craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

At least re clothes, I know a few ways they were extended to save women labor: Skirts of dresses were made with deep pleats around the bottoms that could be taken up or let down if someone grew or clothes were handed down to a shorter girl. Also when fabrics got worn or stained on the outside, solid colors could be cut apart and the pieces turned inside-out and resewn to give the appearance of new cloth.

n a frontier agrarian economy with few/no neighbors and a long distance from commercial centers, every household was ""self-sufficient"" or else you just didn't have things. I don't have a citation for this, but I don't think most people would dispute that men, collectively, built cabins, cleared fields, tilled and planted fields, harvested crops, hunted and fished and had to be good shots and woodsmen, cared for and trained livestock, made furniture/did basic woodworking, and so on. If you were really bad at some of those things, your family just had to wear ill-fitting clothes or sit on wobbly stools...tho I guess you couldn't really afford to be "bad" at the ones that involved basic subsistence.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, July 24, 2013 2:21 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just think it's more likely that some men were more oriented toward certain of these skills and some toward others, and that trade still took place to make up the difference, even among families that lived relatively remotely. Yes the average man or woman probably had a FAR wider range of subsistence skills than 99% of modern people, but I don't think that even in the colonial days most families did everything themselves. And there were specialists and tradesmen (who, again, would still probably have a range of other subsistence skills) way, way before the industrial revolution.

Uh I don't think it's in dispute that the authors meant a conglomerate housewife or whatever. When you say, "the pre-industrial housewife" you're obviously not referring to the one and only woman who was ever a pre-industrial housewife. So I don't know who you're arguing with but it's pretty dumb.

yeah hurting, i don't think anyone was arguing against the existence of trade?? L's point seems to have been that this was work that was done ~at home~, rather than at a 'work-place', and that as such these tasks fell under a rubric of household management which was primarily the domain of women?

yeah I guess I am kind of getting off on a different tangent, but I feel like the myth of complete "self-sufficiency" is sort of related to the thread topic as well, and it's something I was just talking about with a friend so it was on my mind.

worth noting that there isn't any significant movement to add cute indie/artisanal "specialness" value to hugely skill and material dependent craft objects like guitars.

― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Wednesday, July 24, 2013 4:52 PM (2 hours ago)

god how i wish this was true

Orbit: Thanks! That makes more sense...

custom shop guitars, boutique manufacturers, hand painted effects pedals, etc

on the topic of self-subsistence, you know who gets really crafty?? doomsday preppers!

stupid effects pedals are deeply offensive to me

kinda lost me with iphone / apple / steve jobs stuff, tho.

uh, yeah, think i lost myself a bit tbh. it was a cackhanded attempt at trying to find modern parallels - an association of craftsmanship with a modern item, where industrial methods of production didn't preclude the notion of craftsmanship in the design (a dissociation of the physical notion of crafting from the notion of the 'pride of the producer' and the subsequent difficulty of maintaining that 'tradition'. Put plain - how does a company or product at the top stay at the top - the problem of progress or putrefaction/petrification. Don't really think it works - at least without several quite significant intermediary steps - but i'd had a couple I'm afraid.

where industrial methods of production didn't preclude the notion of craftsmanship in the design

i can think of a lot of examples of this, mostly in textiles and apparel

relevant:

S.E.H Kelly makes garments with the makers of the British Isles. The best mills and factories in the Isles, these makers — and, with them, every cloth is woven, and every garment is made, with the unstinting standards, and the characteristic sturdiness, of the best British make.

http://www.sehkelly.com/about/

their photo tumblr is one of my absolute favorites, as far as menswear stuff goes. most of the photos focus on the materials, processes, and technologies that go into the producing the garments, rather than their design or how the finished product is sold / styled. it is def a fetishistic catalog in a way; it has a sort of preoccupation with tools. the process of clothing manufacture is so largely obscured from the view of the consumer that i find the focus pretty engaging, even if i know it's a kind of a silly nostalgic view of the nobility and purity of the way things used to be made.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/3dbdb86a82d4280d8215c97551b352dc/tumblr_mpikvyTAye1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/abe962e0197aab76364d5eec53508a41/tumblr_mntu4zVbvQ1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/df174e703aeddc9f2ba1fe87318db807/tumblr_mmzzmsCqDW1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg

ok i'm done

No, more!!!

