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OCH Publications > Oregon Humanities table of contents

Oregon Humanities is a journal of ideas and perspectives published twice a year by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Each issue includes essays and articles that explore a particular theme from a variety of perspectives, broadening the ways in which readers think about a subject and providing a basis for further thoughtful discussion.

Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007

Handmade and Proud

What's behind the resurgence in knitting, sewing, and making your own stuff?

By Jamie Passaro

The world of domestic craft these days has a lot in common with a skirt I own. Navy blue with white pinstripes, the skirt was refashioned out of an old pair of Haggar men's trousers and some ladies' lingerie. Triangular insets of pale pink polyester lace that probably came from a department store slip are sewn into the front and the back where slits would be on a normal A-line skirt.

This skirt is somehow subversive--the cut-up men's pants, the pink lace peeking out (not very discreetly), a few stray threads hanging off the hem--a parody of the starchy, button-down office culture where the skirt's components would originally have been worn. Inevitably, when I wear it, someone I don't know will compliment me on it and ask me if I made it. On one hand, it's just a skirt I wear when I'm running errands on the weekend. But it's also evidence of the resurgent interest in domestic crafts among twenty- and thirty-somethings like me--though these aren't your mother's, or for that matter, your great-great-grandmother's, crafts. The new generation of crafters incorporates a twist--taking something old, but functional, and redefining it. The kind of cool that's associated with making your own skirt these days is probably baffling to our foremothers, many of whom certainly "did it themselves," but for entirely different reasons.

It's an interesting cultural moment we're having, in which it's suddenly hip to engage in the kinds of domestic arts that women used to practice out of necessity and survival. The impulse to make things today seems especially anachronistic at a time when we can buy just about anything for less money (and in less time) than it would take to make it. My friend Jennifer's grandmother summed it up nicely when Jennifer called her recently for advice on canning tomato sauce: "Why would you want to do that?" she asked.

Yet many people want to do that. Locally, there's a flourishing culture of knitting and craft circles of (mostly) women who get together to make things and talk over wine and snacks. The Portland Church of Craft, which will celebrate its fourth year in October, has nine hundred members. Once a month, members gather and learn to make a project, such as a pendant made from a rubber stamp or a choker made from crocheted wire or a book made from envelopes.

This "crafty-ness" is part of a national trend. Singer reports that sales of its sewing machines have doubled since 1999. The Craft Yarn Council says that between 2002 and 2004, the number of twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds who are knitting and crocheting increased by more than 150 percent. Etsy, an online marketplace that's known as the eBay of craft, reports that it has 300,000 members, 50,000 of whom are sellers. Etsy also reports that in the two years it's been in business, one million items have been sold from its site, and most of these things are either wearable or for the home.

Call it the new wave of craft, domestic craft, domestic arts, or the new domesticity. Some link it to the third wave of feminism, to the same DIY (Do It Yourself) philosophy found in punk rock and its three chords, or to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While it may very well be related to all of those things, there are ways in which it also looks remarkably like the very thing it's trying not to be--a little like Mom herself, or maybe like Martha Stewart, that icon of domesticity.

Whether the purveyors of the new domesticity are hobbyists or entrepreneurs like Portland's Rebecca Pearcy, whose vinyl bags and wallets stitched with images of birds and leaves and cupcakes are fairly ubiquitous among Portland hipsters; stay-at-home moms who adore Martha Stewart and make scrapbooks; or art- and design-school graduates who loathe Martha Stewart and make ironic and kitschy crafts, such as iPod cozies and latch-hooked rugs with seventies soft-core porn motifs--Martha the muse, or specter, is never very far away.

For example: go online and you'll find a bustling and seductive flock of craft websites and blogs. Start at Jenny Hart's Sublime Stitching site ("This ain't your gramma's embroidery!"), where you can order a kit that has everything you need to stitch a martini glass on a tea towel. From there, find your way to NotMartha.org, where you can learn how to make oatmeal energy bars and read about a special kind of coat hook that won't stretch out your clothes. Go from there to Susan Beal's West Coast Crafty blog to read about upcoming craft sales in Portland. Click on the link for a book called Bend-the-Rules Sewing by Amy Karol and you'll end up on Karol's blog, which is called "angry chicken." And from there--if you're as intrigued by a recipe for summer pudding with rum and whipped cream as I was--you'll end up on Oprah.com, because the recipe appeared in an issue of O, Oprah's magazine, which is cousin to Martha Stewart Living.

Sure, Gen Xers like me associate Martha Stewart with baby-boomer corporate badness. Then again, though I love looking at ReadyMade magazine today, dig deep enough in my recycling bin and you'll find old issues of Martha Stewart Living. After all, a lot of women in the current crafts movement didn't inherit their skills from their mothers or grandmothers. They learned them from camp counselors, in the Girl Scouts, from friends in their dorms, from classes and manuals, and from Martha Stewart.

