The New Knitting: This Is Not Your Grandma's Arts & Crafts

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The New Knitting: This Is Not Your Grandma's

Arts & Crafts

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet

Posted on July 28, 2008, Printed on July 28, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/92939/

You don't

have to handcraft your next checkbook cover out of an old plastic tennis racket

sheath that you plucked from a neighbor's garbage bin, cut up and sewed. You

don't have to adorn your bathroom curtain with repetitive designs (sea horses,

say, or tugboats) using a chiseled half-potato and colorfast fabric paint. You

could use the free checkbook cover the bank gave you and buy ready-made

curtains. Nor must you snip the sleeves off that knitted top and replace them

-- get out the matching thread --with floaty scarves. But hey.

 

The DIY

movement wants you to make stuff. The DIY movement is huge, and sometimes it's

charming and sometimes it's annoying and it is an anti-mass-production

insurrection, a cuddly-soft revolt whose arsenal is crochet hooks, needles and

glue guns. It is active in an all-too-passive age. It is a revolution against

dehumanization in a programmed, processed world, and Doing It Yourself declares

the self. It is an anti-retail uprising whose strategy is Make, don't buy -- at

least not new, never full-price. It is one more way to recycle, restore, rescue

and renew -- and every stenciled paper bag transformed into gift wrap, every

lipstick tube transformed into a tampon case, cleans up the Earth while telling

major industries:

 

A flood of

books, many of them spawned by blogs, takes up that chorus. In Anticraft:

Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister (North Light,

2007), Rene Rigdon and Zabet Stewart declare themselves " sick of

homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We

create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done

something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is

currently being churned out. " In Lotta Prints:

How to Print with Anything, from Potatoes to Linoleum (Chronicle, 2008),

Lotta Jansdotter suggests chiseled turnips and carrots as well. In Creepy Cute

Crochet (Quirk, 2008), Christen Haden promises: " You can teach

yourself to crochet, often in as little as one day (it's true!). " In Alternation

(North Light, 2007), Shannon Okey and Alexandra Underhill hail

" enviro-chic. " In Subversive

Seamster (Taunton, 2007), Melissa Rannels and Hope Meng declare: " We

derive the most fashionable satisfaction from knowing that we are reusing and

recycling what already exists in this material world -- and looking damn good

doing it! "

 

You already

know this, or you will: Crafting is back.

 

Not as it

was when pioneers made dolls from clothespins -- when your average person even

knew what clothespins were. But that's the point. This is not crafting by

necessity. This is not crafting to kill time. This is crafting to claim

identity, to save the world from soulless junk. To casual observers it looks

like adults making toys and keeping them. But this is a resurgence with a

vengeance.

 

By the start

of this decade, the counterculture had reached a near-endgame. Just about every

aesthetic and activity that could have been informed by punk already was. We

might not have been aware of this as such, and still we might not credit it,

but punk spawned so much of the angryuglybeautiful, the violent getpisseddestroy

that we take for granted now. And DIY: Punk was DIY music, after all. Played in

DIY costumes at DIY venues, with DIY announcements taped to poles. But by this

decade, punk was one-plus generation back. What hadn't yet been long-since

punkified? What had stayed so uncool so long as to still be untouched?

Did someone

say " embroidery hoop " ?

 

I craft too.

Check out these bottle-cap-framed miniature colored-pencil portraits, this

coquillage matchbox.

 

These new

crafting books -- and dozens more, such as Khris Cochran's The DIY Bride

and Kristen Rask's Plush You

-- turn the toothpick-whittling our ancestors did beside the bonfire into

something now performed in dorm rooms under Che posters. And just as postmodern

crafters refashion polyester golf trousers into floofy plaid faux-feather boas,

they are also deeply invested in refashioning the public image of crafting

itself. It is imperative that they distance themselves from past crafters, who

were not cool: from the toothpick-whittlers and the summer-camp

lanyard-plaiters to the late-20th-century toilet-roll-cover knitters and

tie-dyers. This is not your grandmother's crafting, they say -- literally. The

Anticraft authors proclaim craft " de-grannified. " Plush You! scorns a

" stinky, grumpy old grandfather. " Subversive Seamster's authors urge

readers to raid " grandma's wardrobe " and make sexy corsets out of

" old man pants. " It's as if they feel compelled to keep reminding us

that they're young.

 

Well, every

youth revolution must present itself as radical and new -- even if, as in this

case, the tools and fruits of that revolt are age-old and one of its driving

forces is nostalgia: for remembered " Star Wars " -era childhoods and

for eras that ended long before these crafters were born, lost tiki-torch-lit

cocktail party years adrift in sock-monkeys and napkin rings. They call it

kitsch. They make what their ancestors made, but now it's funny, angry, sexual,

political. Among its rabbits and robots and puppies, Plush You! spotlights

stuffed felt donuts: frosted, with bugle-bead sprinkles. AlterNation shows you

how to transform pillowcases and button-down blouses into saucy corsets.

Anticraft has corsets and a crocheted cat-o'-nine-tails. Subversive Seamster,

too, has corsets and the " Peek-a-Bootylicious Skirt. "

 

Subversive.

Sinister. " Scream yourself hoarse, " the Anticraft authors propose.

