Or write about anything very personal
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How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: December 30, 2007
WERE Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of employees.
In his day, the Ford Motor Company maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”
Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain amorphous “professional” standards of conduct in your free time, you could lose your job.
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Read the rest at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30digi.html?ei=5070&em=&en=083ac408f897c472&ex=1199163600&pagewanted=all
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Madison, WI trip report -- Part One -- Eating, Drinking, and Knitting
I love food and love eating. So I took a picture of the restaurants we visited on this trip.
I had my knitting too. Brother Two's afghan is great portable knitting.
Madison is both the state capital and the home of the flagship university, the University of Wisconsin. The two are connected by State Street, a pedestrian only street lined with shops, restaurants, and bars.
First up: Maza, a great new Afghan restaurant, on State Street. It's run by the kids of the people who run Kabul restaurant across the street. As you can see, it snows in Wisconsin. Before Maza, this space was The Saz, which also served Mediteranean food.
Here's Espresso Royale Cafe, where Husband and I had our first date 16 years ago. Good to know it's still there.
This is Samba, Madison's first Brazilian steakhouse. It's housed in the old Women's Club building, back when universities were just begining to accept women, I guess. Before Samba, it housed Avol's Bookstore.
For lunch one day, we went to Chautara, which serves "Food from the top of the world: Nepal, India, Tibet."
Wonders Pub, in Schenck's Corners, where we had Friday night fish fry, a Wisconsin tradition, courtesy of the Catholics, and probably all the fishing available in the state. Picture taken the next day, not the night of the actual dinner. 
Our last day in Madison, we had lunch with Husband's parents at Ella's Deli on East Washington Avenue. It is an extremely kid-friendly place, with a working carousel, which you can kind of see behind the balloon saying "Ella's Deli."
Inside, it looks like a toy store and carnival exploded in there. Everywhere you look are kid-friendly toys and sights, including this flying Harry Potter, complete with snitch:
Ella's is pretty close to the freeway to Milwaukee, and when we got there, we had our last Wisconsin meal at
The only restaurant I didn't get a picture of was Wah Kee's which was voted Madison's best Chinese restaurant. It's a great place to get a big bowl of noodles in soup and to fuel up after a long night of drinking.
Our days of staying out all night drinking are over, but one night we did manage to close out the Crystal Corner Pub. It is located, conveniently, 2 blocks from Husband's mother's house.
At the Crystal, I saw a group of knitters (one was knitting a yellow and black sock. Hufflepuff?) One of them was wearing this sweatshirt. The front says "Drinkers with a Knitting Problem." And she certainly was.
I had my knitting too. Brother Two's afghan is great portable knitting.
Back from Wisconsin
Got in late last night (Thanks for the ride, Brother One, even though our flight was delayed, thus making you late for a party!)
and everything was fine. There's nothing as good as sleeping in your own bed. Ahhhhh.
Woke up this morning (okay, noon) to the lovely sound of rain and the not so lovely sound of water dripping on the carpet.
This is what I saw
A bulge about 12 inches in diameter, dripping water. You can even see the drop of water, with its shadow on the wall.
It was located next to an area that was punctured by a shard of a tree branch years ago. We had a dying pine tree in the front yard taken down and in the process, a part of a branch at least 12 inches long and 4 inches thick punctured through the roof and then through the ceiling of the front room. The tree company repaired it but clearly not well enough.
The part that gets me about this now, is that a few weeks ago, I got an estimate from a roofing company to stick down some shingles that got loose. Did I go ahead an invest the $250 to fix it then? Noooooo. We're in a drought situation! What are the chances of it raining ever again?
Now I have this mess on my ceiling and a wet and stinky rug, releasing the smell of dog pee, courtesy of the dog of the the previous owner of the rug.
I called back the roofing company, but no one answered. Sunday afternoon, between Xmas and New Year Day? Why would anyone answer the phone? I called another roofing company that said they do emergency calls. The guy said he'd call his employees to see who was available to come out. But in the mean time I should puncture the bulge (placing a bucket below first, of course) and let the water out, before it gets any bigger. A size 6 US straight knitting needle does just fine. And now the ceiling looks like this:
Attractive, is it not? The rectangle to the left is a repair to the hole from the first roof incident. Well, tomorrow, I'll call back the first roofing company and have them come out and fix the roof. It's not supposed to rain for the next 5 days. And the emergency roofing company never did call me back.
I guess drywall spackling and painting is in my future.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Heading North
Tomorrow, Husband and I will join the traveling hordes and fly to Wisconsin, where he's from.
Brother One will house- and cat-sit, and give us a ride to and from the airport. It'll be so nice to not have to worry about finding parking at this late date.
Earlier this year, I discovered cashmere. In January this year, I started shopping the after-holiday sales, and scooped up a few cashmere sweaters. Then this holiday season, Kohl's had cashmere sweaters on sale half off. So Sister and I picked up a few more.
That should keep me warm. I'm no longer accustomed to snow and cold Wisconsin winters, so I'm going to need all the wooly warmth I can get.
Knitting projects I'm packing:
Brother One will house- and cat-sit, and give us a ride to and from the airport. It'll be so nice to not have to worry about finding parking at this late date.
Earlier this year, I discovered cashmere. In January this year, I started shopping the after-holiday sales, and scooped up a few cashmere sweaters. Then this holiday season, Kohl's had cashmere sweaters on sale half off. So Sister and I picked up a few more.
That should keep me warm. I'm no longer accustomed to snow and cold Wisconsin winters, so I'm going to need all the wooly warmth I can get.
Knitting projects I'm packing:
- Brother-in-Law's half-finished vest in KnitPick's superwash wool in Truffle.
- Brother Two's Chinese Coins afghan in KnitPick's superwash wool in grey. The afghan will be knit in strips then sewn together, so I'm just taking 2 skeins of grey for the grey sashing, discussed here.
We're trying to travel light, so that's it.
Happy holidays and happy new year!
Friday, December 21, 2007
Hand made gifts
Monday I got my first present of the season: yarn from Best Friend. Having no self control, I opened it right away. Actually, I do have self-control. But every winter, we go to Wisconsin to celebrate Christmas (the non-religious kind) with Husband's family. And I'm not about to take a gift to me, to Wisconsin, to open there. So I opened it here.
It was Frog Tree Bulky Alpaca in Bordeaux (purply wine red), Teal (dusty blue green) and Olive (light olive green). Fabulous colors that I wouldn't have chosen myself. That's the fun of gift yarn. It stretches your color comfort zone.
On Tuesday night, I couldn't hold out any longer and cast on, and Thursday night I finished this:
Basically, I took a 60 inch long circular needle in size 13 US and cast on at least 120 stitches. I didn't bother counting and really just wanted to make sure the stitches didn't crowd the needle. The yarn usually calls for size 10 US.
It was Frog Tree Bulky Alpaca in Bordeaux (purply wine red), Teal (dusty blue green) and Olive (light olive green). Fabulous colors that I wouldn't have chosen myself. That's the fun of gift yarn. It stretches your color comfort zone.
On Tuesday night, I couldn't hold out any longer and cast on, and Thursday night I finished this:
Basically, I took a 60 inch long circular needle in size 13 US and cast on at least 120 stitches. I didn't bother counting and really just wanted to make sure the stitches didn't crowd the needle. The yarn usually calls for size 10 US. Then I garter stitched random rows and in the end, used any yarn left over to make some (skimpy) fringe. Half way through binding off the red, I ran out of yarn and finished with teal.
It's just about 5 inches wide and 5 feet long. And super soft and super warm.
I worked on it at work and every one's complimented the colors. Plus Frog Tree yarn is a fair trade company, working with artisans in Bolivia, 70% of which are women. So apropos. Great job, Best Friend!
Now I'm working on this scarf: 
It's Landscape yarn by Lion Brand in Country Sunset. It usually calls for size 13 US needle, but I'm using size 17 needles. I cast on 15 stitches and am doing 2 rows of knit, then 2 rows of purl. Basically it's 2 rows of stockingnette stitch then 2 rows of reverse stockingnette stitch. There's a corrugated texture to it that I like.
It's about 7 inches wide and 14 inches long here in this picture. I cast on the first time at about 7:30pm tonight (during Jeopardy!) and then again at 8pmish and again soon after. But that's okay. On such big needles, progress happens so quickly, frogging is relatively painless.
I plan on giving it to one of my employees, the one who keeps raving about the Frog Tree alpaca scarf. Colors aren't quite the same, but it's got the reddish wine and the olive green. And lots of turquoise, which she might appreciate, being from the Caribbean.
Then I have 2 and half more employees to knit for. One of them is a knitter and she wears a scarf she knit herself. The half employee is a recent part-time consultant. Very recent, as in started last week after I fired Complaining Employee.
I plan to give these scarves at Chinese New Year, first week of February. For Chinese, that's the big gift giving holiday, not Christmas. Plus it buys me time!
A lot of my knitting this week got done while watching VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the 90's. Ah, the memories it brings back, especially of the early 90's when I was still in college. Good times, good times.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Monday, December 17, 2007
Handmade 2.0
From yesterday's New York Times magazine.
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December 16, 2007
Handmade 2.0
By ROB WALKER
The declaration from something called the Handmade Consortium materialized on a Web site called buyhandmade.org in late October. “I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request that others do the same for me,” it said, and you could type in your name to “sign” on; within a few weeks, more than 6,500 people had done so. “Buying handmade is better for people,” a statement on the site read in part, and “better for the environment,” because mass production is a “major cause” of global warming, among other things. There were links to an anti-sweatshop site and a Wal-Mart watchdog site.
The pledge echoed the idealistic language of a tree-hugger activist group, but actually the consortium’s most prominent member was the online shopping bazaar Etsy, a very much for-profit entity that bills itself as “your place to buy & sell all things handmade.” Etsy does not fulfill orders from an inventory; it’s a place where sellers set up virtual storefronts, giving the site a cut of sales.
While eBay rose to prominence nearly a decade ago as an endless garage sale for the auctioning of collectibles and bric-a-brac, Etsy is more of an online craft fair, or art show, where the idea is that individuals can sell things that they have made. How many such people can there be? At last count, more than 70,000 — about 90 percent of whom were women — were using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware, stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane to the highly idiosyncratic. Each seller has a profile page telling shoppers a bit about themselves, and maybe offering a link to a blog or a MySpace page or a mailing list; most have devised some clever store or brand name for whatever they’re selling.
Maybe you’re interested in a “random music generator” called the Orb of Sound ($80), built by an Australian tinkerer calling himself RareBeasts. Or a whistle made out of a tin can and bottle caps ($12), by loranscruggs, near Seattle. Or the “hand-painted antique ceramic doll-head planters” sold under the name Clayflower22 by a retired schoolteacher near Las Cruces, N.M. Or the “Kaleidoscope Pearberry Soapsicle” ($5), made by a woman in Daytona Beach, Fla., who calls her shop Simply Soaps. Or a porcelain bowl with an image of a skull on it, from a Chicago couple who call themselves Circa Ceramics. Or an original painting from an artist in Athens, Ga., who goes by the moniker the Black Apple.
Browsing Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk. Most of all there is a dizzying amount of stuff, and it is similarly difficult to figure out how to characterize what it all represents: an art movement, a craft phenomenon or shopping trend. Whatever this is, it’s not something that Etsy created but rather something that it is trying to make bigger, more visible and more accessible — partly by mixing high-minded ideas about consumer responsibility with the unsentimental notion of the profit motive.
On July 29, Etsy registered its one-millionth sale and is expecting to hit two million items sold by mid-December. Shoppers spent $4.3 million buying 300,000 items from the site’s sellers in November alone — a 43 percent increase over the previous month. Thus far in December, the site has had record-breaking sales every day. Only about two years old, the company is not currently profitable but is somewhat unusual among Internet-based start-ups of the so-called Web 2.0 era in having a model that does not depend on advertising revenue. It depends on people buying things, in a manner that the founders position as a throwback to the way consumption ought to be: individuals buying from other individuals. “Our ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost,” the Handmade Pledge site asserts. “Buying handmade helps us reconnect.” The idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of shopping is all about the past.
