On Making

[mme_hardy]

If you have that sort of mind, making things is ridiculous fun. Taking a few ordinary materials and some post-industrial tools that you have bought at substantial expense and manipulating them into a useful object is entertaining, and when you're done you have a table, or a circuit, or a dress. You can get items customized to your own tastes without having to pay a fortune... as long as you don't cost in your own labor.

The catch is that, until you've spent years practicing the necessary skills and learning which materials suppliers have quality goods, the object you produce won't be as good as the ones created by either an industrial business or a custom maker. There are decades and centuries and in some cases millennia of expertise lying dormant in any created object. Much of the time, your sloppily welded, rough-sawn, lumpy-seamed object is good enough, and you can have fun looking at it and saying "I made it!" Somebody who works in the craft/industry you're emulating will look at the same object and see a macaroni drawing hung on the refrigerator.

I first noticed this when I worked in a company full of very, very bright engineers. Far too many of them were confident, by virtue of that brightness, that they could do anybody else's job. They knew more about kitchen logistics, or ingredient buying, or repairing sprinklers, or cleaning than the professionals -- because of the mathematical or mechanical (mostly) intelligence that had gotten them through the top schools. The truth is that anybody else's job looks easy until you watch them do it. I am always astonished when (with permission) I sit on the floor and watch what the electrician, the plumber, the carpenter are doing to my house. You need to know a lot of stuff about how a house is made to walk into any particular house and sort out its mechanical systems. Plumbing is like surgery -- knowing where the pipes are in a platonic object isn't the same as having your hands deep in the guts of a particular object.

Take me. I've been sewing for over forty years, off and on. Note the "off and on". I sew when I feel like it, when I have the spare time, when I'm not doing the job in which I have professional expertise. When I go to a class with serious costumers, I am always, always the last person to finish any step in the process. My finished garment or object is clumsier than those produced by the everyday seamstresses (sters), because I don't have the hundreds or thousands of hours of practice that they do. Their objects, in turn, seldom approach the highest standards reached by people hundreds of years ago who did nothing but hand-sew all day, every day. Very, very few can handspin a thread fine enough to match the Shetland or Orenburg spinners. Indeed, not that many can handspin a thread fine enough to weave. You cannot get linen approaching the finest quality produced in the 1600s, either handmade or machine-made. People who work in living history museums, when interviewed, always marvel at the skills they are imitating.

Another example of this is backyard farming. Animal shelters are starting to have a problem with abandoned urban chickens (note useful debunking). Why? Because eggs can contain either hens or roosters, and roosters are useful only as food. Straight-run hatchery chicks are less expensive than sexed chickens*, and backyard chicks have no guarantees at all. Finally, the maximum lifespan of a layer is years longer than the useful egg-producing period. Farmers solve this problem by killing unwanted chickens for the stewpot (historic) or fertilizer (modern). Many -- not all -- backyard farmers don't want to slaughter birds themselves, so off to the shelter they go. (I am very, very skeptical of the article's using Marin shelters to minimize this; Marin is its own little planet.)

Anybody keeping backyard goats quickly discovers that male goats are nasty creatures that not only stink but can cause your does' milk to be inedible. Again, the historical answer is roast kid or goat curry. This takes goatkeeping from the pleasantly pastoral to the ineluctably bloody. Free-range backyard eggs taste fabulous, but the downside is fighting predators that can't get into a closed battery house. I haven't even touched on the thousands of nasty diseases chickens, goats, and pigs are not so much heir to as enthusiastic boarding-houses for. Animal husbandry is a matter of both skill and luck, and no matter what scale you practice it on, there's a lot of unexpected death.

I love heirloom tomatoes. The hybrids don't, in general -- Early Girl is fabulous -- have as deep a flavor as the open-pollinated plants. Propaganda notwithstanding, the heirlooms in my garden are much more disease-prone than the VFNT** F1 hybrids.

Crafts are awesome. Making things is awesome. Growing things is awesome. But if creating something at home makes you undervalue the expertise and skill of people who do it on a commercial scale, you're doing it wrong.

* Yes, chicken sexing is a real skill, and an esoteric one. You try looking at a new-hatched chick's ass and figuring out which kind of cloaca it has.

** Huh. It isn't VFNT, any more; the toughest hybrids are now VFFNTA, which means resistant to verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, nematodes, tobacco mosaic virus, and alternaria leaf spot. How many beginning gardeners know to look for those letters?

