Dear readers, can you believe this is already my second-to-last blog post? But I am not saying goodbye just yet. We still need a moment to take in Stephen’s departure first (we love you Stephen !!!).
Winter has truly settled over Montreal. The air is crisp, even if a few stubborn patches of grass still linger outside my bedroom window. Just a month ago, I was in Paris for a (much too) brief trip. Among the many things I hoped to accomplish during those whirlwind days, I had set aside a particularly precious moment to craft a small but meaningful object. You may remember that last July, I went to the Saint-Pierre fabric store in the 18th arrondissement. My mission was to find a fabric similar to the one Nil once used to make a small pouch she showed me. My goal was to recreate it so that it could house the hard drive containing Nil Yalter’s archives at the Archivorum headquarters.
Although the fabric had been purchased months earlier, the pouch itself remained to be made. As soon as I found a rare moment of calm (and during Paris’s October art week, calm is a luxury), I finally begn. I carefully retrieved the fabric from the bag where it had been waiting in my closet since the summer. The evening before, I had gathered white yarn and a pair of large needles. Time was tight. It was already mid-October, and Archivorum’s bookshop inauguration in Turin was set for November 1st. With the days needed for the parcel to reach Italy, it was now or never.
Where to start? I genuinely did not know. So I simply plunged in. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I laid out the fabric, the scissors, and the needles, and I queued up a series of horror stories on Netflix, the perfect companion during spooky season. The path toward the pouch I imagined felt uncertain, but I knew exactly what I wanted: something imperfect, a bit raw, and unmistakably handmade. I kept a photo of Nil’s original pouch beside me as a reference. I also had to decide what to write on mine. On Nil’s pouch, the words “Livre d’or” appear. On mine, kind of readable in both French and English, I chose to write “LIVRE D’OR NIL YALTER ARCHIVES”. Simple, direct, and fitting.
I began by measuring the size, roughly stitching the sides, and then moving on to the lettering. Thankfully, TikTok provided a few very efficient tutorials on how to embroider letters. I’d say it took me 6 to 7 hours to finish it. Some professionnals would have done it in less than 2 but hey, there are beginners in very field!
And now, for the final final reveal, here’s the pouch in Turin with Belen’s and Stephen’s, Babs’, and Christianna’s hard disk container as well!
Beautiful.
Babs Haenen
Love!!