STEP 1: Weave Do-It-Yourself Spirit Into a Community
The path that has led to Etsy begins with a motto — do it yourself — that implies distaste for consumer culture. That notion was front and center last year, when O’Reilly Media, best known for computer-related publications, introduced a magazine called Craft.
A spinoff of Make magazine (a latter-day Popular Mechanics for the hacker-tinkerer set), Craft addresses “the new craft movement.” The issue contained a variety of instructional projects: “Stitch a Robot,” one cover line read. “Felt an iPod Cocoon,” said another. Inside, an essay by a longtime crafter named Jean Railla argued that making something yourself is a form of “political statement” and a protest against chain stores that are turning “America into one big mini-mall.”
This dissonant-sounding juxtaposition — politics and felted iPod cocoons? — is what makes the craft thing hard to pin down. Of course Railla wasn’t saying that stitching a robot is akin to a march on Washington; she was writing about a broader do-it-yourself idea that she has watched gradually permeate popular culture over the course of a decade.
Railla, who is 37, founded a Web site called Getcrafty back in 1998, when renewed interest in traditional crafts among young women was still something of a curiosity. It wasn’t as if such skills and hobbies had ceased to exist; from Martha Stewart to nationwide chains like Michaels, major businesses catered to a range of quilt makers and scrapbookers. But the new wave of crafters infused uncool-sounding domestic skills like knitting and sewing with a postpunk attitude that revolved partly around mall-rejecting self-sufficiency. Railla wrote about how to make your own soap and lip gloss — and also about how to knit a bikini. “I really came to it from more of an indie-rock, do-it-yourself kind of political place,” she told me recently. “Sort of married with making peace with feminism.”
Getcrafty was filled with project ideas and how-tos as well as discussion forums, which played a crucial role in building the craft-as-community idea that Etsy would later tap into. “Knitting is part of the same do-it-yourself ethos that spawned zines and mixtapes,” Debbie Stoller, editor of Bust, a pop-culture-meets-feminism magazine, declared. Stoller wrote a series of “Stitch N Bitch” books, which became part of a trend toward the formation of social-crafting groups across the country. More Web gathering points emerged, like Craftster and SuperNaturale. Offline, a communal make-stuff group called Church of Craft formed chapters in several cities.
Crafting had attained a subculture status by 2004, when Railla hired a New York University student named Robert Kalin and some friends to redesign Getcrafty. Kalin had been studying philosophy and classics, but, he told me, he was pessimistic about the job-market value of his degree and was looking for something more entrepreneurial. While he had a bit of woodworking experience, he and his friend Chris Maguire were basically techie types; they hadn’t known much about the handcrafting movement that was bringing so many young women to Getcrafty. “We were the only guys around,” Kalin recalls.
Soon he had an idea for a different kind of site that this burgeoning craft community might find useful: an online marketplace. By that time, plenty of crafters were not simply doing it themselves — they were selling what they had done. There’s nothing surprising about people who enjoy doing something (playing guitar, writing poetry, knitting a bikini) wondering if maybe there isn’t a way to make a living at it. But the scene that Kalin stumbled upon turned out to be brimming with entrepreneurial spirit.
Consider, for instance, the Austin Craft Mafia. This group of nine indiepreneurs traces its roots to a 2001 meeting of young women who hoped to leverage their craft skills into a way to quit their day jobs. Each member built her own business and helped the others do the same. They continued to offer advice and connections with others in Austin and, eventually, beyond. There are now 42 officially sanctioned Craft Mafias, in cities from Omaha to New Orleans to Anchorage to Glasgow. (The Austin Craft Mafia, like Etsy, is a member of the consortium backing the Handmade Pledge.)
For some years now, crafters have been selling on their own sites online. Craft boutiques have opened as fast as independent book and record stores closed. And a new wave of fairs has come to life, not of the country-craft, “Bless This Mess” style, but venues for a younger, more indie-punk aesthetic. These happen all over the country now — the Bazaar Bizarre in Boston and other cities, the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago, the Girlie Show in Oklahoma City — and each one seems to get bigger every year.
So it’s no surprise that when Kalin suggested something akin to an online version of a craft fair but infinitely large and open all the time, to everyone, everywhere, Railla thought it was a “brilliant” idea. She was happy to consult on the new enterprise but gives Kalin and his partners credit for spotting the business opportunity and making it a reality. To her, crafting remains more of a philosophy, and its satisfactions are in participation, not consumption. She reiterated that idea in her Craft magazine column, arguing that the practice satisfies the urge to create, values feminine art forms, provides relief from the digital world and, yes, is a form of “political statement” against the dehumanizing global supply chain.
But she also understands the appeal of the handmade to those who might not have the inclination to do the making. Readers of the first issue of Craft magazine might have eagerly followed the instructions to stitch a robot. But surely others gravitated to a related article about the popularity of a style of hand-stitched robot that you could buy on Etsy. The article discussed how one doll maker’s creations were so popular that every time she posted a new one, it sold within 20 minutes. It was hard to read this without wanting to visit the site immediately and see what the fuss was about. And perhaps to participate in the idea of D.I.Y., at least by buying D.I.Y.
STEP 2: Emboider With Webbiness
This summer I visited the Etsy offices, in downtown Brooklyn . The company that Robert Kalin and his pals founded now has about 50 employees. (They remain jokily cryptic about what the name they chose for their enterprise means. It has been variously suggested that it is a play on the Latin phrase “et si” (“and if”), or that the secret can be found in Fellini’s “8 1/2.”) I got a tour of the rambling warren, spread over about 6,000 square feet on the sixth floor of an old building on Gold Street. It had a clubhouse feel that was equal parts venture-backed start-up and D.I.Y. enterprise: Here was the skateboard ramp; there the homemade greenscreen for Web casts. I was introduced to a number of young women at work silk-screening Etsy promotional materials onto bandannas, and also to the company lawyer.
Kalin is 27 and seems even younger, with boyish features and reddish hair. Serious in a way that could be read as either earnest or deadpan, he told me the stories behind a stuffed animal and an interesting metal sculpture on his desk, both from Etsy sellers. He then handed me a piece of crocheted bacon. In order to explain his company, he offered me a seat and reached for a book. It was a children’s book, about a fish named Swimmy. He pulled his chair closer and read aloud. The upshot was that a whole bunch of little fish gang up and begin swimming in a formation that resembles one huge fish, thus warding off predators. In their formation, the fish named Swimmy assumes the position where the eye would be. Kalin closed the book. “We want to be the eye,” he said, in case I’d missed the point. “Like Swimmy.”
Tilting back in his chair, he spoke for some time, with the supreme self-confidence of the college bull-session raconteur, referencing Marshall McLuhan, beginning a discourse about the problem with central banks with the phrase, “If you read the Founding Fathers . . . ,” and so on. He wasn’t so much making arguments as patiently spelling out the way things work. He informed me, for instance, that young people today are different, having grown up with the Web and all. He had sought guidance from his grandfather about making Etsy a reality but ignored the tedious advice about writing a business plan, figuring the site itself would serve that function. Later he wrote a “fan letter” to one of the founders of Flickr, the popular online photo-sharing site, and she became an investor. A founder of del.icio.us, the social-bookmarking site, invested, and so did a New York venture-capital firm. Kalin’s grandfather was flummoxed.
All of which is a familiar-enough Internet-start-up story line. I was more interested in what made Etsy seem different from so many current efforts to “build community” online: the luck or genius of the site is that Kalin and the other founders encountered in the D.I.Y./craft scene something that was already social, community-minded, supportive and aggressively using the Web. It seemed to me that the company’s future would depend not only on the success of its sellers but also on its reputation among them. Nor could its reputation simply be for business acumen. If all Etsy did was channel D.I.Y.-ism into a profit machine, it could easily be seen as monetizing — exploiting — the creativity and hustle of 70,000 indiepreneurs. There was a cultural dimension, too.
Kalin clearly understood all this. The company does not, for instance, demand exclusivity. Indeed it seems to want its sellers to market themselves aggressively on their own sites, in stores, at fairs. So in its idealized role as Swimmy, Etsy constantly holds entrepreneurial workshops (how to build your “global microbrand”), pointing to “best practices” among Etsy sellers, offering shop critiques, advising how to “write a killer press release.” Its magazine-videocast, The Storque, often feels like a D.I.Y. business school. In addition, Kalin has hired about a half-dozen of the best Etsy sellers to work directly for the company, in jobs meant to spread their skills to as many sellers as possible. Some help run Etsy Labs, a community-centric program held at the company’s headquarters, teaching craft skills.
On some level the Etsy idea is not really techno-progressive at all. It’s nostalgic. The company is host to a book club, which Kalin participates in, and when I visited, the most recent reading assignment was “The Wal-Mart Effect,” a book that assesses the societywide impact of that mass retailer’s success. Kalin seems flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save 12 cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer. Buying something from the person who made it is “the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just this massively impersonal experience,” he told me earlier. “When you get an item from Etsy, there’s this whole history behind it. There’s a person behind it.” I asked whether Wal-Mart was really the right comparison, given Etsy’s eclectic, artistic merchandise, and the more workaday product mix of a big-box discounter. He brushed that aside, noting that Etsy sells clothes, which everyone needs.
His real point, it seemed to me, was not about Wal-Mart or any other particular retailer. It was far more expansive. If the marketplace today has become alienating and disconnected, then buying something handmade, from another individual, rolls back the clock to an era before factory labor and mass production. That’s a lot of clock-turning, if you recall Adam Smith’s excitement about the efficiency of an 18th-century pin factory. Really, Kalin has a problem with the entire modern marketplace. “Everything since the Industrial Revolution has been so fragmented,” he told me, sounding more like a character in Slacker, wasting time in a cafe, than a guy running a briskly growing business.
Kalin is nothing if not grandiose about what he thinks Etsy can accomplish. For example, he knows that individual crafters face a problem of scale: there is only so much one person can produce. (Hence the Industrial Revolution.) So he mentions creating “co-production” sites across the country, where groups of crafters would band together in a co-op-style model, ideally occupying space in distressed areas and offering training to people who want to learn handcrafting skills. Handmade isn’t a fad, he told me, it’s a resurgence, one that is of a piece with the booming interest in organic food. In 25 years, he said, Etsy would be both worldwide and personal, a global-local marketplace, a Web version of the Athenian agora.
The business proposition behind this extravagant vision is rather more straightforward. Etsy charges 20 cents per listing and 3.5 percent of the final sale price; this is generally lower and certainly less complicated than eBay’s fee structure; it also charges up to $15 if creators want to highlight a particular item on the site’s high-traffic showcase pages. More competition may be mixed news for individual artisans as newcomers keep flooding in to peddle their wares, but it’s all good news for Etsy. The company makes money from successful crafters, but it also makes money from wishful thinkers who never get beyond the hobby stage. The entrepreneur who makes something by hand might face a scale problem. Etsy doesn’t.
That said, what’s surprising about Kalin is that his interest really does seem to transcend the profit motive. It’s pretty clear that he not only respects the values of the D.I.Y. world and the earnest idealism of the Handmade Pledge; he also really believes in them. The quasi-libertarian certainty of the Web entrepreneur and the equally confident ex-philosophy-student discourse about the alienating nature of mass society seem contradictory. But to Kalin, they are intertwined. “In a way,” he said when I met him in Brooklyn, “I see Etsy as an art project.” And after a brief recap of art history through Duchamp, he suggested that Etsy could “disturb” the way people see the world, rethinking what makes their possessions important or trivial, leading us to re-evaluate the way we consume. Surely plenty of crafters see what they are up to as a mix of art and business as well — although they may be coming at that from a somewhat different angle.
STEP 3: Stitch Together Ideals and Entrepreneurialism
This past March, I went to Pittsburgh to attend the first-ever Craft Congress, which was made up of about 60 of the best-known and most established figures on the D.I.Y./crafter scene. I had heard the agenda would include a discussion of how their movement ought to be defined and thought about by participants. This is what makes crafting feel distinct from a garden -variety consumer trend: It’s hard to imagine the leading figures in, say, the premium-denim fad or the limited-edition-sneaker craze getting together to hash out what those things are really about, what participating in them really means.
