What comes after a Navy career?

Veteran Sacha de Wit has got the answer to that all stitched up.

Sacha, who lives in Pomona on the Sunshine Coast, benefitted from support from the Prince’s Trust Australia, joining an online program that helped her develop a creative business.

Her interest in embroidery led her not just to make embroidered designs that she sells through her online business, but also to think bigger.

Sacha’s installation artwork, The Unknown Widow, will be a feature of Loddon Valley Arts this year, and is the first time a veteran’s work has been brought to Central
Victoria by the Australian National Veterans Arts Museum, who curated the show.

Sacha studied IT at the Australian Defence Force Academy then went into the Navy, before leaving in 2002, and serving as a reservist until 2010.

Her IT knowledge came in handy when she started using an embroidery machine to make keepsakes and t-shirts. Creating designs first as drawings then as digital images, Sacha then prints in thread on fabric.

Her business is now called Draw Stitch Smile, and along with the website her tea towels, caps, cards and fabric flowers are sold at the Cooroy Butter Factory arts centre.

Sacha’s tea towels were included in RSL Queensland Christmas hampers, when she mentioned that servicemen in the First World War would send embroidered postcards home to their families.

That interest in the legacy of WWI service then led her to the story behind her art installation, The Unknown Widow.

In the Great War of 1914-18, more than 61,000 soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force died in Europe and the Middle-East. Of those who died, some 18,000 have no known grave. Following the war, families of those who had died were invited to write an epitaph for the headstones of their loved ones.

When she learnt of these epitaphs, constrained by a limit of only 66 characters, Sacha de Wit was inspired to create an art installation to commemorate the words and feelings they expressed. The Unknown Widow stretches along a makeshift clothes-line: 66 embroidered handkerchiefs, each with a 66 character epitaph, the succinct, heart-rending, emotional words of those left to mourn.

Sacha heads to Wedderburn for Loddon Valley Arts, and will be at the exhibition for a special afternoon event on Friday 3 October at 5.30pm, when her friend and fellow-veteran Kirshy McAinch will sing one of the haunting WWI songs.