(Originally posted on WP 8/5/20.)
I love EZ (Elizabeth Zimmermann), and her approach towards knitting to make us all thinking knitters, instead of blind followers. I bet her brain was just a mad whirr of activity while she was knitting.
Some people get their ideas in the shower, or whilst they are sleeping, and I get those too, but the surefirest way for me to get 20 things jotted down on a notepad, is to pick up some knitting, preferably a pair of socks, which after nearly 30 yrs, I can almost knit them in my sleep.
* Pick up ndls, knit half a round, put down ndls, pick up pen.
Put down pen, pick up ndls, repeat from * until brain goes fuzzy and sleep beckons.
They’re not all grand ideas, most of it is all the stuff I need to do the next day, which is best written down in advance, otherwise these chores will swim around in my brain all night, keeping me from sleeping. But in-between the mundane, and the frankly far too long list of to-do’s, are Ideas. Knitting Ideas, but lately, mostly Weaving Ideas, and Thoughts About Life.
The ‘what if I put this yarn with that one, sett it at x, and make y with it’ type of stuff. The next day, these ideas each get fleshed out on their own Estimates page in the weaving binder. Estimates of materials cost, time to execute, and then whether the price point allows it to be a salable item.
Though this last part is irksome. Salable *where*?
Which leads me down the road of Handcraft Activism.
Most people think of Etsy, when they think of handmade, but although this may have once been the case, I am not so sure any more. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to refund a $6 knitting pattern pdf purchase because someone thought they were buying a handknit, wool tea cozy (despite “PDF" being everywhere in my pattern listings). For *$6*. *Really?*. Maybe on the planet Cheap Imports, but on a site specifically geared towards *handmade*?
This is exactly why I do not do project estimates for knitting designs any more. BTDT. There is no price point that hand knit items can be sold at, profitably. At least not on Etsy.
I have heard Etsy referred to as an incubator. A place for small biz to start up (but should not stay). Though even within that limited framework and time span, *how* cheaply are makers supposed to value their skill and time? I’ve seen how cheaply. I’ve run the #’s of similar handwoven items for sale, and if the makers are clearing $7/hour, they’re lucky.
Can you pay your mortgage, put half-way decent food on the table, and pay your utilities and health insurance premiums earning $7/hour? Never mind all the extras one needs as they age.
Don’t let anyone fool you - life does not become LESS expensive the older you get, it is MORE expensive. Ironic, as most people are phased out of the workforce just when life insurance premiums begin to skyrocket, along with the expenses of life-supporting medications, hormones, and nutritional supplements, none of which are cheap.
I’m sorry, that’s unacceptable, on both counts – for the maker under-valuing their work, and for its direct result – the consumer thinking that cheap is the norm. Then all other makers think they need to compete with these too-low prices. It’s a downward spiral, which soon takes quality with it.
Perhaps I am living in the wrong country. There are countries that value handwork, quality materials, well-made items, and don’t *expect* them to be sold at Dollar Store prices.
We’ve lost touch with what it means to make or buy something for your closet or your home, which will actually last 20+ years. I’ve been making things since the 80s, dealing with this Dollar Store mentality a long time. It’s not the ‘80s anymore – that throw-away society should have been thrown away ages ago.
So, as I do not wish to undervalue my time and skill, I am now only listing smaller handwoven items on Etsy, and only until the listings expire. Then, as with my other work, I will be moving them onto my website. At some point I will cease to put anything handmade on Etsy, and only have my PDF patterns there.
Why bother with Etsy at all, then?
I wouldn’t, but, and there’s always a but, I have been taking note, for quite some time now, that some women’s magazine editors DO scan Etsy for products, although I wish they’d take Martha’s lead and highlight work not being sold on Etsy, as in the Martha Stewart Living, Nov. 2018 issue's article about women weavers.
The women (Elizabeth Eakins Studio, Stephanie Seal Brown Handwovens, A Little Weather, and Hart) all have their own WordPress or Squarespace websites, and their work is appropriately priced for being handmade, aka not cheap.
With Covid keeping us all home, with little to no social diversions, most of us have time to think. Some of us are also gardening, cooking and baking, others are turning to fiber or other making pursuits, These activities, which are much harder to find the time for, under normal circumstances, are now the line in the sand between us and the loony bin, as this 24/7 togetherness bit is *not* natural, it’s exhausting, especially in down-sized houses! People need personal space, in order to recharge.
But, through engaging in these home and creative arts, we are also re-finding connections to How Life Should be, lost for decades. Growing vegetables and flowers, making food from scratch, crafting things for our homes and families. Depending on our age, we may remember our grandparents or great-granparents engaging in some of these activities.
They weren’t connecting to others through thumbing their days away on health-damaging cell phones, all the while becoming less invested in activities which ground us. Of course, life wasn’t perfect then, it is never perfect, but it was more Real.
So, in this whirr of thinking we are all engaging in, it may have dawned on us that Covid is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, it has changed everything, but not all for the bad. And, as in this well-known Chinese tale, it really isn’t possible to tell if an event is *just* good or bad, as everything can be both good and bad at the same time, depending on how we perceive it. And thanks to our linear human lives, our sight into the future is *very* limited.
But, my hope is that the other side of this pandemic will find our lives changed permanently for the better, not just a temporary backslide into the Real, but that we will decide to stay real.
And once we can actually be social again without having to barricade our bodies, that it too will be Real, where all this electronic gadgetry will drop down a notch or two in our consciousnesses, to become the support systems they are meant to be, not replacements.
My hand knit sock drawer – where thought becomes reality.
Onward,
Dawn
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