Grounded in the notion of how our feelings are interwoven with how we experience the world and why it matters, continual work-in-progress Real bodies have their lives stitched into them presents me with a creative challenge. I am learning through stitch how to describe feelings and their trigger effects on lived experience. This is vulnerable work. Not only the trust placed in the improvisational process, as to how a medley of impromptu embroidered patches of feeling end up as points of contact on the gown; but also addressing, how they evolve and take shape through and in relation to each other. Every patch of embroidery is approached as a form of meditation—stitches breath, seeking their own direction. Intuitively a form of life mapping begins to manifest itself, articulating the randomness and the knotty complexities of a life unfolding through time and space. In this way, the art of stitching is realised not as a method of representation, of something understood; but the performance of uncovering elements of the not-yet-known. Through my continuous process of stitching, I reclaim and recreate a once used gown for my eventual departure. A memory garment pieced together from traces of feelings and experiences in celebration of a life lived.