I wondered if the discussion would be translated into some sort of manifesto. Would they lay out rules for who is a crafter and who isn’t? Would they determine where screen-printing on bulk-ordered T-shirts, or working with factory-made beads, falls on the continuum of “handmade”-ness? (I had read some spirited discussion in Etsy’s forums about the definition of “mass produced.”) I was also interested in the Craft Congress because I’d heard that someone from Etsy would be there, and I wondered how the company would be perceived.
The congress participants (almost all were women) included organizers of fairs in Atlanta, Toronto, Washington and elsewhere, as well as crafters from all around the country. Many had met online but never before in person. The discussions and presentations, spread over two days, began with an attempt at “defining the craft movement” and ranged into politics and recent corporate interest in D.I.Y.-ism. But there was little interest in rule making and manifesto-writing. Jenny Hart, an Austin Craft Mafia founder, went out of her way to make the point that the congress participants should be careful not to come across like self-appointed leaders.
The topics of discussion often weren’t ideological at all, but more practical matters like marketing tactics, taxes and health insurance. Etsy was represented by Matthew Stinchcomb, its 32-year-old marketing chief. When he met Kalin, he was in a rock band. Tired of touring, he got involved in Etsy, applying the sorts of underground promotional ideas he picked up as a musician, like creating Etsy “street teams.”
Gregarious and easygoing, he gave the Etsy pitch. “I think there’s a larger story that we are selling,” he said, presenting Etsy’s goal as recreating the marketplaces of old. Marketing has “crass connotations,” he allowed, but to make those one-on-one connections, sellers had to promote themselves. Later he added that the craft movement needed to keep “providing resources for each other, so we’re not all working against each other.” In other words, he fit right in: his presentation — like the congress in general — was equal parts entrepreneurial seminar and subculture colloquium.
Somehow all the talk made that most conventional American path — small business — seem like an instrument of radicalism. I talked to another attendee, a 29-year-old crafter named Faythe Levine, about the motivations of craft artist-entrepreneurs. She had told me about the thrill of discovering the craft scene: “No corporate backing — it was people doing things, full-on D.I.Y.” Last year she began working on a documentary called “Handmade Nation,” and by the time of the Craft Congress had videotaped 80 hours of interviews with crafters in a dozen cities. Some of her subjects were making a living, but some were still trying to quit dull day jobs, and others were stay-at-home moms. “I didn’t necessarily ask people if they were making stuff and selling it to be political,” she said. But many told her that “running a small business yourself, and trying to separate yourself from the masses — it’s a political statement in its own. That was kind of interesting, and it did come up repeatedly.”
It’s still tempting to characterize anything that looks edgy and has an online component as somehow a function of youth culture. But the age of the average Etsy seller turns out to be 34. Many crafters no doubt feel passionately about the ideals suggested by the Handmade Pledge a horror of sweatshop labor and corporate conformity, concern about the environment and would be pleased to see the broader consumer culture embrace them too. Meanwhile there is also the more salient matter of how to make a rewarding, meaningful and satisfying living without having to give up on those ideals. The women who have led the craft movement don’t want to work for the Man. But many are also motivated by having reached adulthood at a time when the Man is slashing benefits, reneging on pensions, laying people off and, if hiring, is looking for customer-service reps and baristas. This is not a utopian alt-youth framework; it’s a very real-world, alt-grown-up framework.
Listening to the discussions at the Craft Congress, it seemed to me that while there’s a case to be made that this is an art movement, or an ideological movement, or a shopping movement, it is also — and probably fundamentally — a work movement. At one point, talk turned to corporate interest in D.I.Y.-ism, and in particular how companies like Toyota were sponsoring craft fairs. Some argued that “megacorporations” trying to burnish their hipster images had no legitimate role on the scene. Others suggested that corporate money could be put to beneficial uses. No consensus emerged, but toward the end of the discussion one crafter articulated the precise commerce-and-ideals dilemma of the crafty businessperson. “If we can’t have a job where we make enough money,” she observed, “then this movement isn’t sustainable.”
STEP 4: Sell
It is worth noting another element of the Handmade Pledge: “The ascendancy of chain-store culture and global manufacturing has left us dressing, furnishing and decorating alike.” It’s a shrewd pitch, because the consumer craving for novelty, for the unique, the special, seems unquenchable. It has spawned, for instance, a number of blogs dedicated specifically to ferreting out the exciting new thing, usually with a helpful link to a potential transaction. (One of the most popular such sites, Design*Sponge, is another backer of the Handmade Consortium.) Buying something from an indie craft artist can result in a buyer-seller connection, but it can also make consumption itself feel like a creative act. This is the crucial element fueling the craft boom: People show up at the fairs, the shops and the Web sites. And they spend money.
One afternoon last summer, a young artist based in Athens, Ga., unveiled her latest work. Emily Martin is 24 years old. She graduated from art school about two years ago and has never had a gallery show. She announced the date and time of the unveiling on her blog, so at 2 p.m. on Aug. 28, I clicked over and watched as she posted the new work to her Etsy shop: Six original paintings priced between $160 and $250, and nine hand-sewn dolls, for $37 to $65. They disappeared faster than I could click “refresh.” By 2:02 p.m. most had been sold, and Martin had made about $1,400 (minus fees). Martin fully expected to be working as a waitress and confining her art-making to her off hours at this stage of her life. Instead, the Black Apple, as she is known on Etsy, is a full-time artist and perhaps the site’s most famous success story.
Martin’s paintings often depict cartoonish girls with unnaturally wide eyes, and her shy voice sounds as if it were emanating from one of these innocent figures. “You’re told in art school, ‘O.K., well, one out of a hundred of you is going to make a living with the training that you’re getting here,’ ” she said. While sweet and appealing, Martin’s aesthetic is more thrift store than Chelsea gallery; she was “really intimidated” by “the whole capital-A art thing.” But at a local craft fair, someone told her about this new site called Etsy. “The idea of a shop online, being a more democratic thing, really appealed to me,” she says. As of early December, she had sold more than 10,000 items through her Etsy store — mostly 8-by-10, open-edition prints priced at $13 apiece, but also postcards, buttons, hand-sewn dolls and original paintings.
It’s a feel-good story of Webby empowerment and the triumph of a niche-culture underdog. Martin recognizes that what the Web in general, and Etsy in particular, has done for her is to make a market. It has exposed her work to more people than ever would have seen it in Athens, without any auditions for capital-A art power brokers. Just as important, though, is that her aesthetic turned out to have unusually broad appeal, and she doesn’t know quite what to tell the aspiring crafter-artists who besiege her with requests for advice. “I had no idea that my work would appeal to grandmas, 12-year-old girls, hipsters, guys buying things for their girlfriends and wives,” she says. The real lesson of the Black Apple may be not how many Emily Martin stories there have been (not many) but how many people figure that they, too, can achieve what she has (lots).
Inevitably, not everyone can, and it’s no surprise that Etsy has detractors. Some point out that for all the talk of consumers wanting to escape mall-fueled conformity Etsy’s online-mall format amplifies market-driven trends. (Images of birds, especially owls, are inexplicably popular. One crafter told me she was sick of making the same owl over and over — but that’s what her customers wanted.) Others grouse about another side effect, price pressure: The competition is so intense on the site that new crafters can’t break out, and some established ones feel they cannot raise their prices. That’s a particularly thorny problem if part of your sales pitch is that you’ve made a thing yourself; a careful artisan can’t respond to lower prices with greater volume. The most extreme version of this critique practically makes Etsy sound like Wal-Mart in its ripple-effect power through the broader D.I.Y. business community.
These aren’t really Etsy problems; they are consumer-marketplace problems. An enterprise founded on its creator’s passion still has to satisfy consumer demand if it’s going to be a profitable enterprise. Consider another Etsy seller story, one less splashy, but perhaps more representative, than Emily Martin’s. Circa Ceramics is two Chicago-based potters, Andy Witt and Nancy Pizarro. A few years ago, their work had a fairly traditional aesthetic Southwestern color schemes in stripes, flower shapes and other patterns. They sold these pieces at traditional fairs, or to business customers like coffee shops.
More recently they stumbled across some design blogs and learned about Etsy and the apparent demand for pottery work with an edgier look — which the potters themselves happened to prefer. At the Renegade fair in Chicago, their booth was full of porcelain pieces of all kinds — cups, magnets, wall-hanging tiles and so on — decorated with images of manual typewriters, skulls, vintage cameras and bugs. It was their first time at Renegade, and they seemed enthusiastic about how it was going. Their gradual move toward the “indie community,” and to a customer base they describe as 25 to 35 years old, rather than 35 to 75, has been good for business. A year ago they opened an Etsy storefront, and while they weren’t sure how many people would go for $30 coffee mugs ordered via mail, it turned out that hundreds would. Recently Circa Ceramics helped form the Etsy Chicago Street team. Etsy sales now represent 25 percent of their business, with orders going to customers as far away as Spain, Belgium, even Australia.
For Circa Ceramics, and for crafters in general, Etsy is another manifestation of how D.I.Y.-ism has evolved. Its motivation may still be the independence from capitalism that Railla wrote about. But it can also be about a form of independence economic independence within capitalism. Many of the artist-entrepreneurs opening up their virtual shops on Etsy want what Circa Ceramics or Emily Martin or the Austin Craft Mafia have achieved: Making a living from what they love to do. It’s a goal that reconciles ideology and self-branding, not so much to change the world as to stake out a place in it.
Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for the magazine. His book, “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are,” will be published by Random House next June.
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December 16, 2007
Handmade 2.0
By ROB WALKER
The declaration from something called the Handmade Consortium materialized on a Web site called buyhandmade.org in late October. “I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request that others do the same for me,” it said, and you could type in your name to “sign” on; within a few weeks, more than 6,500 people had done so. “Buying handmade is better for people,” a statement on the site read in part, and “better for the environment,” because mass production is a “major cause” of global warming, among other things. There were links to an anti-sweatshop site and a Wal-Mart watchdog site.
The pledge echoed the idealistic language of a tree-hugger activist group, but actually the consortium’s most prominent member was the online shopping bazaar Etsy, a very much for-profit entity that bills itself as “your place to buy & sell all things handmade.” Etsy does not fulfill orders from an inventory; it’s a place where sellers set up virtual storefronts, giving the site a cut of sales.
While eBay rose to prominence nearly a decade ago as an endless garage sale for the auctioning of collectibles and bric-a-brac, Etsy is more of an online craft fair, or art show, where the idea is that individuals can sell things that they have made. How many such people can there be? At last count, more than 70,000 — about 90 percent of whom were women — were using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware, stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane to the highly idiosyncratic. Each seller has a profile page telling shoppers a bit about themselves, and maybe offering a link to a blog or a MySpace page or a mailing list; most have devised some clever store or brand name for whatever they’re selling.
Maybe you’re interested in a “random music generator” called the Orb of Sound ($80), built by an Australian tinkerer calling himself RareBeasts. Or a whistle made out of a tin can and bottle caps ($12), by loranscruggs, near Seattle. Or the “hand-painted antique ceramic doll-head planters” sold under the name Clayflower22 by a retired schoolteacher near Las Cruces, N.M. Or the “Kaleidoscope Pearberry Soapsicle” ($5), made by a woman in Daytona Beach, Fla., who calls her shop Simply Soaps. Or a porcelain bowl with an image of a skull on it, from a Chicago couple who call themselves Circa Ceramics. Or an original painting from an artist in Athens, Ga., who goes by the moniker the Black Apple.
Browsing Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk. Most of all there is a dizzying amount of stuff, and it is similarly difficult to figure out how to characterize what it all represents: an art movement, a craft phenomenon or shopping trend. Whatever this is, it’s not something that Etsy created but rather something that it is trying to make bigger, more visible and more accessible — partly by mixing high-minded ideas about consumer responsibility with the unsentimental notion of the profit motive.
On July 29, Etsy registered its one-millionth sale and is expecting to hit two million items sold by mid-December. Shoppers spent $4.3 million buying 300,000 items from the site’s sellers in November alone — a 43 percent increase over the previous month. Thus far in December, the site has had record-breaking sales every day. Only about two years old, the company is not currently profitable but is somewhat unusual among Internet-based start-ups of the so-called Web 2.0 era in having a model that does not depend on advertising revenue. It depends on people buying things, in a manner that the founders position as a throwback to the way consumption ought to be: individuals buying from other individuals. “Our ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost,” the Handmade Pledge site asserts. “Buying handmade helps us reconnect.” The idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of shopping is all about the past.