In the introduction to her book Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec, Jean Railla, founder of the webzine getcrafty.com, describes her path from crafty kid to women's studies major to New York City-dwelling website producer, for whom anything "domestic" was akin to drudgery and whose diet consisted of "cigarettes, coffee, and beer." At some point, she decided to take better care of her body, and in the process found herself interested once again in the crafts of her Girl Scout years: knitting, sewing, and cooking.

It's a trajectory so common among Generation X crafters that it could almost be scripted: Girl Scouts, punk rock, feminism, college, 9-to-5 job, followed by a rediscovery of crafts and an interest in all things domestic. For a lot of women, reconnecting with these skills feels a little like a rebellion against the Betty Friedan school of feminism, which regarded domestic work as stifling and meaningless. And while Stewart's brand of domesticity may not seem rebellious, she was, in fact, one of the original postwar domestic entrepreneurs. Talking about the genesis of her business on the Charlie Rose show in 1999 (and later quoted in a New Yorker story written by Joan Didion), Stewart says: "I was serving a desire--not only mine but every homemaker's desire, to elevate that job of homemaker. It was floundering, I think. And we all wanted to escape it, to get out of the house, get that high-paying job and pay somebody else to do everything that we didn't think was really worthy of our attention. And all of a sudden I realized it was terribly worthy of our attention."

Which is echoed in something Railla says in Get Crafty. When she rediscovered domestic crafts as an adult, she learned that "all the stuff I had always dismissed as women's work was actually quite complicated." And she wondered, "What if, instead of dismissing domesticity, we thought of it as an important part of women's culture?"

Susan Beal, a founding member of Portland craft collective PDX SuperCrafty and coauthor of the book Super Crafty: Over 75 Amazing How-to Projects, says that while she was growing up she didn't observe her mother taking the kind of satisfaction in home crafts that fills her own life today--and that compels Beal to, say, sew a quilt that's a reversible duvet cover or rework broken jewelry and vintage charms into a two-strand necklace. Her mother worked full time and was a great feminist influence. As a child, Beal marched with her for the Equal Rights Amendment.

In high school, Beal took auto mechanics rather than home economics to avoid the kind of feminine stereotypes associated with domestic arts and crafts. She learned how to sew when she was twenty-six, after buying a turquoise 1960s Singer sewing machine that she fell for because it was "cute." A friend taught her how to use it, and she began making skirts. Not long after that, she was selling them at the Northwest Portland store Seaplane, which sells clothes and jewelry made by independent designers. Today, Beal is a kind of craft celebrity around Portland, earning her living by writing about craft for magazines such as Adorn, Craft, BUST, and ReadyMade. Like many other crafters, Beal professes her devotion to Martha and writes about Stewart's latest product lines on her blog (westcoastcrafty.wordpress.com).

Beal thinks that the recent resurgence of interest in domestic crafts comes in part from the fact that a lot of people in their twenties and thirties spend most of their days sitting in front of computers and feeling disconnected from that "warm and tactile feeling of working with their hands." She also thinks that these same people feel increasingly dissatisfied with consumer culture and unethical practices in the production of clothes and other goods.

It's the same motivation described by Dennis Stephens, a doctoral student in art and art education at Columbia University's Teachers College, who analyzes craft culture on his blog Redefining Craft. He says DIY craft "refers to a form of domestic creativity that emerges from a DIY ethos that seeks to confront mass-market consumerism and the homogenization of culture as a result of the aggressive expansion of big box retailers."

Some say the craft renaissance is guided by the same sort of yearning and philosophy that drove the Arts and Crafts movement, only instead of protesting industrialization, today's crafters are protesting technology and globalization.

And while some crafters seem genuinely motivated by political leanings and providing an alternative to mainstream consumption, this explanation also has a kind of scripted quality that comes, in part, because so many crafters have been asked to analyze the craft resurgence for trend articles in newspapers and magazines like this one. It becomes an easy and admirable sound bite. Even if they craft for pure pleasure or because they want cool or nice things to sell on Etsy or to wear or display in their homes, they might not mind being aligned with noble causes, such as fighting mass consumption and shady labor practices, and reducing environmental impacts. But, as a fiber artist asked me recently, how many scarves and cute tote bags does the world need?

Yet, consistent with the Arts and Crafts movement, there's a feeling that a beautiful or interesting object made by hand by a skilled craftsperson has an honesty that mass-produced objects can't match. As Diane Gilleland (a.k.a. "Sister Diane"), the organizer of the Portland Church of Craft, puts it, "There's a certain power in making with your own two hands the things you want in the world."