" We're all outcasts and refugees from the mainstream here. We want you to

help us carry this along, which makes it political -- a stand against the

current trends in society to sanitize grief, drug sadness, hide obscenities,

stigmatize sex. " Thenceforth come instructions on making scarves,

stockings, purses, earrings, stuffed felt Easter eggs, a soft woolen hat. The

hat is " an antidote to the bright colors this season forces upon

(us). " The eggs are appliqued with decapitated rabbits: " Sew on

bloody hole at the top left of the bunny body using red floss. Sew on the bone

so it appears to be sticking out of the bloody hole. Embroider blood drips and

arterial spray using red floss. "

 

One of the

revolving mottoes at the seminal site Craftster.org

is " No tea cozies without irony. "

 

At its most

basic, we're talking popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. At the far end of the

spectrum, it's soldering irons and pearls. In between lies this vast realm of

clever, creative, not bone-simple but still basically

doable-without-a-design-degree projects, your rubber-stamped note cards and

drawstring tote bag. That's what insiders, aka craftsters, like to call them:

projects, lending all this snipping of felt and sewing-on of sequins a

semiacademic, art-grant, observerish tone.

 

That tone is

crucial, because the craftster scene is one to watch. Like earlier eras'

garage-band and punk and 'zine scenes, this is one of those rare, actually

of-the-people crusades that start from the bottom up: a few plebeian pals horsing

around in a basement and somehow, somehow, whatever they come up with catches

on. That this can still happen in a processed world should give us hope. In

2003, Boston-area computer programmer Leah Kramer started Craftster.org based

on a lifelong hobby that she hadn't realized many others shared until she

started posting project ideas and pictures online. Almost entirely by word of

mouth, the site quickly expanded to more than 100,000 members. Thousands more

join every month. Other sites pepper the Internet, long-tailing the crafting

subculture into subsubcultures: the neo-knitters, the book-cover refigurers,

the sewing-machinists. And yes, this anti-industry intifada is now itself an

industry, with its own superstores, TV shows, ad-laden Web sites, celebrities

and books, because after all this is America. Still craftsterism is, at heart,

all heart. It has to be. Originality is non-negotiable when anything is made by

hand. In a consumer culture where even the so-called customized is

mass-produced -- think ring tones, think M & Ms printed with your favorite

photograph -- this is the revolutionary part. Human one-of-a-kindness.

Even the

same " project, " completed by different crafters, yields different

results. Because each finished product is so intrinsically personal, each

stitch and each silver spray-painted pea a wee receptacle of memory (I did this

part while listening to Tisto, right before the rainstorm, talking on the phone

to Dad), and because the movement's ethos is so intrinsically populist, craftsterism

(as punk and 'zines once were) is a social barometer. At craftsteramas like

Boston's Bizarre Bazaar and San Francisco's new Renegade Craft Fair, whose

premiere event drew bustling crowds this summer, the " projects " on

show and on sale expose the hopes and dreams of an ever-increasing faction of

the young and hip: their obsessions and their preoccupations. Their themes

become memes. Making crafts takes precious time. What icons, which motifs,

which messages are, to their makers, worth it?

 

Well.

 

Visions of

childhood. Again and again, the kittens and the monkeys. And the big round

staring eyes -- made of felt, buttons, French knots, beads, polymer clay,

classic cheap plastic shake-'ems, set wide apart for maximum wistfulness and

affixed even to renditions of non-living things: to stuffed popsicles and rocks

and fruit, staring, usually smiling. Why? These are eminently fearsome, fearful

times. Most modern craftsters belong to post-Roe v. Wade generations often

criticized (and envied) as the most wanted, most spoiled, most infantile and

most narcissistic in history. It's no surprise that so many solace themselves

by spending days and nights with cuddly toys. The past, your own or some

putative past that came before, is a known territory. How tempting to retreat

into a time before anyone ever heard of global warming, a time without war (or

with wars which, being so long ago, seem sanitized and not quite real).

" This

is stuff to remind you of childhood, to comfort you in your darkened

apartment, " we read in Plush You! Its repertoire of staring-smiling felt

fried eggs and staring-smiling stuffed fleece ice cream sandwiches and

staring-smiling candy corn and staring-smiling trees and staring-smiling

cookies and a staring-smiling Brussels sprout, all made by different

craftsters, " represents real-world things but in a surreal, softly perfect

way. "

 

Visions of

hell. Creepy Cute Crochet's title says it all. Instructions that your

grandmother might actually recognize -- " Row 4: Ch 1, sc 1 in same, sc 2

[inc, sc1] 5 times, sl st to close round (23) " -- lead to utterly

adorable, round-bottomed Satans, Grim Reapers, and the like, to be stuffed with

polyfill or poly-pellets. Amid its irresistible owlets and donuts, Plush You!

includes zombie sock monkeys with loosely stitched gaping wounds, eyes dangling

out on blood-red yarn, amputated legs ending in bloody stumps. Another stuffed

toy in this book is a " poor little bunny whose throat has been cut. "

After drawing the slash with thick red craft paint, we read, add realistic droplets.

One section on a nearby page shows how to craft vomit. Apply thick paint to

make it " look as if gravity is at work and the fluids are pooling. "

 

It's a 21st

century merging of comfort and fear, childhood and death, escapism and protest.

" We're all about the cute and pretty, " announces Plush You! -- and

yes. We have reached a point in history at which a certain sector of the

populace finds puke pretty and cute.

 

Anneli Rufus

is the author of several books, including " Party of One: The

Loners' Manifesto. "

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/92939/

 

 

Diana

 

Palmarosa Hand Crafts

palmarosa.etsy.com

confessionsofacraftaholic.blogspot.com