STEP 1: Weave Do-It-Yourself Spirit Into a Community
The path that has led to Etsy begins with a motto — do it yourself — that implies distaste for consumer culture. That notion was front and center last year, when O’Reilly Media, best known for computer-related publications, introduced a magazine called Craft.
A spinoff of Make magazine (a latter-day Popular Mechanics for the hacker-tinkerer set), Craft addresses “the new craft movement.” The issue contained a variety of instructional projects: “Stitch a Robot,” one cover line read. “Felt an iPod Cocoon,” said another. Inside, an essay by a longtime crafter named Jean Railla argued that making something yourself is a form of “political statement” and a protest against chain stores that are turning “America into one big mini-mall.”
This dissonant-sounding juxtaposition — politics and felted iPod cocoons? — is what makes the craft thing hard to pin down. Of course Railla wasn’t saying that stitching a robot is akin to a march on Washington; she was writing about a broader do-it-yourself idea that she has watched gradually permeate popular culture over the course of a decade.
Railla, who is 37, founded a Web site called Getcrafty back in 1998, when renewed interest in traditional crafts among young women was still something of a curiosity. It wasn’t as if such skills and hobbies had ceased to exist; from Martha Stewart to nationwide chains like Michaels, major businesses catered to a range of quilt makers and scrapbookers. But the new wave of crafters infused uncool-sounding domestic skills like knitting and sewing with a postpunk attitude that revolved partly around mall-rejecting self-sufficiency. Railla wrote about how to make your own soap and lip gloss — and also about how to knit a bikini. “I really came to it from more of an indie-rock, do-it-yourself kind of political place,” she told me recently. “Sort of married with making peace with feminism.”
Getcrafty was filled with project ideas and how-tos as well as discussion forums, which played a crucial role in building the craft-as-community idea that Etsy would later tap into. “Knitting is part of the same do-it-yourself ethos that spawned zines and mixtapes,” Debbie Stoller, editor of Bust, a pop-culture-meets-feminism magazine, declared. Stoller wrote a series of “Stitch N Bitch” books, which became part of a trend toward the formation of social-crafting groups across the country. More Web gathering points emerged, like Craftster and SuperNaturale. Offline, a communal make-stuff group called Church of Craft formed chapters in several cities.
Crafting had attained a subculture status by 2004, when Railla hired a New York University student named Robert Kalin and some friends to redesign Getcrafty. Kalin had been studying philosophy and classics, but, he told me, he was pessimistic about the job-market value of his degree and was looking for something more entrepreneurial. While he had a bit of woodworking experience, he and his friend Chris Maguire were basically techie types; they hadn’t known much about the handcrafting movement that was bringing so many young women to Getcrafty. “We were the only guys around,” Kalin recalls.
Soon he had an idea for a different kind of site that this burgeoning craft community might find useful: an online marketplace. By that time, plenty of crafters were not simply doing it themselves — they were selling what they had done. There’s nothing surprising about people who enjoy doing something (playing guitar, writing poetry, knitting a bikini) wondering if maybe there isn’t a way to make a living at it. But the scene that Kalin stumbled upon turned out to be brimming with entrepreneurial spirit.
Consider, for instance, the Austin Craft Mafia. This group of nine indiepreneurs traces its roots to a 2001 meeting of young women who hoped to leverage their craft skills into a way to quit their day jobs. Each member built her own business and helped the others do the same. They continued to offer advice and connections with others in Austin and, eventually, beyond. There are now 42 officially sanctioned Craft Mafias, in cities from Omaha to New Orleans to Anchorage to Glasgow. (The Austin Craft Mafia, like Etsy, is a member of the consortium backing the Handmade Pledge.)
For some years now, crafters have been selling on their own sites online. Craft boutiques have opened as fast as independent book and record stores closed. And a new wave of fairs has come to life, not of the country-craft, “Bless This Mess” style, but venues for a younger, more indie-punk aesthetic. These happen all over the country now — the Bazaar Bizarre in Boston and other cities, the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago, the Girlie Show in Oklahoma City — and each one seems to get bigger every year.
So it’s no surprise that when Kalin suggested something akin to an online version of a craft fair but infinitely large and open all the time, to everyone, everywhere, Railla thought it was a “brilliant” idea. She was happy to consult on the new enterprise but gives Kalin and his partners credit for spotting the business opportunity and making it a reality. To her, crafting remains more of a philosophy, and its satisfactions are in participation, not consumption. She reiterated that idea in her Craft magazine column, arguing that the practice satisfies the urge to create, values feminine art forms, provides relief from the digital world and, yes, is a form of “political statement” against the dehumanizing global supply chain.
But she also understands the appeal of the handmade to those who might not have the inclination to do the making. Readers of the first issue of Craft magazine might have eagerly followed the instructions to stitch a robot. But surely others gravitated to a related article about the popularity of a style of hand-stitched robot that you could buy on Etsy. The article discussed how one doll maker’s creations were so popular that every time she posted a new one, it sold within 20 minutes. It was hard to read this without wanting to visit the site immediately and see what the fuss was about. And perhaps to participate in the idea of D.I.Y., at least by buying D.I.Y.
STEP 2: Emboider With Webbiness
This summer I visited the Etsy offices, in downtown Brooklyn . The company that Robert Kalin and his pals founded now has about 50 employees. (They remain jokily cryptic about what the name they chose for their enterprise means. It has been variously suggested that it is a play on the Latin phrase “et si” (“and if”), or that the secret can be found in Fellini’s “8 1/2.”) I got a tour of the rambling warren, spread over about 6,000 square feet on the sixth floor of an old building on Gold Street. It had a clubhouse feel that was equal parts venture-backed start-up and D.I.Y. enterprise: Here was the skateboard ramp; there the homemade greenscreen for Web casts. I was introduced to a number of young women at work silk-screening Etsy promotional materials onto bandannas, and also to the company lawyer.
Kalin is 27 and seems even younger, with boyish features and reddish hair. Serious in a way that could be read as either earnest or deadpan, he told me the stories behind a stuffed animal and an interesting metal sculpture on his desk, both from Etsy sellers. He then handed me a piece of crocheted bacon. In order to explain his company, he offered me a seat and reached for a book. It was a children’s book, about a fish named Swimmy. He pulled his chair closer and read aloud. The upshot was that a whole bunch of little fish gang up and begin swimming in a formation that resembles one huge fish, thus warding off predators. In their formation, the fish named Swimmy assumes the position where the eye would be. Kalin closed the book. “We want to be the eye,” he said, in case I’d missed the point. “Like Swimmy.”
Tilting back in his chair, he spoke for some time, with the supreme self-confidence of the college bull-session raconteur, referencing Marshall McLuhan, beginning a discourse about the problem with central banks with the phrase, “If you read the Founding Fathers . . . ,” and so on. He wasn’t so much making arguments as patiently spelling out the way things work. He informed me, for instance, that young people today are different, having grown up with the Web and all. He had sought guidance from his grandfather about making Etsy a reality but ignored the tedious advice about writing a business plan, figuring the site itself would serve that function. Later he wrote a “fan letter” to one of the founders of Flickr, the popular online photo-sharing site, and she became an investor. A founder of del.icio.us, the social-bookmarking site, invested, and so did a New York venture-capital firm. Kalin’s grandfather was flummoxed.
All of which is a familiar-enough Internet-start-up story line. I was more interested in what made Etsy seem different from so many current efforts to “build community” online: the luck or genius of the site is that Kalin and the other founders encountered in the D.I.Y./craft scene something that was already social, community-minded, supportive and aggressively using the Web. It seemed to me that the company’s future would depend not only on the success of its sellers but also on its reputation among them. Nor could its reputation simply be for business acumen. If all Etsy did was channel D.I.Y.-ism into a profit machine, it could easily be seen as monetizing — exploiting — the creativity and hustle of 70,000 indiepreneurs. There was a cultural dimension, too.
Kalin clearly understood all this. The company does not, for instance, demand exclusivity. Indeed it seems to want its sellers to market themselves aggressively on their own sites, in stores, at fairs. So in its idealized role as Swimmy, Etsy constantly holds entrepreneurial workshops (how to build your “global microbrand”), pointing to “best practices” among Etsy sellers, offering shop critiques, advising how to “write a killer press release.” Its magazine-videocast, The Storque, often feels like a D.I.Y. business school. In addition, Kalin has hired about a half-dozen of the best Etsy sellers to work directly for the company, in jobs meant to spread their skills to as many sellers as possible. Some help run Etsy Labs, a community-centric program held at the company’s headquarters, teaching craft skills.
On some level the Etsy idea is not really techno-progressive at all. It’s nostalgic. The company is host to a book club, which Kalin participates in, and when I visited, the most recent reading assignment was “The Wal-Mart Effect,” a book that assesses the societywide impact of that mass retailer’s success. Kalin seems flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save 12 cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer. Buying something from the person who made it is “the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just this massively impersonal experience,” he told me earlier. “When you get an item from Etsy, there’s this whole history behind it. There’s a person behind it.” I asked whether Wal-Mart was really the right comparison, given Etsy’s eclectic, artistic merchandise, and the more workaday product mix of a big-box discounter. He brushed that aside, noting that Etsy sells clothes, which everyone needs.
His real point, it seemed to me, was not about Wal-Mart or any other particular retailer. It was far more expansive. If the marketplace today has become alienating and disconnected, then buying something handmade, from another individual, rolls back the clock to an era before factory labor and mass production. That’s a lot of clock-turning, if you recall Adam Smith’s excitement about the efficiency of an 18th-century pin factory. Really, Kalin has a problem with the entire modern marketplace. “Everything since the Industrial Revolution has been so fragmented,” he told me, sounding more like a character in Slacker, wasting time in a cafe, than a guy running a briskly growing business.
Kalin is nothing if not grandiose about what he thinks Etsy can accomplish. For example, he knows that individual crafters face a problem of scale: there is only so much one person can produce. (Hence the Industrial Revolution.) So he mentions creating “co-production” sites across the country, where groups of crafters would band together in a co-op-style model, ideally occupying space in distressed areas and offering training to people who want to learn handcrafting skills. Handmade isn’t a fad, he told me, it’s a resurgence, one that is of a piece with the booming interest in organic food. In 25 years, he said, Etsy would be both worldwide and personal, a global-local marketplace, a Web version of the Athenian agora.
The business proposition behind this extravagant vision is rather more straightforward. Etsy charges 20 cents per listing and 3.5 percent of the final sale price; this is generally lower and certainly less complicated than eBay’s fee structure; it also charges up to $15 if creators want to highlight a particular item on the site’s high-traffic showcase pages. More competition may be mixed news for individual artisans as newcomers keep flooding in to peddle their wares, but it’s all good news for Etsy. The company makes money from successful crafters, but it also makes money from wishful thinkers who never get beyond the hobby stage. The entrepreneur who makes something by hand might face a scale problem. Etsy doesn’t.
That said, what’s surprising about Kalin is that his interest really does seem to transcend the profit motive. It’s pretty clear that he not only respects the values of the D.I.Y. world and the earnest idealism of the Handmade Pledge; he also really believes in them. The quasi-libertarian certainty of the Web entrepreneur and the equally confident ex-philosophy-student discourse about the alienating nature of mass society seem contradictory. But to Kalin, they are intertwined. “In a way,” he said when I met him in Brooklyn, “I see Etsy as an art project.” And after a brief recap of art history through Duchamp, he suggested that Etsy could “disturb” the way people see the world, rethinking what makes their possessions important or trivial, leading us to re-evaluate the way we consume. Surely plenty of crafters see what they are up to as a mix of art and business as well — although they may be coming at that from a somewhat different angle.
STEP 3: Stitch Together Ideals and Entrepreneurialism
This past March, I went to Pittsburgh to attend the first-ever Craft Congress, which was made up of about 60 of the best-known and most established figures on the D.I.Y./crafter scene. I had heard the agenda would include a discussion of how their movement ought to be defined and thought about by participants. This is what makes crafting feel distinct from a garden -variety consumer trend: It’s hard to imagine the leading figures in, say, the premium-denim fad or the limited-edition-sneaker craze getting together to hash out what those things are really about, what participating in them really means.
