Making as love language

My daughter Uma turns nine this week, and I’m in the studio working on her birthday present. Well… technically not right now. Right now I’m sitting in the car before school pick-up, scribbling down thoughts before they disappear. But in my mind, I’m back in the studio, surrounded by scraps, cutting fabrics, moving colours around, trying to solve the lovely little puzzle of who Uma is right now.

Every year I make both the kids something for their birthdays. Something useful. Something they’ll love. Something that feels, in a small way, like a snapshot of who they are in this season.

This year, the challenge is colour.

For years, our family has lived inside what we jokingly call the family colours – though if I’m honest, they’re mostly just… my colours. Warm browns. Dusty aubergines. Washed rusts. Soft, earthy, muted tones. The colours of our home. Our clothes. Our quilts. The colours that, until now, everyone has seemed quite happy to be wrapped up in.

And then, seemingly overnight, Uma started gravitating somewhere entirely different.

Blues.

Teals.

Turquoise.

She announced over dinner the other night that her favourite colour is now “Sparkly Aqua” – which, I am not convinced is an actual colour. And if it is, I’m not sure my nervous system is prepared for it!

And yet, at the same time, she’s still drawn to golden ochres, dusty pinks, chocolate browns. Colours that make sense to me. Colours I know how to work with. But throw in a side of teal and turquoise, and suddenly the whole palette becomes a much trickier conversation.

So part of the work in the studio this week has been less about sewing, and more about seeing. About listening. About asking how to honour who someone is right now? How to work with colours which don’t automatically belong together and help them find their place? How to hold one colour’s hand long enough for it to feel included in the palette without overpowering everything around it?

While these are certainly challenges, they are also the exact questions and puzzles, that keep me transfixed by this work. I get such a thrill from creating cohesion where, at first glance, there shouldn’t be any. Helping colours soften each other. Balance each other. Belong together. Maybe I’m a relationship therapist for colour?!

While I’m deeply honoured in doing this work with clients, there’s also something deeply satisfying about doing this for someone you know intimately. And it’s definitely why I love making for Uma so much. She’s understood, since she was very small, the way love can be stitched into things. She notices the little quirks. The tiny mistakes. The decisions that make her gift feel unmistakably like her.

This year, I’m making a rectangular cushion for her bed. Mum is giving her a new doona and doona cover, and I wanted to make something that would sit alongside it. There’s a floral block at the centre. Some people would probably call it an eight-point star. To me, it has always very obviously been a flower.

And because this is Uma – and because I know she’ll care where every piece came from – the fabrics matter just as much as the colours.

I’m including:

• A blue linen shirt that once belonged to Rodolfo.

• Scraps from the lining of a dress Uma wore to Grandma’s funeral when she was three.

• Pieces from a pair of bloomers she wore when she was one.

• Ochre linen from the first pair of pants I made myself after she was born, which I wore and mended until they were threadbare.

Bits and pieces that, on their own, are no longer quite big enough to become much of anything.

And yet together:

Something entirely new.

Something useful.

Something beautiful.

Something that, if I’ve done my job right, will somehow draw together all the slightly wild, not-quite-obvious colours of who she is right now…

…and feel unmistakably like Uma.