The bank that employs me is filled with bored women. Banking is not exactly a challenging job, not a lot of intellectual or creative stimulation. In fact, it’s best to not think and certainly not improvise. So most people have hobbies that verge on second jobs. There are a few gardeners, several cooks, a couple dog trainers, many quilters and knitters, photographers and other visual artists. I’m not the only writer, though there isn’t much talk of writing output. (Of course, for obvious reasons, I don’t talk about this writing project except to say that I am a journalist… which is sort of true in the traditional sense of the word…)
Once upon a time, I would have been thrilled to hear about so many crafty projects. I believe skills-building is absolutely necessary in a shrinking world. I also believe that making things is human instinct. Making home is what we do, how we live, who we are. But for a while now I have been growing increasingly uneasy with craft for craft’s sake, or perhaps craft to relieve the acedia that is bound up with modernity.
This first began niggling when I was a bookstore owner with almost daily craft-times. We stressed learning through doing and tying the mental nature of reading to tangible handiwork. Craft-time incorporated free-drawing and finger-paint as well as simple fabric craft and clay sculpting and candle making. We had the kids turn trash into art at least once a week, just to open their minds to the possibilities of reuse. Sometimes we took field trips to the field behind our building to gather pebbles and seedpods and dried weeds that were used in wreaths and collages. There were pot-painting days that included planting seeds in the soil, and gourd-painting days to make birdhouses and fancy ladles. We had classes on basic repair work, making sock puppets so they could learn how to sew on a button or darn a hole or embroider simple designs to brighten tired garments. We even had cooking classes now and again, though these were less hands-on being that we didn’t have a kitchen and couldn’t actually cook. We did make cold food and introduced them to new ways of looking at what we eat and where it comes from and all the work that goes into it. Though it must be said that most Albuquerquean kids already have a working knowledge, often an intimate relationship, with producing food.
On a practical scale, I think my craft teachers ranked high. Nearly everything they had the kids produce was of some utility. And yet still… so much of it was just going to end up in the garbage. We did avoid plastics and other poisons because that was not our aesthetic (my lead craft teacher, who also taught elementary school art classes, called glitter “art herpes”), but also because plastic is not something that a person can make. It is not accessible craft. It is also expensive because you must buy everything. So we didn’t produce toxic trash. Mostly. But it was depressing to think about all those seasonal wreaths and fridge art collages and wonky potholders going out our doors in the hands of happy kids, knowing that most of their creative work would soon find its way to the compost heap or trash can. I began to wonder what we were teaching these kids…
I was not a hobby-having person, nor did I make much actual stuff that could not be eaten or worn. (Though I do have a penchant for wreath-making…) I made music and poetry. I grew gardens, made food, raised kids. I worked. A lot. I did not have free time, nor was I ever assaulted by boredom. But mostly, I just didn’t see the point. While I taught myself how to fix things, how to build what I needed, I didn’t feel compelled to quilt or knit. Though I did harbor dreams of weaving and throwing pots if I ever had the time and space. And budget.
It was that expense that prompted me to think about what craft is in this culture. We don’t make quilts to keep us warm, to fill the trousseau, to hand down through the generations. We make stuff. Useless stuff. We make useless stuff out of useless stuff. We are encouraged to make stuff. We are compelled, obliged. We are not complete, particularly as women, if we don’t make stuff. Always more and more and more stuff, no matter whether we need it, want it, or can even fit it in the overflowing craft closet.
If this sounds quite a lot like capitalism… well… craft has been turned into the vehicle of choice for parting suburban women from their disposable income. It is an industry unto itself. Enormous factories in Bangladesh and the Philippines churn out brightly dyed acrylic yarn by the ton, poisoning the water and air for miles around, and we turn it into scarves and tiny crocheted cartoon creatures. Chinese laborers, mostly women, bend over machines that stamp out petals from polyester to make “silk florals” to be made into lifeless bouquets and holiday wreaths. How many forests have been pulped to make quilling paper and scrapbooking supplies? And what happens to all these creations?
There are attempts to wrest back creativity from capitalism. Craftivists make useful, or nominally useful, household items and clothing for donation to shelters and various charities. Some knitters turn their stitching into public art, yarn bombing trees and fire hydrants. Many are turning away from hobby supply stores and seeking out locally produced or natural sources for their supplies. Some are even beginning to raise their own materials, whether that be wool or dye plants or floral essences and oils.
Among younger people there is also a new and welcome emphasis on making practical things, perhaps because they have no disposable income, perhaps because they’ve seen the mess that capitalism crafting causes and don’t want a life mired in that. They are learning to make what they need. This is a wholly different thing than crafting as it exists in our culture. They treat craft as a means, not an end, and there is no compulsion to make what is not needed. Because they are focused on the need and not trying to fill time with hobbies, they range further over the maker territory than the traditional quilts and embroidery samplers. And they aim to share what they have learned, posting succinct tutorials on Tik-Tok and YouTube. You can find young people – and it is not just women — sharing how to do everything from saving tomato seeds (a high art…) to making toothpaste from garden herbs and baking soda to fashioning furniture from reclaimed fence posts. There is also more emphasis on repairing and repurposing — because that is where crafty skills truly benefit people and communities.