I wondered if the discussion would be translated into some sort of manifesto. Would they lay out rules for who is a crafter and who isn’t? Would they determine where screen-printing on bulk-ordered T-shirts, or working with factory-made beads, falls on the continuum of “handmade”-ness? (I had read some spirited discussion in Etsy’s forums about the definition of “mass produced.”) I was also interested in the Craft Congress because I’d heard that someone from Etsy would be there, and I wondered how the company would be perceived.
The congress participants (almost all were women) included organizers of fairs in Atlanta, Toronto, Washington and elsewhere, as well as crafters from all around the country. Many had met online but never before in person. The discussions and presentations, spread over two days, began with an attempt at “defining the craft movement” and ranged into politics and recent corporate interest in D.I.Y.-ism. But there was little interest in rule making and manifesto-writing. Jenny Hart, an Austin Craft Mafia founder, went out of her way to make the point that the congress participants should be careful not to come across like self-appointed leaders.
The topics of discussion often weren’t ideological at all, but more practical matters like marketing tactics, taxes and health insurance. Etsy was represented by Matthew Stinchcomb, its 32-year-old marketing chief. When he met Kalin, he was in a rock band. Tired of touring, he got involved in Etsy, applying the sorts of underground promotional ideas he picked up as a musician, like creating Etsy “street teams.”
Gregarious and easygoing, he gave the Etsy pitch. “I think there’s a larger story that we are selling,” he said, presenting Etsy’s goal as recreating the marketplaces of old. Marketing has “crass connotations,” he allowed, but to make those one-on-one connections, sellers had to promote themselves. Later he added that the craft movement needed to keep “providing resources for each other, so we’re not all working against each other.” In other words, he fit right in: his presentation — like the congress in general — was equal parts entrepreneurial seminar and subculture colloquium.
Somehow all the talk made that most conventional American path — small business — seem like an instrument of radicalism. I talked to another attendee, a 29-year-old crafter named Faythe Levine, about the motivations of craft artist-entrepreneurs. She had told me about the thrill of discovering the craft scene: “No corporate backing — it was people doing things, full-on D.I.Y.” Last year she began working on a documentary called “Handmade Nation,” and by the time of the Craft Congress had videotaped 80 hours of interviews with crafters in a dozen cities. Some of her subjects were making a living, but some were still trying to quit dull day jobs, and others were stay-at-home moms. “I didn’t necessarily ask people if they were making stuff and selling it to be political,” she said. But many told her that “running a small business yourself, and trying to separate yourself from the masses — it’s a political statement in its own. That was kind of interesting, and it did come up repeatedly.”
It’s still tempting to characterize anything that looks edgy and has an online component as somehow a function of youth culture. But the age of the average Etsy seller turns out to be 34. Many crafters no doubt feel passionately about the ideals suggested by the Handmade Pledge a horror of sweatshop labor and corporate conformity, concern about the environment and would be pleased to see the broader consumer culture embrace them too. Meanwhile there is also the more salient matter of how to make a rewarding, meaningful and satisfying living without having to give up on those ideals. The women who have led the craft movement don’t want to work for the Man. But many are also motivated by having reached adulthood at a time when the Man is slashing benefits, reneging on pensions, laying people off and, if hiring, is looking for customer-service reps and baristas. This is not a utopian alt-youth framework; it’s a very real-world, alt-grown-up framework.
Listening to the discussions at the Craft Congress, it seemed to me that while there’s a case to be made that this is an art movement, or an ideological movement, or a shopping movement, it is also — and probably fundamentally — a work movement. At one point, talk turned to corporate interest in D.I.Y.-ism, and in particular how companies like Toyota were sponsoring craft fairs. Some argued that “megacorporations” trying to burnish their hipster images had no legitimate role on the scene. Others suggested that corporate money could be put to beneficial uses. No consensus emerged, but toward the end of the discussion one crafter articulated the precise commerce-and-ideals dilemma of the crafty businessperson. “If we can’t have a job where we make enough money,” she observed, “then this movement isn’t sustainable.”
STEP 4: Sell
It is worth noting another element of the Handmade Pledge: “The ascendancy of chain-store culture and global manufacturing has left us dressing, furnishing and decorating alike.” It’s a shrewd pitch, because the consumer craving for novelty, for the unique, the special, seems unquenchable. It has spawned, for instance, a number of blogs dedicated specifically to ferreting out the exciting new thing, usually with a helpful link to a potential transaction. (One of the most popular such sites, Design*Sponge, is another backer of the Handmade Consortium.) Buying something from an indie craft artist can result in a buyer-seller connection, but it can also make consumption itself feel like a creative act. This is the crucial element fueling the craft boom: People show up at the fairs, the shops and the Web sites. And they spend money.
One afternoon last summer, a young artist based in Athens, Ga., unveiled her latest work. Emily Martin is 24 years old. She graduated from art school about two years ago and has never had a gallery show. She announced the date and time of the unveiling on her blog, so at 2 p.m. on Aug. 28, I clicked over and watched as she posted the new work to her Etsy shop: Six original paintings priced between $160 and $250, and nine hand-sewn dolls, for $37 to $65. They disappeared faster than I could click “refresh.” By 2:02 p.m. most had been sold, and Martin had made about $1,400 (minus fees). Martin fully expected to be working as a waitress and confining her art-making to her off hours at this stage of her life. Instead, the Black Apple, as she is known on Etsy, is a full-time artist and perhaps the site’s most famous success story.
Martin’s paintings often depict cartoonish girls with unnaturally wide eyes, and her shy voice sounds as if it were emanating from one of these innocent figures. “You’re told in art school, ‘O.K., well, one out of a hundred of you is going to make a living with the training that you’re getting here,’ ” she said. While sweet and appealing, Martin’s aesthetic is more thrift store than Chelsea gallery; she was “really intimidated” by “the whole capital-A art thing.” But at a local craft fair, someone told her about this new site called Etsy. “The idea of a shop online, being a more democratic thing, really appealed to me,” she says. As of early December, she had sold more than 10,000 items through her Etsy store — mostly 8-by-10, open-edition prints priced at $13 apiece, but also postcards, buttons, hand-sewn dolls and original paintings.
It’s a feel-good story of Webby empowerment and the triumph of a niche-culture underdog. Martin recognizes that what the Web in general, and Etsy in particular, has done for her is to make a market. It has exposed her work to more people than ever would have seen it in Athens, without any auditions for capital-A art power brokers. Just as important, though, is that her aesthetic turned out to have unusually broad appeal, and she doesn’t know quite what to tell the aspiring crafter-artists who besiege her with requests for advice. “I had no idea that my work would appeal to grandmas, 12-year-old girls, hipsters, guys buying things for their girlfriends and wives,” she says. The real lesson of the Black Apple may be not how many Emily Martin stories there have been (not many) but how many people figure that they, too, can achieve what she has (lots).
Inevitably, not everyone can, and it’s no surprise that Etsy has detractors. Some point out that for all the talk of consumers wanting to escape mall-fueled conformity Etsy’s online-mall format amplifies market-driven trends. (Images of birds, especially owls, are inexplicably popular. One crafter told me she was sick of making the same owl over and over — but that’s what her customers wanted.) Others grouse about another side effect, price pressure: The competition is so intense on the site that new crafters can’t break out, and some established ones feel they cannot raise their prices. That’s a particularly thorny problem if part of your sales pitch is that you’ve made a thing yourself; a careful artisan can’t respond to lower prices with greater volume. The most extreme version of this critique practically makes Etsy sound like Wal-Mart in its ripple-effect power through the broader D.I.Y. business community.
These aren’t really Etsy problems; they are consumer-marketplace problems. An enterprise founded on its creator’s passion still has to satisfy consumer demand if it’s going to be a profitable enterprise. Consider another Etsy seller story, one less splashy, but perhaps more representative, than Emily Martin’s. Circa Ceramics is two Chicago-based potters, Andy Witt and Nancy Pizarro. A few years ago, their work had a fairly traditional aesthetic Southwestern color schemes in stripes, flower shapes and other patterns. They sold these pieces at traditional fairs, or to business customers like coffee shops.
More recently they stumbled across some design blogs and learned about Etsy and the apparent demand for pottery work with an edgier look — which the potters themselves happened to prefer. At the Renegade fair in Chicago, their booth was full of porcelain pieces of all kinds — cups, magnets, wall-hanging tiles and so on — decorated with images of manual typewriters, skulls, vintage cameras and bugs. It was their first time at Renegade, and they seemed enthusiastic about how it was going. Their gradual move toward the “indie community,” and to a customer base they describe as 25 to 35 years old, rather than 35 to 75, has been good for business. A year ago they opened an Etsy storefront, and while they weren’t sure how many people would go for $30 coffee mugs ordered via mail, it turned out that hundreds would. Recently Circa Ceramics helped form the Etsy Chicago Street team. Etsy sales now represent 25 percent of their business, with orders going to customers as far away as Spain, Belgium, even Australia.
For Circa Ceramics, and for crafters in general, Etsy is another manifestation of how D.I.Y.-ism has evolved. Its motivation may still be the independence from capitalism that Railla wrote about. But it can also be about a form of independence economic independence within capitalism. Many of the artist-entrepreneurs opening up their virtual shops on Etsy want what Circa Ceramics or Emily Martin or the Austin Craft Mafia have achieved: Making a living from what they love to do. It’s a goal that reconciles ideology and self-branding, not so much to change the world as to stake out a place in it.
Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for the magazine. His book, “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are,” will be published by Random House next June.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Mailing gifts
Earlier this week, the New York Times had an article about gift giving which I cut and paste here.
It was in the back of my mind as I packed up a crate of stuff to mail to relatives. Some of it is ceramic (including one of my pottery bowls) and breakable. I hope the UPS people pack it up well.
Then I did some more shopping. For Brothers One and Two, I got them gift cards to big box bookstores. One brother lives a relatively transient lifestyle, and needs to keep material belongings to a minimum, and another brother lives in NYC so space is at a premium. We're a bookish family, so a gift card to a book store's always a good gift.
While I was at it, I got my employees gift cards to the bookstore too. And wonder of wonders, I walked out of there without getting any books for myself. However, I did go to a specialty store when shopping for someone, and another Kaffe Fassett book somehow jumped into my basket.
The rampant consumerism that seems to take over this time of year is lamentable. But exchanging gifts, with the attendant thoughtfulness of what the recipient likes, is a symbol of the social bonds we humans require to be happy. And it's fun to think about the other person and think about what would they enjoy.
Plus, it's a great excuse to buy some candy to include in the gift, and what do you know? a candy bar for me too :)
It was in the back of my mind as I packed up a crate of stuff to mail to relatives. Some of it is ceramic (including one of my pottery bowls) and breakable. I hope the UPS people pack it up well.
Then I did some more shopping. For Brothers One and Two, I got them gift cards to big box bookstores. One brother lives a relatively transient lifestyle, and needs to keep material belongings to a minimum, and another brother lives in NYC so space is at a premium. We're a bookish family, so a gift card to a book store's always a good gift.
While I was at it, I got my employees gift cards to the bookstore too. And wonder of wonders, I walked out of there without getting any books for myself. However, I did go to a specialty store when shopping for someone, and another Kaffe Fassett book somehow jumped into my basket.
The rampant consumerism that seems to take over this time of year is lamentable. But exchanging gifts, with the attendant thoughtfulness of what the recipient likes, is a symbol of the social bonds we humans require to be happy. And it's fun to think about the other person and think about what would they enjoy.
Plus, it's a great excuse to buy some candy to include in the gift, and what do you know? a candy bar for me too :)
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Pictures from Savannah -- complete with wildlife
Over the weekend, Husband and I went to Savannah, Georgia. Saturday night we had dinner with his secretary who was having a girls' weekend with her mother in Savannah too. It's kind of interesting to go bar hopping with your husband, his secretary, and her mom. We saw plenty of wildlife, all of the human kind.