It's a philosophy that looks a lot like DIY/punk rock ethos meets Martha Stewart, and one that also fits with an observation made by University of Oregon professor Doug Blandy, who's taught a zine and do-it-yourself democracy class to incoming freshmen for the last five years. He says the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds in his classes are often perplexed to the point of paralysis by the political and social problems in the world around them and are concerned with the notion of not wanting to sell out.

That kind of paralysis may account for a lot of the nesting that's happening in the larger world--a sort of reaction that says, I don't know what to do about the ozone layer, but I can retreat and make a nice, comfortable home for myself. And, thanks in part to magazines like Stewart's (and to her TV show and product lines), there are about three gazillion ways to learn how to make a nice house.

And yet there's a lot of outrage and ambivalence surrounding Stewart that's not necessarily related to her corporate misdeeds. Is it because she's viewed as a sellout by the same group of young adults that Blandy describes as being obsessed with not selling out? Or is it much simpler than that: Is Stewart the mom we're rebelling against, yet, inevitably, becoming?

"Martha Stewart is our mom's generation of DIY," says Faythe Levine, a thirty-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin, filmmaker who has interviewed dozens of crafters around the country for a documentary called Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design. Levine, who grew up in the 1990s punk scene in Seattle, also owns a craft boutique, coordinates a craft fair, and plays musical saw in a band called Wooden Robot.

While Levine, with tattoos up both arms and tons of hipster cred, doesn't look like Stewart, what she whips up with a glue gun sure does. Her signature craft is a hand-cut and machine-sewn felt owl with a card in its back pocket. When it became so popular that Levine got tendonitis and couldn't keep up with demand, she had to hire help.

Yet Levine says that she isn't interested in Stewart because Martha's too corporate, too far removed from the actual day-to-day work of making things. While Stewart amasses her empire of homes and media and product lines, Levine lives far at the other end of the spectrum: she has no insurance and works part-time in a bar to make ends meet.

Today's crafters may be more motivated by conscious lifestyle choices, what Gilleland from the Church of Craft calls a rebellion against the 9 to 5: twenty- and thirty-year-olds who look at their hardworking, baby boomer parents and say, Maybe that's not what I want. Maybe I want to stay home with my children and work part-time.

Or, as Dagua Webb Nelson says, maybe I just don't want to work for anyone else. Nelson, the former proprietor of Deluxe, the thrift and consignment shop where I bought that pinstriped skirt, says she often is compared to Stewart, which she finds frustrating. "She's so frumpy," says Nelson, who is decidedly unfrumpy, usually dressed in clothes that are a combination of vintage, thrift-store finds, and her own designs.

After she sold Deluxe, one of the first stores in Eugene to sell felted flower pins and skirts adorned and appliqued with lace and fabrics borrowed from other clothes ("repurposing" in DIY craft lingo), Nelson opened Ladydove, which carried mostly her own designs. When I spoke with her, Nelson was in the midst of reinventing Ladydove into "Augurie the indy shop," which will carry more than twenty-five lines of clothes and household goods that Nelson has hand-selected from Etsy. As we talked, Nelson painted a table green ("too minty?" she asked), sketched an owl on a white wall with a pencil, and wondered out loud if the country-kitsch heart on the wooden shelves she'd bought at Goodwill could be painted and resurrected as something different altogether.

As talented as she is at decorating spaces, designing and making clothes, and running a business, Nelson, who has degrees in French and art history, admits to an ongoing inner struggle about the validity of these typically female pursuits. She has friends who are getting PhDs, and she wonders if she should be making a different kind of a contribution to the world.

At the same time, she recognizes that one of the reasons Stewart isn't taken more seriously is because of a gender bias that undervalues domestic crafts. Many still hold the view that these crafts fall within the hopelessly feminine realm of women's work and find the fact that a woman could make millions of dollars from this kind of work a bit preposterous. True, it's easy to make fun of Stewart--a Halloween luminaria or a gift box embellished with a tissue-paper flower is a long way from the more utilitarian objects of domestic craft's past. "But what she makes is beautiful," Nelson says, "and it is valid."

Perhaps the association with Stewart or the stereotype that links domestic craft with housewives is what has prompted a lot of today's crafters to make imperfect things, like that pinstriped skirt with its stray threads or other items that might be a little shocking to grandma: a knitted vibrator cozy or a baby bonnet with an embroidered skull-and-crossbones motif.

"There's this cache of avant-garde," says Namita Wiggers, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, about one offshoot of the craft movement. Last fall, the museum explored women's changing relationship with domestic craft in an exhibit called New Embroidery: Not Your Grandmother's Doily. The title of the exhibit was intentionally ironic, a nod to some of the tension that exists around the idea that the new wave of craft is disrespectful to other generations of craft. The exhibit brought work from the DIY world together with more traditional crafts, and included artists such as Lou Cabeen. A Seattle fiber artist, Cabeen took pillowcases that had been embroidered by her grandmother originally, and then embroidered new text over them. Another artist, Orly Cogan, who could be described as coming from the DIY school, handstitched an image of a multi-armed Barbie--busy with her cellphone, a comb, and a cup of coffee--on a vintage printed tablecloth, evoking questions about women's roles in society. In the same vein, DIY crafter Jenny Hart hand-stitched the words "THIS WORK NEVER ENDS" on vintage linen.

