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mme_hardyIf 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?
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?
Also
Date: 2013-11-19 01:25 am (UTC)Re: Also
Date: 2013-11-19 02:04 am (UTC)Spindles are relatively easy -- I can make a decently useable one with a wooden toy wheel, a dowel rod, an eye screw, and some glue, using a handsaw and a pair of nippers in under an hour. I couldn't make a wheel, because they are complicated. They're also relatively recent -- about 500 years old, and that's nothing in the history of textile production.
Re: Also
Date: 2013-11-19 02:19 am (UTC)I had been looking suspiciously at high-end spindles because the woodworking was beautiful but the hook was a cup-hook. Was I wrong?
Re: Also
Date: 2013-11-19 02:31 am (UTC)Depending on the spindle-maker -- some will make endhooks of their own, but some do use cuphooks. I find most cuphooks to be too large to be a good endhook, which is why I said an eyescrew and a nipper -- you can cut open an eyescrew and have a lovely little endhook without a problem.
Which makers were you considering? I've got quite a collect of spindles, and there are some that I don't like using because of wobble or fiddlyness, and some that look ridiculous and spin like a dream.
Re: Also
Date: 2013-11-19 02:42 am (UTC)Basically, what I want (NOT NOW) is a sensible beginner spindle for wool, end product to be knitted, but one that's pretty enough to make the tool itself pleasurable.
In not-at-all-high-end ones, I deeply covet this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/87205167/let-it-snow-drop-spindle-nootlin?ref=shop_home_active but, as I said, am suspicious of the hook.
Re: Also
Date: 2013-11-19 02:54 am (UTC)Let me think about beginner spindles that aren't boat anchors... I used to rec Kokovoko, but I haven't seen their products for a while.
I don't suppose you live in an area that has a sheep & wool festival? That's the place to go to with a knowledgeable friend and try out a bunch of spindles from different makers. That, or a fiber arts shop that is big enough to have more than one or two people's spindles for sale.
Re: Also
Date: 2013-11-19 02:57 am (UTC)Followed your link
Date: 2013-11-19 02:20 am (UTC)Re: Followed your link
Date: 2013-11-19 02:32 am (UTC)Re: Followed your link
Date: 2013-11-19 02:36 am (UTC)Re: Followed your link
Date: 2013-11-19 02:59 am (UTC)If you really want to drool over something, wooden sculptures that are all-day pendulum clocks, absolutely no motors!