We didn't get too close to the heron and thank goodness for the zoom lens on the camera. We turned away to look across the field and when we turned back, the bird was gone. Silent the whole time.
Here's deer in the morning mist, as the sun's coming up.
On the way back, the mist burned off and we saw these in a clearing by the parking lot:
We took a little path off to the side and it took us down to the Savannah River, where we saw this container ship go by. Global commerce in action.
On the way back to the car, we saw
I guess the gate to the park was now open. And clearly cars don't bother them but people do. They were quite wary of us -- see blurry picture above of them running away from us.
Here's the best pictures of all:
Yes, many pictures of deer, but we're done now.
Guy was nice enough to bring it closer, saying "look at the eyes!"
Here's they're using plyers to take the hook out of it.
Then they threw it back into the water. It landed belly up and slowly we could see it's white-diamond shapve sink into the green water.
Back and forth, back and forth. And now the final piece. I like the ends, where he pivoted around, creating the outer curve and little divots of sand:
And to end this post, I wrote this in the sand:
Sunday morning, despite the multiple margaritas on Saturday night, Husband and I got up at the crack of dawn to go to Fort Pulaski national park. A few weeks ago, Husband was in Savannah for work (I couldn't go with him because of my work) and went out to Fort Pulaski early to get some exercise in before starting the day. He saw deer and wanted me to go with him this time.
We got to the entrance to the park and found that the gate at the bridge to the park was still closed. So we left the car on the side of the road and walked across the bridge. Didn't take any pictures but is was nice and peaceful with river (pretty sure not the Savannah River) below us and one loon. The bird, not a person.
Here is our first encounter with deer at the gate to the visitors center and the fort itself. Conveniently, but unintentionally, Husband's head is in the foreground, for scale. Deer are kind of big. At least I think so, since the biggest animals I see are cats and dogs. 
The brick wall doesn't go much beyond what's in the picture, so we just went around it and walked over to the fort. Here you can see the damage from cannon balls way back from Civil War times (I think).
Then we saw this at the edge of the moat:
We didn't get too close to the heron and thank goodness for the zoom lens on the camera. We turned away to look across the field and when we turned back, the bird was gone. Silent the whole time.Here's deer in the morning mist, as the sun's coming up.
On the way back, the mist burned off and we saw these in a clearing by the parking lot: We took a little path off to the side and it took us down to the Savannah River, where we saw this container ship go by. Global commerce in action.On the way back to the car, we sawI guess the gate to the park was now open. And clearly cars don't bother them but people do. They were quite wary of us -- see blurry picture above of them running away from us.Here's the best pictures of all:
Yes, many pictures of deer, but we're done now. After Fort Pulaski, we went to Tybee Island for breakfast at the Breakfast Bar (or was is Club?). Then on to the beach, Husband's favorite part.
First stop, the pier, where a little girl found us fascinating and came right up to us to just stare. Then a guy caught this:
Guy was nice enough to bring it closer, saying "look at the eyes!"Here's they're using plyers to take the hook out of it.Then they threw it back into the water. It landed belly up and slowly we could see it's white-diamond shapve sink into the green water.After a while, Husband and I went down to the beach where we saw a seagull walking away from a dead fish. I wanted to tell it there were starving seagulls in China:
As we're walking along, I noticed that we were paralleling Husband's tire tracks in the sand. Because we were just strolling, the tracks were kind of meandering and drifted one way and then another, with little turns. So we made a little artwork. I call it "Overlapping Tire Tracks."
And then another pass. The pier is in the back ground, with a little gazebo at the end and a little dark blue sliver of the Atlantic Ocean.
As we're walking along, I noticed that we were paralleling Husband's tire tracks in the sand. Because we were just strolling, the tracks were kind of meandering and drifted one way and then another, with little turns. So we made a little artwork. I call it "Overlapping Tire Tracks."First Husband rolled across the sand, making sure to put in interesting curves. Then he turned around and came back, being careful to retrace on tire track. Here he is coming back around for another pass:
And then another pass. The pier is in the back ground, with a little gazebo at the end and a little dark blue sliver of the Atlantic Ocean.
Back and forth, back and forth. And now the final piece. I like the ends, where he pivoted around, creating the outer curve and little divots of sand:And to end this post, I wrote this in the sand:
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Complaining Employee is gone
I let her go today. I was hoping for a peaceful ending, like when I was fired, once, a long time ago. Of course, however, there were tears and anger, on her part.
But it just wasn't going to work out in the long run.
But it just wasn't going to work out in the long run.
The Psychology of Gift Giving.
Interesting article from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/health/11well.html?em&ex=1197608400&en=b5d02845093ff32b&ei=5070
A Gift That Gives Right Back? The Giving Itself
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Published: December 11, 2007
When my mom died a few years ago, my siblings and I were discussing the many ways life would be different without her. “No more presents,” my brother noted.
My mother was passionate about gifts. As an adult, I often urged her to stop giving presents and spend the money on herself, but she refused. She liked giving gifts too much.
Gift giving has long been a favorite subject for studies on human behavior, with psychologists, anthropologists, economists and marketers all weighing in. They have found that giving gifts is a surprisingly complex and important part of human interaction, helping to define relationships and strengthen bonds with family and friends. Indeed, psychologists say it is often the giver, rather than the recipient, who reaps the biggest psychological gains from a gift. Frustrated by crowds, traffic and commercialism, people can be tempted at this time of year to opt out of gift giving altogether. A 2005 survey showed that four out of five Americans think the holidays are too materialistic, according to the Center for a New American Dream, which promotes responsible consumption.
But while it’s reasonable to cut back on spending during the holidays, psychologists say that banning the gift exchange with loved ones is not the best solution. People who refuse to accept or exchange gifts during the holidays, these experts say, may be missing out on an important connection with family and friends.
“That doesn’t do a service to the relationship,” said Ellen J. Langer, a Harvard psychology professor. “If I don’t let you give me a gift, then I’m not encouraging you to think about me and think about things I like. I am preventing you from experiencing the joy of engaging in all those activities. You do people a disservice by not giving them the gift of giving.”
The social value of giving has been recognized throughout human history. For thousands of years, some native cultures have engaged in the potlatch, a complex ceremony that celebrates extreme giving. Although cultural interpretations vary, often the status of a given family in a clan or village was dictated not by who had the most possessions, but instead by who gave away the most. The more lavish and bankrupting the potlatch, the more prestige gained by the host family.
Some researchers believe evolutionary forces may have favored gift giving. Men who were the most generous may have had the most reproductive success with women. (Notably, the use of food in exchange for sexual access and grooming has been documented in our closest ape relative, the chimpanzee.) Women who were skilled at giving — be it extra food or a well-fitted pelt — helped sustain the family provider as well as her children.
Margaret Rucker, a consumer psychologist at the University of California, Davis, says men are typically more price-conscious and practical when it comes to the gifts they give and get, while women tend to be more concerned about giving and receiving gifts with emotional significance.
Dr. Rucker says she often recounts the story of a man who climbed a tree to retrieve a robin’s egg that matched his girlfriend’s blue eyes. “Women say, ‘Oh, how romantic,’” she said. “But men say, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, and also what about the mama bird?’”
Gender differences in gift giving seem to emerge early in life. Researchers at Loyola University Chicago studied 3- and 4-year-olds at a day-care center, all of whom had attended the same birthday party. The girls typically went shopping with their mothers and helped select and wrap the gift. Boys, meanwhile, were often unaware of what the gift was. “They’d say, ‘I took a nap while my mom went shopping for it,’” said Mary Ann McGrath, the associate dean of the graduate school of business at Loyola.
Gift giving is often the most obvious way a partner can show interest, strengthen a bond or even signal that a relationship should end. One colleague of Dr. Rucker’s noted that she knew her marriage was over when her husband handed her a gift in a brown grocery bag.
People who stop giving gifts lose out on important social cues, researchers say. “Who is on your gift list is telling you who is important in your life,” Dr. McGrath said. “It says who is more important and who is less important.”
But the biggest effect of gift giving may be on ourselves. Giving to others reinforces our feelings for them and makes us feel effective and caring, Dr. Langer said.
For a glimpse into the psychology of giving, researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University recently studied gift giving by pet owners, finding that it stemmed from a desire to make pets happy and offer gifts that would improve a pet’s comfort and care. The research, to be published next year, may seem frivolous, but it also gives insight into the self-serving nature of giving, since pets can’t reciprocate, the researchers note.
“When you’re giving to another person, you have this pressure of reciprocity, but it’s not there with a pet,” said Tracy Ryan, an associate professor of advertising research at Virginia Commonwealth. “It shows that a lot of the pleasure is in the giving, knowing you’ve taken care of someone.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/health/11well.html?em&ex=1197608400&en=b5d02845093ff32b&ei=5070
A Gift That Gives Right Back? The Giving Itself
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Published: December 11, 2007
When my mom died a few years ago, my siblings and I were discussing the many ways life would be different without her. “No more presents,” my brother noted.
My mother was passionate about gifts. As an adult, I often urged her to stop giving presents and spend the money on herself, but she refused. She liked giving gifts too much.
Gift giving has long been a favorite subject for studies on human behavior, with psychologists, anthropologists, economists and marketers all weighing in. They have found that giving gifts is a surprisingly complex and important part of human interaction, helping to define relationships and strengthen bonds with family and friends. Indeed, psychologists say it is often the giver, rather than the recipient, who reaps the biggest psychological gains from a gift. Frustrated by crowds, traffic and commercialism, people can be tempted at this time of year to opt out of gift giving altogether. A 2005 survey showed that four out of five Americans think the holidays are too materialistic, according to the Center for a New American Dream, which promotes responsible consumption.
But while it’s reasonable to cut back on spending during the holidays, psychologists say that banning the gift exchange with loved ones is not the best solution. People who refuse to accept or exchange gifts during the holidays, these experts say, may be missing out on an important connection with family and friends.
“That doesn’t do a service to the relationship,” said Ellen J. Langer, a Harvard psychology professor. “If I don’t let you give me a gift, then I’m not encouraging you to think about me and think about things I like. I am preventing you from experiencing the joy of engaging in all those activities. You do people a disservice by not giving them the gift of giving.”
The social value of giving has been recognized throughout human history. For thousands of years, some native cultures have engaged in the potlatch, a complex ceremony that celebrates extreme giving. Although cultural interpretations vary, often the status of a given family in a clan or village was dictated not by who had the most possessions, but instead by who gave away the most. The more lavish and bankrupting the potlatch, the more prestige gained by the host family.
Some researchers believe evolutionary forces may have favored gift giving. Men who were the most generous may have had the most reproductive success with women. (Notably, the use of food in exchange for sexual access and grooming has been documented in our closest ape relative, the chimpanzee.) Women who were skilled at giving — be it extra food or a well-fitted pelt — helped sustain the family provider as well as her children.
Margaret Rucker, a consumer psychologist at the University of California, Davis, says men are typically more price-conscious and practical when it comes to the gifts they give and get, while women tend to be more concerned about giving and receiving gifts with emotional significance.
Dr. Rucker says she often recounts the story of a man who climbed a tree to retrieve a robin’s egg that matched his girlfriend’s blue eyes. “Women say, ‘Oh, how romantic,’” she said. “But men say, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, and also what about the mama bird?’”
Gender differences in gift giving seem to emerge early in life. Researchers at Loyola University Chicago studied 3- and 4-year-olds at a day-care center, all of whom had attended the same birthday party. The girls typically went shopping with their mothers and helped select and wrap the gift. Boys, meanwhile, were often unaware of what the gift was. “They’d say, ‘I took a nap while my mom went shopping for it,’” said Mary Ann McGrath, the associate dean of the graduate school of business at Loyola.
Gift giving is often the most obvious way a partner can show interest, strengthen a bond or even signal that a relationship should end. One colleague of Dr. Rucker’s noted that she knew her marriage was over when her husband handed her a gift in a brown grocery bag.
People who stop giving gifts lose out on important social cues, researchers say. “Who is on your gift list is telling you who is important in your life,” Dr. McGrath said. “It says who is more important and who is less important.”
But the biggest effect of gift giving may be on ourselves. Giving to others reinforces our feelings for them and makes us feel effective and caring, Dr. Langer said.