Since the New Embroidery exhibit, Wiggers has been thinking about the way in which many women today have a relationship with craft that is strikingly different than one that comes from tradition. In DIY crafts, Wiggers sees "this really fascinating blend of seventies craftiness and ironic fifties Americana." On one hand, she sees a kind of nostalgia for the tradition of craft, and on the other, a need to reinvent that tradition.

Andi Zeisler calls it "hipster craft." Zeisler is cofounder and editor of Bitch magazine (subtitle: "a feminist response to pop culture"), which recently relocated to Portland. While a supporter of Portland's craft scene, Zeisler is critical of certain parts of this reinvention. Items such as the crocheted baby bonnet with the skull and crossbones can come off as classist and snobby, she says, because there are many people who sincerely crochet and knit and macrame. "It's valuing the irony more than the craft" and "making sure you're cooler than that." (Zeisler is a crafter herself. She learned to knit in college and these days likes to embroider portraits of pets and people.)

Subtract the irony, and the crocheted sushi, knitted sweater vests, and latch-hooked seventies scenes of DIY crafts don't look that different from the items displayed in the textiles exhibit at local county fairs. They use the same techniques and derive from the same impulse: to make things with one's own hands.

Josh Faught, a twenty-eight-year-old fiber artist who recently moved from Chicago to Eugene to teach at the University of Oregon, says Zeisler's observation about "hipster craft" is an "important factor to consider as we evaluate these contemporary incarnations of craft practice."

Faught picked up an interest in craft during the summer camps of his childhood. He's one of those frenzied crafters who is skilled in many techniques--weaving, knitting, crocheting, repeat building, dye processes. He's serious when he calls himself a "jack of all fibrous trades" on his Friendster page. One of his former instructors called his work "sloppy craft" for its lack of structural integrity.

While he talks about serious concepts like "using materials, objects, and ornamentation to trace codes of depression, desire, illness, loss, tragedy, and criminality," he also likes to, for instance, make a spider plant out of yarn. This summer, Faught was the guest artist for Knit:Knit magazine, an art publication that looks at the intersection of traditional craft and art. For the occasion, he crocheted two hundred magazine-jacket covers with limited-edition crochet yarn.

When Faught made his first trip to Eugene's thirty-year-old Saturday Market in August, he came face-to-face with crafters who'd been practicing fiber arts like macrame since the seventies. Though he views his art as sincere, he also observes that there's a "rupture" between his frenzied craftmaking and a skill that's been practiced and honed over a lifetime. He says he has a lot of respect for the rich sense of history he observes in more traditional crafters; he recently went to the Lane County Fair and was "blown away" by the quilt competition.

Though the notion of a quilt competition might seem quaint alongside craft blogs and hipster boutiques, what they have in common is a lot of people making things with their hands again and feeling proud about it. The end products often look very much like things Martha would encourage you to make, and is that really such a bad thing?

Besides, the tradition of self-expression, of taking pride in your work and showing it off, is nothing new. It's probably why my husband's grandmother sewed tags with her name on them inside the hand-smocked baby dresses that have been handed down to us. The difference is that, today, with blogs and websites, you can show off your sock monkey or your knitted bikini not only to friends and family, but also to fellow crafters in Akron or Fort Lauderdale.

My friend Kimberly confessed to me recently that she'd made sure the gift she'd knitted for a coworker's baby made its way to the baby shower even though Kimberly couldn't attend the party. Why not just deliver the gift at work? Kimberly admitted that she wanted an audience to see the knitted booties emerge from the package and for them to know that she'd made them.

Not that this was her only reason for making the booties. Sure, she says, there's a unique pleasure that comes from transforming a ball of yarn into something useful using your own hands and two wooden sticks. She works a desk job during the day, and knitting is a pleasant way to unwind at night. But would she just knit and knit and knit with no recipients in mind, no gifts to give, no venues for public display? Probably not.

When my daughter was born, I received an olive green pair of Kimberly's signature booties. They were a staple of my daughter's wardrobe during her first four months, not just because they were warm and cute--we had plenty of store-bought baby footwear that fulfilled that same criteria--but because they were handmade. A little of the same pride that went into making them transferred to me every time my daughter wore them and every time someone complimented us on them. As with that pinstriped skirt, sometimes people just assumed that I had made them, and I was happy to let them think so.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities

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