But those useful skills remain on the periphery of craft. Rather like producing food — which I am more familiar with and which involves gardening, cooking and preserving, and creating and maintaining proper storage — lives on the edges of the gardening industry. Gardening is a skill that has been denuded of utility in this culture. We are encouraged to plant knot gardens and ornamental borders and specimen trees. Planting tomatoes and peppers is acceptable in moderation, mostly for summer consumption. Growing potatoes and dried beans is seen as a strange enthusiasm, but still nominally allowed — as long as we continue to buy hybrid seed-stock and soil amendments. Planting cabbage and turnips for winter keeping, growing locally-adapted fruit trees, saving seed and breeding your own locally-adapted food plants, producing Hubbard squash rather than prize-winning pumpkins, and worst of all ripping out the lawn and planting veg and herbs — all of that garners sneering at best, quite often legal action if you persist in making a useful landscape around your home despite zoning laws, HOA rules and neighborhood mores.
People can be quite vicious about it.
Partly this is because you, with your landscape of abundance, are making them feel guilty, underachieving, less skilled and knowledgeable. Partly this is bourgeois aesthetics. You are supposed to want an immaculate and uniform lawn with a few terrified shrubs around the house foundations. That you ripped up the grass is offending their sense of what is right in the world. But the worst offense is simply that your food production is useful. It is providing for yourself. And while there is still expense, most of it is localized and it all tends to diminish over time. You are taking your food needs out of the capitalist system. Your productive garden is glaring evidence that you do not spend as much money on food as your neighbors. Nothing can evince more snarling rage than evidence of a free lunch.
The hobby garden industry wants, needs, demands just the opposite from you. It wants you to spend thousands on tools and plants and fertilizers and pesticides and labor — lots of labor, from professionals who are also spending thousands, or more like tens of thousands on bigger tools and gallons of fuel to run their machines and vast barrels of poison to sterilize all surfaces. This is a system that will increase in expenditure with every growing season, because there is no growing involved. Everything is being managed, eradicated, killed. Every year it takes more and more and more. There are annual ads this time of year encouraging you to feed and reseed your lawn, getting ready for barefoot summer. Have you ever questioned this? I mean, there are annual grasses, but those aren’t what we grow in lawns. Lawn grasses are perennials, weedy perennials actually. Grass takes over. I am ripping it out of the herb and veg beds constantly, every year. So why is it necessary to reseed? I say, if you must regularly reseed your lawn, then you have a yard of dead dirt. It will grow nothing without more and more and more prophylactic industrial inputs. Which is exactly what industry requires of your yard.
Similarly, craft…
Frivolous and useless hobbies are extolled in women’s media. There are probably millions of YouTube videos demonstrating how to make amigurumi critters. Crochet gets its own magazines. Quillers have huge conventions in Las Vegas… which just begs so many questions it serves as a complete thought-stopper. I’m not against craft just to make pretty in our ugly world. I like making pretty. It’s my one super-power. But these are the grace notes in a balanced life, the foundation of which is production, utility, actual craft-work.
Still, uselessness is not evil unto itself. It is evil when it is all there is, when the focus is on useless waste, while utility, that which might remove your need from feeding money into industry, is disparaged, precisely to keep you spending that money. Uselessness is also evil in how it is practiced. Making a mandala of field stones and flowers is completely useless on a practical level, though it certainly can serve emotional needs. But there is no waste. There is little or no harm. What is left behind will decompose and flow back into the healthy system. But make a mandala out of bleached paper and acrylic paints and plastic bric-a-brac imported across oceans, and you’ve added evil to disutility. Because all this is harmful on enormous scales in time and space. Which is exactly why it is so profitable. The more complex something it, the more destructively useless something is, the more needs are created. The more need created, the more money is spent chasing fulfillment.
Recently, I overheard a conversation about craft. One woman is involved in a town project to bring people together each week to make things, to learn how to do things. I love this idea, so I listened in. I wish I hadn’t.
Some of the projects might be paths to learning useful skills, but most of them were just time-fillers, producing nothing but junk. Granted, perhaps the focus is not the crafting, but the gathering, particularly giving our rural elders some reason to get out of the house for much-needed socialization. But why not make quilts and crocheted blankets for our hundreds of unhoused? Does the world need more macrame plant-hangers? And yeah… quilling… what exactly is the point of curled paper glued to more paper? (I don’t mean to bag on quilling… but it’s such an easy target…) Why not have classes on darning? Or weaving? Or anything really! Pick something that needs to be done. Craft is how we make our lives. There are so many useful crafts that could be employed as a background for social gatherings. Furthermore, I suspect many of the elders that come most frequently could teach the classes on useful craft. How fulfilling and meaningful would that be! And to top it off, there would be no need to buy specialist, possibly toxic, almost certainly industrially-made supplies. Bring in your holey socks and knitting needles. We’ll supply the Vermont-made darning yarn. Or whatever…
This conversation depressed me. It also inspired a renewed interest in creating a third space in my community, a place where you can gather without spending money. There might be a need to sell something “by day” to pay the rent — maybe books, maybe locally-made clothing and housewares, maybe even food — but the focus would be on community. I suspect it would be a lot like my first store, but smaller, so the rent is not that high. In that perfect little space, I would again hold classes, but I think I would let the elders lead them. There might also be room for toaster repair and canning classes, bicycle maintenance tips and seed saving. So many skills are needed, and few of the most useful ones require industry. In fact, the most useful ones are hacks to avoid industry and save your time and money. I might even brush off my geology lesson plans and hold workshops on noticing the world.
There might even be quilling…
Maybe… probably not…