For a glimpse into the psychology of giving, researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University recently studied gift giving by pet owners, finding that it stemmed from a desire to make pets happy and offer gifts that would improve a pet’s comfort and care. The research, to be published next year, may seem frivolous, but it also gives insight into the self-serving nature of giving, since pets can’t reciprocate, the researchers note.
“When you’re giving to another person, you have this pressure of reciprocity, but it’s not there with a pet,” said Tracy Ryan, an associate professor of advertising research at Virginia Commonwealth. “It shows that a lot of the pleasure is in the giving, knowing you’ve taken care of someone.”
Friday, December 7, 2007
Off to Savannah
This weekend, Husband and I will go to Savannah. He has a work appointment there on Monday and I'm just along for the ride.
I am so tired. We're still short handed at work, though Complaining Employee is getting better. I thought we had a breakthrough yesterday, but today, interacting with her has just been draining. And we interacted for only an hour max today, in person, e-mail, and phone.
She's a perfectionist and very rigid. This week, the New York Times had an article about perfectionists (pasted below). I gave it to her yesterday, when I thought we had moved past some difficulties, and she laughed, saying yes, she is trying to get beyond it.
And then it flared up again today. I have to deal with her tomorrow, but then it's off to Savannah.
There is really no focus to my blog. It's a lot of knitting stuff, some news articles I find interesting, and stuff from my life. However the really hard, stressful stuff is not here. In the last 12 months or so, I have had some of my highest highs and lowest lows. That stuff I share with only a few people. It's self preservation. I don't know how long I will keep up this blog. It may be for years and I don't want to look back and see that hard stuff in black and white and relive it. I think Crazy Aunt Purl has the right idea -- hold off on posting on things until you've moved beyond it.
And so this blog has a lot of knitting. It's become more and more important to me, I think in proportion to my need for a way to deal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Unhappy? Self-Critical? Maybe You’re Just a Perfectionist
By BENEDICT CAREY Dec 4, 2007.
Just about any sports movie, airport paperback or motivational tape delivers a few boilerplate rules for success. Believe in yourself. Don’t take no for an answer. Never quit. Don’t accept second best.
Above all, be true to yourself.
It’s hard to argue with those maxims. They seem self-evident — if not written into the Constitution, then at least part of the cultural water supply that irrigates everything from halftime speeches to corporate lectures to SAT coaching classes.
Yet several recent studies stand as a warning against taking the platitudes of achievement too seriously. The new research focuses on a familiar type, perfectionists, who panic or blow a fuse when things don’t turn out just so. The findings not only confirm that such purists are often at risk for mental distress — as Freud, Alfred Adler and countless exasperated parents have long predicted — but also suggest that perfectionism is a valuable lens through which to understand a variety of seemingly unrelated mental difficulties, from depression to compulsive behavior to addiction.
Some researchers divide perfectionists into three types, based on answers to standardized questionnaires: Self-oriented strivers who struggle to live up to their high standards and appear to be at risk of self-critical depression; outwardly focused zealots who expect perfection from others, often ruining relationships; and those desperate to live up to an ideal they’re convinced others expect of them, a risk factor for suicidal thinking and eating disorders.
“It’s natural for people to want to be perfect in a few things, say in their job — being a good editor or surgeon depends on not making mistakes,” said Gordon L. Flett, a psychology professor at York University and an author of many of the studies. “It’s when it generalizes to other areas of life, home life, appearance, hobbies, that you begin to see real problems.”
Unlike people given psychiatric labels, however, perfectionists neither battle stigma nor consider themselves to be somehow dysfunctional. On the contrary, said Alice Provost, an employee assistance counselor at the University of California, Davis, who recently ran group therapy for staff members struggling with perfectionist impulses. “They’re very proud of it,” she said. “And the culture highly values and reinforces their attitudes.”
Consider a recent study by psychologists at Curtin University of Technology in Australia, who found that the level of “all or nothing” thinking predicted how well perfectionists navigated their lives. The researchers had 252 participants fill out questionnaires rating their level of agreement with 16 statements like “I think of myself as either in control or out of control” and “I either get on very well with people or not at all.”
The more strongly participants in the study thought in this either-or fashion, the more likely they were to display the kind of extreme perfectionism that can lead to mental health problems.
In short, these are people who not only swallow many of the maxims for success but take them as absolutes. At some level they know that it’s possible to succeed after falling short (build on your mistakes: another boilerplate rule). The trouble is that falling short still reeks of mediocrity; for them, to say otherwise is to spin the result.
Never accept second best. Always be true to yourself.
The burden of perfectionist expectations is all too familiar to anyone who has struggled to kick a bad habit. Break down just once — have one smoke, one single drink — and at best it’s a “slip.” At worst it’s a relapse, and more often it’s a fall off the wagon: failure. And if you’ve already fallen, well, may as well pour yourself two or three more.
This is why experts have long debated the wisdom of insisting on abstinence as necessary in treating substance abuse. Most rehab clinics are based on this principle: Either you’re clean or you’re not; there’s no safe level of use. This approach has unquestionably worked for millions of addicts, but if the studies of perfectionists are any guide it has undermined the efforts of many others.
Ms. Provost said those in her program at U.C. Davis often displayed symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder — another risk for perfectionists. They couldn’t bear a messy desk. They found it nearly impossible to leave a job half-done, to do the next day. Some put in ludicrously long hours redoing tasks, chasing an ideal only they could see.
As an experiment, Ms. Provost had members of the group slack off on purpose, against their every instinct. “This was mostly in the context of work,” she said, “and they seem like small things, because what some of them considered failure was what most people would consider no big deal.”
Leave work on time. Don’t arrive early. Take all the breaks allowed. Leave the desk a mess. Allow yourself a set number of tries to finish a job; then turn in what you have.
“And then ask: Did you get punished? Did the university continue to function? Are you happier?” Ms. Provost said. “They were surprised that yes, everything continued to function, and the things they were so worried about weren’t that crucial.”
The British have a saying that encourages people to show their skills while mocking the universal fear of failure: Do your worst.
If you can’t tolerate your worst, at least once in a while, how true to yourself can you be?
I am so tired. We're still short handed at work, though Complaining Employee is getting better. I thought we had a breakthrough yesterday, but today, interacting with her has just been draining. And we interacted for only an hour max today, in person, e-mail, and phone.
She's a perfectionist and very rigid. This week, the New York Times had an article about perfectionists (pasted below). I gave it to her yesterday, when I thought we had moved past some difficulties, and she laughed, saying yes, she is trying to get beyond it.
And then it flared up again today. I have to deal with her tomorrow, but then it's off to Savannah.
There is really no focus to my blog. It's a lot of knitting stuff, some news articles I find interesting, and stuff from my life. However the really hard, stressful stuff is not here. In the last 12 months or so, I have had some of my highest highs and lowest lows. That stuff I share with only a few people. It's self preservation. I don't know how long I will keep up this blog. It may be for years and I don't want to look back and see that hard stuff in black and white and relive it. I think Crazy Aunt Purl has the right idea -- hold off on posting on things until you've moved beyond it.
And so this blog has a lot of knitting. It's become more and more important to me, I think in proportion to my need for a way to deal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Unhappy? Self-Critical? Maybe You’re Just a Perfectionist
By BENEDICT CAREY Dec 4, 2007.
Just about any sports movie, airport paperback or motivational tape delivers a few boilerplate rules for success. Believe in yourself. Don’t take no for an answer. Never quit. Don’t accept second best.
Above all, be true to yourself.
It’s hard to argue with those maxims. They seem self-evident — if not written into the Constitution, then at least part of the cultural water supply that irrigates everything from halftime speeches to corporate lectures to SAT coaching classes.
Yet several recent studies stand as a warning against taking the platitudes of achievement too seriously. The new research focuses on a familiar type, perfectionists, who panic or blow a fuse when things don’t turn out just so. The findings not only confirm that such purists are often at risk for mental distress — as Freud, Alfred Adler and countless exasperated parents have long predicted — but also suggest that perfectionism is a valuable lens through which to understand a variety of seemingly unrelated mental difficulties, from depression to compulsive behavior to addiction.
Some researchers divide perfectionists into three types, based on answers to standardized questionnaires: Self-oriented strivers who struggle to live up to their high standards and appear to be at risk of self-critical depression; outwardly focused zealots who expect perfection from others, often ruining relationships; and those desperate to live up to an ideal they’re convinced others expect of them, a risk factor for suicidal thinking and eating disorders.
“It’s natural for people to want to be perfect in a few things, say in their job — being a good editor or surgeon depends on not making mistakes,” said Gordon L. Flett, a psychology professor at York University and an author of many of the studies. “It’s when it generalizes to other areas of life, home life, appearance, hobbies, that you begin to see real problems.”
Unlike people given psychiatric labels, however, perfectionists neither battle stigma nor consider themselves to be somehow dysfunctional. On the contrary, said Alice Provost, an employee assistance counselor at the University of California, Davis, who recently ran group therapy for staff members struggling with perfectionist impulses. “They’re very proud of it,” she said. “And the culture highly values and reinforces their attitudes.”
Consider a recent study by psychologists at Curtin University of Technology in Australia, who found that the level of “all or nothing” thinking predicted how well perfectionists navigated their lives. The researchers had 252 participants fill out questionnaires rating their level of agreement with 16 statements like “I think of myself as either in control or out of control” and “I either get on very well with people or not at all.”
The more strongly participants in the study thought in this either-or fashion, the more likely they were to display the kind of extreme perfectionism that can lead to mental health problems.
In short, these are people who not only swallow many of the maxims for success but take them as absolutes. At some level they know that it’s possible to succeed after falling short (build on your mistakes: another boilerplate rule). The trouble is that falling short still reeks of mediocrity; for them, to say otherwise is to spin the result.
Never accept second best. Always be true to yourself.
The burden of perfectionist expectations is all too familiar to anyone who has struggled to kick a bad habit. Break down just once — have one smoke, one single drink — and at best it’s a “slip.” At worst it’s a relapse, and more often it’s a fall off the wagon: failure. And if you’ve already fallen, well, may as well pour yourself two or three more.
This is why experts have long debated the wisdom of insisting on abstinence as necessary in treating substance abuse. Most rehab clinics are based on this principle: Either you’re clean or you’re not; there’s no safe level of use. This approach has unquestionably worked for millions of addicts, but if the studies of perfectionists are any guide it has undermined the efforts of many others.
Ms. Provost said those in her program at U.C. Davis often displayed symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder — another risk for perfectionists. They couldn’t bear a messy desk. They found it nearly impossible to leave a job half-done, to do the next day. Some put in ludicrously long hours redoing tasks, chasing an ideal only they could see.
As an experiment, Ms. Provost had members of the group slack off on purpose, against their every instinct. “This was mostly in the context of work,” she said, “and they seem like small things, because what some of them considered failure was what most people would consider no big deal.”
Leave work on time. Don’t arrive early. Take all the breaks allowed. Leave the desk a mess. Allow yourself a set number of tries to finish a job; then turn in what you have.
“And then ask: Did you get punished? Did the university continue to function? Are you happier?” Ms. Provost said. “They were surprised that yes, everything continued to function, and the things they were so worried about weren’t that crucial.”
The British have a saying that encourages people to show their skills while mocking the universal fear of failure: Do your worst.
If you can’t tolerate your worst, at least once in a while, how true to yourself can you be?
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Leaning towards Hazy Corners
The more I look at that picture (see previous post), the more I like the idea of using the Rainbow of Malabrigo to make my own Hazy Corners.
I'm also wanting to reorganize my stash. Currently, it's mostly organized by fiber content, then by color within each group. There's a separate section for machine washable wool. It's from that section that I pulled the yarns for Brother Two's afghan.
The fact that I pulled the sock weight yarn from Brother Two's afghan's box o' yarn got me thinking about rearranging the stash by weight. Most of it is worsted weight, but I have lace, sock, and bulky too.
But then, looking at my Rainbow of Malabrigo, now housed in its own little basket, makes me want to organize them by manufacturer. After all, right now, all the Manos del Uruguay are together. All the Lion Brand Landscapes are together. The KnitPicks and Cascade 220s are split up by color.