Comments

[sara]

Hunh. Our local shelters...do not have an abandoned chickens issue. And I will bet that we have a higher incidence of backyard chickens here than you do there (not least because, er, we sort of never stopped doing it, because we're all damn hippies.)

As usual, I think the problem is Marin.

I am an edge case when it comes to traditional skills, so I try not to get into it because I worry about coming over as self-aggrandizing.

[mme_hardy]

I thought of you when I was writing this, because I was absolutely confident that you could and would wring a chicken's neck if it became necessary.

The thing is, I know that both professionally and personally you respect traditional skills. You don't think that any damn fool can do X just reasoning from first principles.

[sara]

...actually, I am kind of terrible at butchery! I asked my dad to help with it the last time it came up as an issue, because he has been shooting things and butchering cattle and docking dogs' tails and so forth for some decades now, and even HE was terrible at chicken-butchery!

(No, really, terrible. It ended up with a small headless chicken flying across the inside of his shop/winemaking room, spraying blood everywhere. We laughed quite hard because the alternative was screaming OMG AUGH CHICKEN BLOOD EVERYWHERE!)

Butchery is a srs bznss traditional skill which I do not have, and the skills necessary vary from species to species. I have a neighbor who has done chickens a few times and next time I need a chicken butchered I am totally taking it to A. instead of Dad. It is hard to kill something cleanly and ethically and not make a huge fucking mess and render the meat edible.

I figure that any good new skill you have to budget a couple of years of totally fucking up at it before you achieve an even vaguely acceptable skill level. Though the acquisition time for skillsets that are related to existing skillsets is lower, which is how I picked up leatherworking at a level where I am now taking the occasional commission: I had already invested thirty years in learning to sew and make containers in other media, and so it's only taken a couple of years to learn to make leather containers at an accomplished-amateur level (*cough* Okay, so on an absolute scale I'm better than about 85% of what you see on Etsy, but that's not really such a high bar to come over because damn kids today are sloppy with their skiving.) But you put me up next to, say, the 60-something gal who clerks at the leather store, who handsews wallets like nothing I have ever seen? It will be DECADES before I am that good.

My sewing has gotten in recent years to where I am finally starting to think my skill level has exceeded my equipment quality, and where I can usually generate good, wearable garments...but I bought my current sewing machine in 1997, so...yeah, 15-16 years.

[mme_hardy]

" (not least because, er, we sort of never stopped doing it, because we're all damn hippies.)"

If there was one thing the Whole Earth Catalog was not, it was twee. (I should insist that my parents will me their copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog.)

[pameladean]

This is a great post. It's like part of a Fourth Street panel.

It is for similar reasons that we still have a large empty piece of lawn that was originally supposed to contain apple trees. Every few years we discuss who will check them for disease, prune them, keep things going nicely, and so far we have no Little Red Hen around to do it, so no trees.

P.

[sara]

Oh, THAT's what I should do, now the leaves have come off, is go dormant-oil the fruit trees.

Although there are still some apples left, because I ran out of steam on the apple-buttering after two rounds this year. Urban homesteading is tiring, yo.

[mme_hardy]

Oh, damn. I need to do that to mine. Also, I've been down for the count for a month or so, so I need to see if the very first apple on my bench-graft saplings is still on the tree.

Mmmmmm, apple butter. The house I grew up in was a farmhouse whose grounds had been sold off to make the surrounding development. We had lots of old apple trees; windfalls were for weaponry, and we made apple butter by the [insert large quantity]. I love rotting apple smell.

[pameladean]

Sometimes even thinking about it is tiring.

Now I want to pelt you with questions, but I'll refrain.

P.

[mme_hardy]

Around here (ah, Northern California), there exists at least one gardening service that specializes in fruit-tree care: they come around and do the stuff, you get the fruit. You might check the ads for local arborists, if you have cash to spare.

e: And thanks for the compliment! High praise.

[pameladean]

You're very welcome!

We don't have spare cash, but we wouldn't be buying apple trees anyway unless we did, so that's something definitely worth looking into. I just have to get over the idea that it's a form of slacking and therefore Wrong. Provides more time for writing, that's the ticket.

P.

[telophase]

I resent your implication that the lumpy fruit of my hour-and-a-half spinning lesson is worthless for making things!

It makes a wonderful cat toy!

