This Is Not Your Grandma's Arts & Crafts

[eridani]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/92939/the_new_knitting%3A_this_is_not_your_grandma%27s_arts_%26_crafts/

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: Fuck you.

[snappyturtle]

1. WOW! What an article. It may help explain some of the crafts I see

today that I don't "get"! To me, so much of it is depressing and I have enough to be depressed about without purchasing it. What did you think of the article?

[Warpy]

2. Brace yourself, baby, more is coming

as the economy continues to swirl down the pan and people try to rethink junk and turn it into something useful or amusing, especially for presents they can no longer afford to buy.

It can't possibly be any worse than what we did in the 60s when we started to pop through the knees and seat of our favorite bell bottoms or pursued the hippie ethic of "If you can't eat it, smoke it or wear it, stick it up on the wall and call it found art."

Remember Sprang window panels? Ew.

[Tansy_Gold]

3. Duh. I wrote my master's thesis in 2003 on crafting as political subversion

And I was just building on William Morris, Allen Eaton, and a host of others before me.

The article is pretty lame, but the underlying premise is accurate. There is politics in crafting.


Tansy Gold, fourth generation crafter