a photo I had sent earlier of a repair I made to one of his favorite blankets. “It’s sort of a gnarly fix,” I’d told him, “but I think it will hold until I make you a replacement.”
Stitched in thick cotton, the wounded blanket is heavy and warm with a soft, fluid drape that makes it ridiculously comfy. I crocheted it for him nearly 20 years ago, long before I taught myself to knit during the Covid pandemic. A true child of the 1970s, Wes has always favored the colors of kitchen appliances from that era, so I designed the blanket in alternating waves of Harvest Gold, Avocado Green, and Burnt Orange. Wes’s little dog, Bean, is equally attached to the blanket, and in his zeal to snuggle under it this winter, he tore a large hole near the border.
When I spotted the damage during a recent visit to Wes’s house, I brought the blanket home with me. Rummaging through my stash of yarn from past projects, I found bits of the right colors and used them to crochet a patch into the torn fiber. Despite my careful stitching, the patch formed a ridge, a sort of scar, on the blanket, and the new yarn’s colors stood out brightly because the old yarn was faded and worn smooth from years of love. My repair was imperfect. It didn’t blend into the background the way I had wanted it to.
Wes didn’t care. Hence his question.
Kintsugi is a Japanese practice of rejoining broken pottery with a compound of molten gold. This results in a visible scar, clearly revealing the former breaks, yet it can make the piece even more monetarily valuable with the addition of gold. As a philosophy, kintsugi considers breakage and repair to be part of an object’s history, rather than something to hide. Kintsugi posits that a repair doesn’t have to be invisible in order to be beautiful. If I had been familiar with the concept, I wouldn’t have tried to conceal my blanket repair. I would have accepted its imperfection as part of the blanket’s story.
A paradox of Wes’s personality is that, while striving for perfection in everything he does as an art director, a guitarist, a cook, and a father, he also embraces the weird, the broken, and the rejected. Take Bean, for example. He’s a tiny mixed-breed stray with no known history who has become a beloved companion. Wes’s favorite guitar for many years was a banged-up acoustic version that had been decorated with acrylic paint, which, along with a caved-in area on the front, had altered the instrument’s resonance in a funky way that appealed to him.
At age 47, Wes knows about gnarly fixes. He carries a 6-inch scar on his chest from open-heart surgery when he was 35. Like a kintsugi repair, that scar tells a story about Wes’s history, about his health and his body’s ability to heal. It’s not a story about a cure, though. As a mother, I had hoped for a cure, but he’s had two heart attacks since then.
Healing and curing are inherently different. The practice of kintsugi heals the bowl, by which I mean it makes the bowl whole again. But it can’t cure the bowl — that would mean taking away the break altogether. And that would steal part of its history, its stories.
The process of needlework can be restorative, if not curative, for the maker, and the product can be healing for the recipient. A hand-crafted blanket, crocheted or knitted with love, can’t cure an illness. But it can help heal any number of ailments by providing comfort and evidence of caring. Its condition year after year tells its story.
Wes’s blanket is sure to get more holes in it, especially if Bean continues burrowing himself into it. After thinking about scars and the stories they tell, I’ve decided not to crochet Wes a replacement blanket after all. Maybe I’ll knit an extra one for him with my new-found needle skills. But I’m going to keep repairing — healing — the old one with glittery golden yarn to make those scars visible.
