ancient-art-of-craft

[ancient-art-of-craft]

Digging around Archive.org for weaving books and found the best book title ever

[ancient-art-of-craft]

Friendly reminder to all of my craftspeople, the state fair is coming up! Now is the time to finalize any big projects, or reach out to people to politely ask for your mittens back because you want to win a prize of a $20 gift card to the local yarn shop.

[ancient-art-of-craft]

it's me girl it's the fiber arts, speaking to you inside your brain. listen to me girl. leave the boy, we don't need him! come with me and do my crafts, we'll have knitting times in... rafts! do do dodo, yeah, you need me girl your free will is an illusi-

[ancient-art-of-craft]

Yarn Snail!

Colors on the body didn't quite turn out how I wanted, but overall very pleased. One antenna broke off before its last kiln journey, but will be glued back on.

[ancient-art-of-craft]

There's a concept I try to convey to other crochet artists

You are never going to get paid for the amount of time you put into the piece. Best you can generally sell anything for is Materials x3

That enables you to pay for the yarn, and 2 more of the same thing you sold, so you can support your yarn addiction.

"But Gilligan you're only making $2.50 an hour!" I WAS GONNA CROCHET ANYWAY BITCH! Any income is better than yarn sitting around while you wait for a magical unicorn buyer who's gonna pay $500.

I know, it sucks, I put hours and hours into making those slippers. The yarn cost like $5 and I can squeeze maybe two pairs out of it. 5x3 =15, round it up to 20 and that's how much someone will probably buy them for. Again, I was going to crochet anyway. Because the devil says so.

Crocheting isn't my job it's my hobby and I'm good at it. Don't ruin it for yourself by trying to monetize it.

[ancient-art-of-craft]

Sweet mother, I cannot weave - slender Aphrodite has overcome me with tendonitis.

[ancient-art-of-craft]

I know I swore to myself I wouldn't buy more craft supplies, but if I buy a loom and use only yarn I already own then technically that's helping to reduce my stash.

[ancient-art-of-craft]

it wild to me that there are people out there who aren't interested in history

like wdym you don't think about the fact that women would tell stories as they made butter in the same way we listen to podcasts today? wdym you don't think about that one Chinese poet who wrote about how much he loved his cats hundreds of years ago? wdym you don't think about the fact that we found a gravesite of a young child surrounded by flowers from THOUSANDS of years ago? wdym you don't think about how people wrote "i was here" into the walls in Pompeii? wdym you don't think about the little egyptian boy who drew little doodles at the top of his school works more then a thousand years ago?

wdym you don't think about the fact that people, no matter the place, time, social status, are fundamentally no different from you. that they loved the same as you, enjoyed the same things you did, dreamed about a better life the same way you did. that despite how seemingly detached you are from these people, in time, place, and culture, the things you do and the thing u are, are so undeniably human that it transcends time and space

[ancient-art-of-craft]

It’s true this is a real picture of me crocheting

[ancient-art-of-craft]

crochet is very modular, each time builds upon the past, each row builds upon each other. Knitting is very intertwined, it’s hard to tell where it ends and begins

[ancient-art-of-craft]

Often, men will say something like : "Who built this world? Men! Who created everything, all the technology, the great art, the culture, our societies? Who built the roads you drive on? Men!" and feminists will respond "That's because you didn't let us work or make art!" and... that's just wrong? Why are you validating the idea that women didn't contribute anything to the world? That we didn't work? That we didn't innovate? And why are you approving the nonsense that says being a mother is not work?

Don't let men rewrite history.

Women have always worked the double shift; outside of home and inside of home.

[ancient-art-of-craft]

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

[ancient-art-of-craft]

I'd like to issue a very polite "fuck you" to whatever is making my stockinette curl.

[ancient-art-of-craft]

My wife extremely cutely gifted me a set of Sylvanian/Calico critters kittens! I'd been lovingly looking at them every time we saw them in a toy shop for years (and secretly hoping someone would get them for our daughter so I could look at them at home), but pasi got them for me 🥰🥰🥰🥰

I love them but I don't love the clothes they come with.

So guess what!

Time to put my 1.5mm needles to use!

[ancient-art-of-craft]

every time someone says ‘oh, you knit? do you like it?’ i have the marrow-deep urge to tenderly take their face in my hands and press my lips to their eyelids and telepathically transmit the full overwhelming awareness that i carry just beneath my skin every moment of every day of how important fiber crafts and textiles are and historically have been to humanity. every stitch i work is a thousand billion stitches that have already been worked and will be worked in the future, from the farthest reaches of prehistory until time immemorial. every spindle i spin is spun with the same flick of uncountable fingers from ages past, all united across history in the deceptively simple movement that has shaped history, and art, is the context within which every single person on earth has ever lived their life and lives their lives still. everything from our phones to our homes is given shape and form by the overlooked but utterly important textile arts.

‘of fucking course i like knitting, you jackass,’ i say gently. ‘i wouldn’t do it otherwise.’

[ancient-art-of-craft]

Y'all help

Part of my new years resolutions was to buy No New Books and No New Yarn. I have enough of both to last me the year, I don't need to be a glutton.

... But this Joan's liquidation is screaming at me to buy a ton of yardage on the cheap.

Thoughts??