(Or it would if I let Sora play with it--he loves playing with batting, so I expect a lumpy woolen mini-hank would be considered fantastic, but he tends to bite and lick batting, then get it caught on his tongue and swallow it if I don't get it out of his mouth, so I'm a bit leery of letting him have it. So perhaps not as wonderful as all that, after all.)

[mme_hardy]

I understand that the traditional name for one's earliest spinning projects is "art yarn". *g*

[telophase]

I believe that to be the case!

The spinners I was learning from were telling me that people were making big bucks selling art yarn, and that it was usually easier than getting perfect, usable yarn. I sense a new career path, if I can't get good yarn with practice!

[sara]

In related news, I have just learned that 5/8" is LARGER than 1/2".

Those of you who're now thinking, "But Sara, you already knew that!" are perhaps not comprehending the purpose of this anecdote.

(I can compensate, it's a dress that's sized for 40-42" and I'm between 39 and 40, so losing a half inch all around is probably an improvement. But durr.)

[lexin]

But if creating something at home makes you undervalue the expertise and skill of people who do it on a commercial scale, you're doing it wrong.

Sing it, sing it.

I grew up with parents who had two allotments (growing land they rented) and a large garden and we had constant problems with disease in plants.

And my mother made a lot of my clothes, and people at school still took the piss out of me because of it because they never had the same degree of perfection as shop bought. Not ever. And she was good at sewing.

[ankaret]

I've been married to my husband for nineteen years and I only realised this weekend that he didn't know how skilled a job plastering is. Evidently my experience was skewed by growing up with a father who could probably survive an apocalypse through his practical skills and an uncle who was a builder.

My father has this laser-like, 'I will become an expert in this' focus on matters varying from photography to misbehaving drains. I inherited some of his abilities, but so far have only managed to apply them to writing, GMing and doing things with my hair.

Also, I am about to move to the arse-end of nowhere and people keep asking me whether I plan to keep chickens. I've come to the conclusion that I must just have that kind of a face. (The answer is no: I already have a husband, a cat and several WIPs to keep track of, I do not need any more responsibilities, even if they do lay eggs)

[mme_hardy]

I bet your WIPs never, ever get bumblefoot. (Don't google it.)

[mme_hardy]

I thought everybody's father could repair the dishwasher and resolder the radio. I may add, however, that my father's dishwasher repair was the source of some of my best swears.

I still feel a profound sense of sin whenever I pay a painter or repairman.

[neadods]

I haven't even touched on the thousands of nasty diseases chickens, goats, and pigs are not so much heir to as enthusiastic boarding-houses for

I just had to say that was a brilliant line.

[mme_hardy]

Awww, thank you.

[neotoma]

You cannot get linen approaching the finest quality produced in the 1600s, either handmade or machine-made.

Machine spun linen is cottonized because linen fibers are too long for the machines otherwise. To get 1600s linen, you're talking lots of extremely tedious hacking and splicing to comb and join extremely fine fibers; no one wants to pay for all the hours of human hand labor to get it done.

I've been spinning, weaving and knitting as hobbes for over a decade, and seriously, people don't appreciate a) how much work goes into spinning and weaving even with the amount of automation in industrial cloth production and b) are insulted when you want them to pay you for your time at a living wage if you do want to make a job out of being a custom fiber artist.

[mme_hardy]

I didn't know that about cottonizing! Aaamen to your other points. Retting and hackling always sounded like a nightmare to me. Then with wool there are all these processes we don't even do any more, like teasing and waulking. I once read the blog of a fabric artist who was maintaining her own indigo dye vat. Sooner her than me.

The thing people don't *get* about fabric arts is that up until fairly recently fabric was extraordinarily expensive because of how much labor it represented. The reason people mended, remade, and passed on garments wasn't just because they were thriftier -- it was because the hand labor to do so was still much, much cheaper (and of course more abundant) than the fabric itself.

Also

[mme_hardy]

Making a working spinning wheel represents a lot of technology on its ownsome.

[ironed_orchid]

Far too many of them were confident, by virtue of that brightness, that they could do anybody else's job

Ugh, I hate that attitude.

I tend to err more towards imposter syndrome. Yesterday, I showed some colleagues my current knitting project, which is one of the more ambitious pieces of colourwork I've done, and they were all in awe. I was dismissive of their praise because painfully aware of all the flaws and also aware of what other people can do using the same techniques.

[mme_hardy]

We're trained not to accept praise as the due of good work.