The bouquet of awards for the Beijing Winter Olympics brought me back to my mother 30 years ago

The Beijing Winter Olympics award bouquet, hand-knitted with velvet thread, is both frugal and convenient for athletes to carry back to China as a souvenir, never withering.

Behind the good idea is the painstaking efforts of the folk craftsman, the 70-year-old grandmother of Shanghai. A single rose takes at least 5 hours for a knotweed, and about 35 hours to complete a beautiful bouquet. Manual work is much more expensive than machine work, and it is expensive to think about it, and every needle has a momentum to make the best thing. People who use it can also feel this intention.

The scene of Grandma Li and her old partner's fingers flying, déjà vu, brought me back to my mother's side 30 years ago, with a white lace cloth on her knees, a pointed tip cut from side to side, and in a flash of effort, there was a cluster of grid hollows on the white cloth, and pieces of "leaves" trembled out from between the fingers. This kind of lace embroidery is almost extinct at present, but it was very popular in Jiangnan in the 1960s and 1970s.

When my mother was a teenager, a lace club was opened in Changshu's hometown town, operating a lace distribution business, and students could not take it, only rural women and young women who cut in the queue had the privilege of bringing special cards with their names printed on them and the time of delivery. The mother begged the eldest sister who had cut in the queue to go to the countryside to lend her the card, and sometimes the eldest sister was too busy in the countryside to put the card on her mother's side. As a result, the student sister also had a relatively fixed source of income, two or three pieces, and the mother used the money for lace embroidery to pay for tuition and bought cloth to make clothes.

The three female classmates who want to be good often make time to make lace together, and talk about the girl's heart and do not miss the production, which may be more creative than the current girls' party. In order to save kerosene, the three people take turns to sit in the village, go to your house today, go to her house tomorrow, come to my house the day after tomorrow, and say that they will do 9 o'clock in the evening, and they will not finish work before the point to show fairness. Three people also compete, and whoever finishes a line first is usually won by the mother. "I'm the fastest person." Speaking of this now, she still has a proud face.

In the summer, everyone sits around the bamboo garden, usually a bunch of girls, a bunch of middle-aged women, a bunch of old ladies, each talking about each other, often in the cool breeze will come the gossip of the daughter-in-law, the complaint of the mother-in-law, throw a sentence, blow over, the hands are not idle. The girls have good eyes, work fast, do some complicated tricks, middle-aged women are responsible for wrapping the edges, and the old lady's hands and feet are not good, so she has to take some rough work.

Lace station to receive the goods, the eyes are the most poisonous, first look at the card, the name on the card are familiar, who works what kind of heart an account, and then look at the past work, up and down from left to right over and over again, almost to bring a magnifying glass, if you see a little flaw, must force you to go back to dismantle the redo, do bad of course to compensate. Well done, also cheerful, checkout on the spot, small two dollars three dollars, large can get five or six dollars, sometimes a large piece of lace alone can not eat down, the mother will discuss with the little sisters, the two together to make a piece, you hold that head, I twist this head, slowly meet in the middle. Usually speaking well, ten days or half a month, a day can not be delayed.

Making lace patches for household use is a habit that many women in Jiangnan towns have developed since childhood, of course, the premise is that they must have a pair of skillful hands. Mother is best at grid drawing, first lock the outer contour, in the direction of the longitude and latitude of the cloth at a certain width of the interval to remove one or more threads, and then through embroidery, weaving, the formation of a hollow effect, usually a regular decorative pattern. Lace finished products will be used as sheets, tablecloths, pillowcases, curtains, etc., in the past cabinets, sofas are used to put some lace cloth as decoration, now young people will feel old, but in the 60s and 70s of the last century to get married, these are necessary.

Changshu lace embroidery, famous far and wide, has a history of more than 80 years, was once the main product of foreign trade, according to the "Yushan Town Chronicle" record: in 1986, the suburban lace society completed the output value of 759,600 yuan. My family's town, also since the 1970s, the rise of social enterprises, opened a lace factory, the original lace society people have been incorporated, zheng'er Bajing began to engage in "lace economy". Once the export trade boomed, peers from near and far have come to visit, but the good times are not long, after the 80s of the last century, the budding of township enterprises, rural young and middle-aged women into the factory to work income is higher than lace embroidery, they are no longer keen on doing lace, plus embroidery machine began to put into production, embroidery machine each has at least 30 heads, can replace 100 embroidery girls, as long as the computer design pattern, embroidery machine embroidery out of the penny, gradually, machine embroidery to squeeze the artificial embroidery out of the historical stage.

Nowadays, many post-70s and post-80s generations no longer take embroidery needles, let alone post-90s and post-00s. But the silhouette of my mother making lace under the lamp always occupies a small part of my memory. Now 70 years old, her eyes are not very good, and she is probably the root of the disease that falls under the lamp. The bustling prosperity of the lace society on that day was still in front of them, and the women laughed loudly, received the goods sharply, paid money, and worked like an assembly line, which were embroidered with more than 60 kinds of stitches such as buckles, bags, windings, swimming, cutting, rings, nets, and yarns with an embroidery needle, starting from the small town in Jiangnan and being sent to the corners of the world.

The reason for the decline of every thing is simply that it is no longer needed. It was thought that hand-stitched lace embroidery was outdated and that machines could do it better than it. As the 70-year-old mother sighed, today's lace embroidery, each piece can be done flat and uniform, before relying on manual embroidery, it can not be done at all, there will be a sense of bump, even if the same person does it, there will be differences before and after. But is a world that is too neat really what we need? To be more efficient, we invent tools to make everything look the same, but at the same time we may have lost the experience of "different." And is the process of meticulously smoothing a white cloth, through the endless labor from morning to night, making it a little more beautiful, such a process is really superfluous? For me, every night my mother spent making lace under the lamp was unforgettable, and she used her scissors wholeheartedly, carefully counting the number of yarns in the interval, and then pumping out the extra one. Honestly, I'm a little envious of people who use that lace tablecloth.

It's a pity that my mother will never be invited to a big stage like the Winter Olympics. Unfortunately, because we are too anxious to want the result, we gradually lose the ability to slowly experience and enjoy a process.