Imagine a stressful situation. Now what if you could slip a hand inside your pocket — or touch the cuff of a sleeve — to calm your anxiety?
Transforming clothes into wearable tools for self-soothing is Megan Burke’s mission. She’s been leading workshops in Massachusetts to raise awareness and reduce stigma around mental health challenges — one stitch at a time.
On a recent Saturday afternoon about two dozen people sat at tables inside the Boston-based School of Fashion Design’s brightly lit community space. Burke asked them to introduce themselves, and she talked about the role clothing plays in our identities. Then she instructed the participants to unpack little embroidery kits she provided.
“Everyone has a hoop,” she said, “you’re going to grab your needle and unwind it from the top.”
Burke joked about pricking her fingers countless times as founder of the non-profit and inclusive fashion brand Cuerd@s Clothing.
“So what we’re doing here today is hand embroidering using cuerdos stitches,” she said, “to create a self-soothing tool that the students can take home with them or donate to us that we then bring into the community.”
The stitches are very simple and look like little raised nubs. “So they’re a stitch, and then a stitch on top of it,” Burke explained, “and that’s why this is so accessible.”
After a little practice the group tried stitching clusters of these little dots in strategic places on donated or thrifted jackets, pants, sweatshirts, scarves and ties. Burke explained how the bumpy texture taps into a concept called proprioception.
“We use a tactile medium to self-soothe and calm the fight or flight response that comes up when you experience anxiety,” she said. “So you pair a physical movement with calming breathing techniques to feel safe and grounded in the body.”
The power of proprioception is deeply personal for Burke. She described what it was like growing up with her favorite person: a creative, vivacious older sibling who also struggled with bi-polar disorder.
“By the time I went off to college, my sibling had been in more inpatient psychiatric units than I could count,” Burke shared. “My dad had left his job to stay home with my sibling full time to make sure they weren’t hurting themselves or someone else. My mom took on the sole responsibility of providing for our family — and I was away at college with nothing but guilt and shame and confusion.”
Burke missed her sibling. Then she remembered back to the times when she had been able to visit them and noticed they would self-soothe by rubbing their hands or wrists on their body. So Burke decided to stitch textured patches on a plain white t-shirt — in the spots where her sibling’s nervous hands would go — and she popped it in the mail.
“It would be a physical manifestation of our relationship that cannot go away,” Burke said.
Turns out her sibling never wanted to take that t-shirt off, and Cuerd@s was born. Burke researched the concept and developed her dream on a roll of paper in her dorm room. Eventually she began testing the stitches with different groups and donated comfortable, embroidered clothing to mental health organizations. But Burke also realized the act of stitching itself is calming, so she started bringing workshops to companies, nonprofits and schools like this.
Boston’s School of Fashion Design executive director Jennifer Leclerc was thrilled to host Burke’s workshop and looks forward to the next one on June 21 (which is already sold out). She also said more people are curious about up-cycling garments and crafting.
“There’s a move back to slow fashion and sustainability, and people are gravitating towards making things by hand more and more,” she said.
Burke walked around the room checking in with participants. A former psychiatric nurse named Sara Barker beelined over to say Burke’s story about her sibling’s t-shirt really hit home.
“I think this would’ve helped a lot of our patients just to have someone send them something from home like you did — something that they can feel like it’s theirs and not be in a gown,” Barker said. “I think would’ve made a lot of difference, so thank you.”
Other people opened up, including Amanda Smart. She said she suffered a brain injury at 17.
“I also work at a rehab with adults with developmental disabilities, and I’m always trying to knit with them and crochet with them because it’s very soothing,” Smart said. “It just makes your heart feel better.”
A few tables away Jason Courtemanche was embroidering purple dots into the black henley shirt on his back. He said he has dyslexia and thinks his friends with ADHD could also benefit from this wearable tool.
“This kind of texture could really help people break those patterns when we feel like we’re the only ones that spiral or have negative thoughts,” he said. “Bringing awareness and normalizing the whole process I think is really important.”
Everyone was chatting and getting to know each other while stitching away. Then Burke shared that seven years ago she didn’t think she’d ever speak to her sibling again. “I didn’t even know if I would have a sibling,” she said choking up a bit, “and this week that same sibling got married, so it was really special.”
In Spanish cuerdo means sane, and Burke said her brand’s name is a play on what that label even means. She chose an @ for Cuerd@s because it can be seen as both an “o” and an “a” as a nod to her sibling who’s trans and non-binary.
When people ask her if hand embroidering takes a lot of time, she emphatically replies “yes.”
“Because I need the person wearing that piece of clothing to know there’s someone else out there in the world that is not hoping they fail,” she said, “that’s actually hoping they rise up to their fullest potential and see tomorrow.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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