There's a group at the Cathedral that I go to; it meets once a month, we have a speaker, a cup of tea and a chat and it also raises funds for various projects overseas. Last month one of the members was speaking and she brought with her some of the needlework she and other members of her family have done over the generations.
The lady herself was born prematurely during World War 2, and she was born with the last two fingers of each hand fused together. Because it was wartime, and because she wasn't expected to survive, the doctors didn't try to separate her fingers, so she has spent her life with the defect uncorrected.
That didn't stop her learning to knit and sew like all the other women in the family and she has produced some beautiful work. But the thing that caught my eye and spoke to me most directly, was a pair of crocheted gloves made for her by her grandmother. She had been asked to be a bridesmaid at a family wedding. It seems to have been a bit of a tradition that her grandmother made gloves for bridesmaids on these occasions and here were hers, adapted so that instead of four fingers on each hand there were only three.
I was so moved by this simple act of creation; it speaks volumes about acceptance and inclusivity, years before these terms became buzz words of the 'socially aware'. And it says a lot too about the skills of craftswomen in the past; there was no written pattern for the gloves, not even for the non-adapted ones, they were created from a fusion of imagination and experience in the mind and hands of their creator.
If I'd seen these in a museum case I'd have given them a glance and walked on; how much more meaningful things become when we know the story behind them.
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