Fibre Punk

Me: drops the needle at the end of the row

Needle: lands on the floor

Me:

—

Kyoko Mori, ‘Yarn’

That last phrase especially - “I won’t even try this because it doesn’t come naturally to me and I won’t be very good at it.” It really is like some kind of all-encompassing evil spirit sometimes.

the dude didnt just want an axe! he wanted the experience of handwork, he wanted to engage in a tradition of craftsmanship, he wanted to practice skills. the process of making things is about so much more than the thing you make

if i knit a hat, the fact that i’ll have a hat at some point is tertiary to everything else i get out of the experience. it’s meditation, it’s how i interact with a community, it connects me to a history, it mediates my anxiety, it’s a sensory experience, it’s me engaging with my body in a way that is careful and thoughtful and elegant and beautiful

handwork is so devalued for a lot of reasons, and those reasons are almost always socially complex – there’s a lot to be said about how class and gender play out in different hobbies; how cost can become prohibitive in learning skills that were once vital to the poor, how certain kinds of labor have become a luxury, how histories of gendered labor cause that labor to become mocked. all of those things and so many more are difficult to grapple with