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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?
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:04 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:05 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:09 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:31 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:37 pm (UTC)(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.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:38 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:41 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:42 pm (UTC)e: And thanks for the compliment! High praise.
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Date: 2013-11-18 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 06:57 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 07:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 07:03 pm (UTC)(duck, run)
no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 07:04 pm (UTC)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!
No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 07:12 pm (UTC)Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 07:16 pm (UTC)Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 07:41 pm (UTC)Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 08:12 pm (UTC)Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 08:15 pm (UTC)(There are also some very nice wood ones, but the consensus here is that those would disintegrate on the way to and fro tournaments.)
Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 08:17 pm (UTC)Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 08:20 pm (UTC)ETA: OH GOD THE SAME PERSON HAS MOVED ON TO GLUING MY LITTLE PONIES TO HATS.
Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 08:23 pm (UTC)Why, yes, yes, they do.
Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 08:25 pm (UTC)Wow. Those. Those are a thing, all right.
Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 08:26 pm (UTC)...oh God, in addition to the pony hats, there are custom penis necklaces. You can get the penis necklace with different tchotchkes stuck in it. Including what appears to be Tums. Because nothing says, "You should get a restraining order against me, stat!" like giving your romantic partner a cast-resin penis-shaped necklace with antacids in it.
Re: No longer available, but...
Date: 2013-11-18 08:27 pm (UTC)