A Cross Stitched for the Ones Who Crossed the Sea

There is a wall slowly growing inside Studio Kre’at.

It isn’t a gallery wall.

It isn’t carefully styled.

It is becoming a wall of remembrance.

Today I took a scrappy little calico cross that I had stitched by hand some time ago. It was plain, unfinished, and beautifully ordinary.

Then I reached for small scraps of green fabric pieces that whispered Ireland and I began slow stitching them onto the cross.

Every stitch felt like a prayer.

Not because the fabric is precious, but because of the women and men I was thinking about as I stitched.

My Irish ancestors left the hills and homes of Tipperary, Cork and Roscommon carrying stories I will never fully know.

Some came searching for hope. Some came carrying grief. My two-times great-grandmother Johanna on my maternal line crossed the sea as an orphan, arriving in a country that would ask so much of her life. Others came hoping to leave hardship behind and build something gentler for the generations that followed. Then of course my 3 x great grandmother Honora on my paternal line came across the seas as a convict who was pardoned and arrived as a free woman.

As I stitched these scraps together, I wasn’t trying to recreate Ireland.

I was simply saying, I remember you.

This little cross now hangs among ivy on my studio wall, reminding me that faith was one of the things my ancestors carried when they crossed oceans.

Long before I ever held a needle, there were hands in my family mending clothes, quilting blankets, praying quietly, and making beauty from very little.

Perhaps that is why slow stitching feels so familiar to me.

It feels inherited.

This wall is becoming a place where remembrance lives ~ one handmade piece, one prayer, one story at a time.

May those who came before us know they are remembered with gratitude.

— Lisa Raie