I'm thinking I should divide by machine washable vs hand wash only. Then by weight with in each. Then by manufacturer. Then by weight. I might find more appropriate yarns for the Hazy Corners afghan that way.
Plus I have 5 hanks of superwash worsted weight Bare from KnitPicks that I can dye. I have been so impressed by how soft that yarn is.
The yarns allocated for projects will be housed separately.
I'm also wanting to reorganize my stash. Currently, it's mostly organized by fiber content, then by color within each group. There's a separate section for machine washable wool. It's from that section that I pulled the yarns for Brother Two's afghan.
The fact that I pulled the sock weight yarn from Brother Two's afghan's box o' yarn got me thinking about rearranging the stash by weight. Most of it is worsted weight, but I have lace, sock, and bulky too.
But then, looking at my Rainbow of Malabrigo, now housed in its own little basket, makes me want to organize them by manufacturer. After all, right now, all the Manos del Uruguay are together. All the Lion Brand Landscapes are together. The KnitPicks and Cascade 220s are split up by color.
I'm thinking I should divide by machine washable vs hand wash only. Then by weight with in each. Then by manufacturer. Then by weight. I might find more appropriate yarns for the Hazy Corners afghan that way.
Plus I have 5 hanks of superwash worsted weight Bare from KnitPicks that I can dye. I have been so impressed by how soft that yarn is.
The yarns allocated for projects will be housed separately.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Quilt inspiration
I have dabbled in quilting (another post for another day) and many of my afghans are based on quilts, so that's where I turned for ideas for 2 projects on my mind.
First, the Rainbow of Malabrigo, described in a previous post:
What to do with it? I pulled out my Kaffe Fasset quilt books (Glorious Patchwork and Kaleidoscope of Quilts, signed by the author!) and found these possibilities (terrible quality with glare, I know).
Hazy Corners from Kaleidoscope of Quilts, basically mitered squares with a solid square in the corner. The Rainbow of Malabrigo would fit right in.
What to do with it? I pulled out my Kaffe Fasset quilt books (Glorious Patchwork and Kaleidoscope of Quilts, signed by the author!) and found these possibilities (terrible quality with glare, I know).Hazy Corners from Kaleidoscope of Quilts, basically mitered squares with a solid square in the corner. The Rainbow of Malabrigo would fit right in.
Little Bricks, from Glorious Patchwork. Basically it's alternating rectangles with the stripes going horizonally and vertically. He's got a few plaids in there. I could do blue/purple stripes, with yellow/orange stripes. Green could be the garter stitch border.
Pieced Stripes from Glorious Patchwork. Years ago I sketched a blanket idea based on this quilt, using greens and whites with a border of squares. It's inspired by a Japanese kimono pattern, which I've seen in one of my kimono books. Talk about great sources of inspiration!
Then for Brother Two, I have these boxes of machine washable yarn. 
Some of the yarn is from my stash (Mountain Colors' Bearfoot, Brown Sheep Company's Wildfoote, sock yarn from KnitPicks, Spinrite's Muskoka, Cotton Classic, Peaches 'n' Creme), some I ordered from KnitPicks. Over Thanksgiving, I showed him the catalog and asked him to pick colors he liked. He wanted blues, green, and grey (bor-ing! but it's his blanket, not mine). The red/grey is my idea. At the bottom is a crocheted blanket I started with sockyarn. Who am kidding? That project will take forever, so it will frogged.
Some of the yarn is from my stash (Mountain Colors' Bearfoot, Brown Sheep Company's Wildfoote, sock yarn from KnitPicks, Spinrite's Muskoka, Cotton Classic, Peaches 'n' Creme), some I ordered from KnitPicks. Over Thanksgiving, I showed him the catalog and asked him to pick colors he liked. He wanted blues, green, and grey (bor-ing! but it's his blanket, not mine). The red/grey is my idea. At the bottom is a crocheted blanket I started with sockyarn. Who am kidding? That project will take forever, so it will frogged.
I thought about doing something from Mason-Dixon Knitting and last night, started swatching. Then this morning, I realized that I had to make Chinese Coins. Here's a picture from Beautiful Quilts: Amish & Mennonite, another great book for inspiration.
This is perfect in so many ways. First, we're ethnically Chinese. Second, our father's name is Coin. Third, it's a great stash buster.
Originally, I was going to do stripes of blues and greens, with little flashes of red, and have the solid sashing be the grey (shown blue above), with the red/grey crocheted as a border. But now that I realize I have all this green, maybe that will be the sashing.
(Added later -- I took out anything that wasn't worsted weight because I realized that having different weights would probably not work. Most of that was 6 skeins of green Cotton Classic and then all that varigated sock yarn. Plus I really wanted the sashing to be the grey because of the great contrast with the dark and medium blues and greens. This will require buying more grey yarn. A real hardship, I know.)
To make it reversable, I might use the checkerboard pattern from Husband's afghan. Or I might find something from the Barbara Walker Treasuries.
Oh the fun of starting a new project. And I haven't even blogged about my little Variations on the Lotus jag I'm on.
Need to fix drip!
We have a drip in the bathtub. We put a bucket in there to catch the water. Every bit counts, considering we're in a historic drought in Georgia and all outdoor watering (other than food gardens) is banned.
Below is a picture of the bucket with the water collected between 7:45am and 7:45pm. It shows 6 inches of water.
Below is a picture of the bucket with the water collected between 7:45am and 7:45pm. It shows 6 inches of water.
I used this to water the leyland cypresses that flanks our front door.
That's a lot of water. I need to fix that drip.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Husband's blanket update
Making good progress on Husband's afghan. The strips of blue and black Cascade 220 has been sewn together and now I just have to knit the top and bottom stripes. Progress picture:
Basic recipe:
Hold yarn double, cast on 20 stitches onto size 10US needles.
First six rows: Knit 5, Purl 5, Knit 5, Purl 5.
Next six rows: Purl 5, Knit 5, Purl 5, Knit 5.
Repeat, alternating rows so you get a checkerboard texture.
Continue until yarn runs out.
Make several strips. Sew them together so that the checkerboard is consistent throughout.
What I have left to do -- pick up stitches along the top in blue and continue the checkerboard texture so that there will be a frame of blue stripes around the black, blue, black, blue, black strips. Repeat with the bottom edge.
I did colors as strips to be knit together, so that direction of the checkerboard texture is the same throughout. Also, strips are more portable than hauling around an ever growing blanket.
The blanket is almost 5 feet wide and I don't have a size 10US needle long enough. So I finally broke down and ordered a set of the Knit Picks Options set of needles and ordered a 60 inch cable.
In the mean time, what will I do? I'm still thinking about my Rectangle of Malabrigo using the Malabrigo I have:
The colors are:
2 skeins Purple Mystery (one wound into a ball, one still in the hank) Notice how much darker one is than the other.
1 skein Buscando Azul, split into three balls -- Love. This. Color.
1 skein Oceanos still in the hank.
1 skein Saphire Green (their spelling). It's left over from a house coat sweater I made for myself last year. It's true, Malabrigo pills like crazy. But I love it anyway. So soft and cozy.
1 skein Pollen.
1 skein Tiger Lily.
What to do with all this Malabrigo goodness? I'm thinking of a log cabin afghan with green central squares. But I have more blue and purple than yellow and orange. Either I have to buy more yarn (oh the hardship) or leave off one skein of purple and blue.
I need to think about this.
Oh, by the way, the yarn I used for Husband's afghan is not machine washable. Which means I'll be washing this by hand. How could I have forgotten this detail?
For Brother Two's afghan, I did not make the same mistake. I made him pick only from the superwash (wool yarn chemically treated to withstand machine washing and drying without shrinking and felting) worsted weight yarn from the Knit Picks catalog. That yarn and Mason-Dixon Knitting should be here any day now.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Love Thanksgiving
I think Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Thanksgiving I spend with all my siblings and Christmas with Husband's family. Chinese New Year is nice too because that's when my parents visit. But with Sister in DC, Brother Two in NYC and Brother One here with me in Atlanta, it's not too often that all of us are together.
So Thanksgiving is it. Wednesday we went to Maggiano's for dinner and ate much too much. Sister wore the cardigan I made her. Clearly she likes it very much. Here she's holding the hat I made her boyfriend. Both items made from Manos del Uruguay in Eclipse (sweater) and Adobe (hat) on size 10 US needles. 
Thursday we ate much too much as well (ham from Honey-Baked Ham, grilled chicken breast, grilled Italian sausage, mashed potatoes, wild rice and white rice, asparagus, and green beans).
Friday morning Sister and her boyfriend got up early and by 6am were at Home Depot. Sister's Boyfriend had his eye on some items and when they went on sale, he was there to snap them up. Then they went to Kohl's where Sister picked up cashmere sweaters, originally $90 for less than $40. By the time the rest of us got up, they were back, and back in bed. But there were up in time for us to go to the Atlanta Zoo.
I had never been there and it was sunny (see: historic drought) and cold. Sister's Boyfriend wore his new hat, I wore a hand knit beret and wore my yellow Argosy scarf in Malabrigo. Mmmmmm, Malabrigo.....
We saw the pandas, which Husband thought were the most overrated animal and Brother One or Two thought was just alright. Here's a picture:
My favorite part was the owl, leashed by the leg. We happened upon a zoo keeper giving a talk about owls. The owl must have been happy to be out of the cage but it also tried flying away once or twice, and would sit there making soft squawking noises. 
Then here's a picture of the same kind of owls in their cages:
This bird, a cassowary or something, was kind of freaky. It's at least 4 feet tall if not taller and look at that beak. Good thing there's a fence between me and it.
Sister wanted a hat like her boyfriend's (Ela's Favorite Hat, from One Skein Wonders, the original, not the designer edition). So using some of the leftover yarn from her sweater, I cast on another hat before leaving for the zoo at about noon. Her boyfriend drove, while I knitted. I knitted at the zoo, even in the cold. I took a break for dinner, then knit while playing Scrabble and mah-jong, and at about 1:30am, finished. Brother One was amazed. Here it is in the florescent lighting of our den on the couch.
Here's a picture of Sister and her Boyfriend Saturday morning in their matching hats, wearing sweatshirts they borrowed from me. Why yes, I did go to the University of Wisconsin.
I'm loving the yarn and pattern so much I'm making one for me. But slower.
All six of us then signed a birthday card for Ba, our father. Sister's Boyfriend didn't think he should sign it, but why not? It'll make Ba happy to know that Sister's still got a boyfriend. Ba's really concerned that she's "on the wrong side of 35" and not married. It's kind of a sore point with Sister.
Ba's a huge Gone with the Wind fan, like many Taiwanese of his generation. A few weeks ago, Rhett Butler's People was published and Brother One went to a book signing and the author, Donald McCaig, personalized for Ba. So cool.
Another reason I love Thanksgiving with my family, is that's the only time I get to play mah-jong. We did a lot of that on Thursday and Friday, and even squeezed in three games Saturday morning before we had to leave to take Sister and her boyfriend to the airport. And I won all three of those games. Ha ha!
Husband and Sister's Boyfriend don't know how to play mah-jong, plus it's a four person game, so it was me, Sister, and Brothers One and Two. Just like when we were growing up.
There was also much Scrabble playing. Brother Two is a member of Mensa, so he made sure to come up with the best words. Like armoire. At one point I'm staring at my tiles trying to figure out what word I could make. Brother Two shifted them around and revealed select. I was impressed. It turns out that neither Husband or Sister's Boyfriend knew how to play Scrabble. I find that rather surprising. Fortunately it's an easy game to learn and they're pretty smart people.
Saturday night, when it was me, Husband, and Brothers One and Two, it was euchre and Jameson whiskey time! Euchre is a 4 person game that's essentially a shortened form of bridge. Ba taught Brothers One and Two how to play bridge and Brother One suggested that we learn. But why when euchre's fun and fast? It does involve trump cards and I always have to write down which suite is trump. Other wise I have to keep asking and people tend to get annoyed.
Today it's Sunday and silent. Growing up in a family of six, it was normal to have people around all the time. But we haven't lived together in a long, long time. Now that they're all gone and Husband's at the office, I'm in the house by myself and things are back to normal. And our eating and drinking will have to go back to normal too.
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