Sewing in Public: Making an object by hand

Michael sent me this quote from Rosemary Hill, art historian:

To make objects by hand in an industrial society, to work slowly and uneconomically against the grain, is to offer, however inadvertently, a critique of that society.
--From “Explorations of a Third Space,” Times Literary Supplement, April 23, 1999. Quoted in Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (2000).

Yesterday I chose from my Steeple People Thrift Store stash a linen runner that someone had barely started to work on long ago, and I began to stitch the words. 
I sat outside embroidering at Jasmine, a nearby Vietnamese deli. 
A young man at the next table asked me what I was doing, and I showed him the quote I'd written down. We ended up talking off and on for the whole time he ate his pho––he's a painter, newly moved to town.

A couple people walking past stopped and commented too.

I'm finding that sewing in public solves the problem of eye contact with friendly strangers: You always have your sewing to look at, if it's awkward, there's a gap in the conversation, or you don't want to engage. Very handy.