loads more here:

http://sehkelly.tumblr.com/

strange noodle looms

on the level of personal experience, tho -- i work for my family's business, a t-shirt company. we are something of a specialty printer but first and foremost we are known for our tie-dye designs. in most people's experience tie-dye is rightly epitome of 'crunchy craft' insomuch as it's results are highly random & notoriously difficult to control with precision. color matching is not always easy, but there's also the question of coming up with large-scale manufacturing process that will reliably produce the desired pattern over & over again. we produce a lot of inventory, so there are standardized folding & pleating techniques, templates, dye recipes & ratios, laundry procedures, methods of dye dispensing, etc etc -- all of which go into standardizing output of this particular craft, which is the basis of our reputation, on a large scale.

Love SEH Kelly! Beyond love!

I have always wished I was part of some family business that included being skilled in a trade that I needed to learn and become great at. It always clashed with my sister's wish that we were just an old money family (boring). My family is made up of various office and teaching jobs. I'm the only one who does anything crafty. Grandmother's did thread pulling and needlework to relax and that's about it.

http://www.jpeterman.com/One-of-a-Kind

first google result
http://pandpguitars.com

"Every guitar is meticulously crafted from carefully selected pieces of reclaimed timber. Each is unique in appearance, sound, and story. Over a century ago a carpenter built a barn. Milled timbers of ash were hand hewn and framed to last for ages. The builder probably didn't consider that 150 years later that timber takes a second life as an electric guitar, but stories like this are what makes each piece special."

retracted

buy our stories

It's funny because if it's the story of the wood itself that's interesting then maybe they shouldn't sand it down, destroy the patina, and make it into something else that's brand new and doesn't have a story. People should just start collecting reclaimed wood planks and displaying them as art pieces.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/110976884/reclaimed-wood-art

really wish I could find the SNL driftwood sculptor bit with John Malkovich

i like that wood art thing

Ha!!Loved that driftwood sketch!

this woman...
http://olga66.wordpress.com/my-works/

i can't decide whether 'reclaimed' or 'upcycled' is the worse marketing term

"reclaimed" sounds fine to me.

that first wood artist is seriously underwhelming; the second at least has some kind of brutalist vibe going

the first one seemed more of a decor piece whereas the second one seemed more like something you'd see in a gallery or museum

well yes

idea for a hipster furniture store: Reclaimed Freight

HA! Or just Pallets!

on that note, i saw someone on craiglist locally selling cable spools as reclaimed coffee tables

i mean they've ALWAYS been coffee tables, i'm pretty sure my dad had one in his first apartment too, but his wasn't 'reclaimed,' is was junk

my boy cyrus was making upcycled dorito bag purses at camp the other day. #westernmass4ever

but did he meticulously craft the purses from carefully selected dorito bags that each had a unique story?

Upcycled Cinderblocks

reclaimed lint

it's interesting how a disproportionate amount of the stuff that's marketed this way is actually stuff that probably doesn't require a huge amount of true "craftsmanship." Like fucking pickles -- I mean ok, you use higher quality ingredients, you fuck around with the recipe a little, you try different kinds of pickling jars or whatever, but ultimately anyone with a good sense of taste could probably hit on a good pickle-making process relatively quickly and the rest is marketing. OTOH I have a friend who makes really beautiful furniture in brooklyn, and the thing is he has been doing various kinds of carpentry and construction almost his whole life, and his family was in the business too. So even though his furniture is very much marketed in that Brooklyn way, it can probably make about as legitimate a claim to "craftsmanship" as anything can.

just think of how many recipes they had to throw out

how many pickles they had to taste thoughtfully

the records they kept about each pickle's flavor notes

the balance of garlic and dill, so carefully adjusted from batch to batch

the number of different fonts they tried out for their business cards

i want to sell pickles made in the spirit of jazz culture, that is, the recipes are improvised with each batch.

i once bought a jar of "irregular batch" pickles from the discount store. they tasted unusual.

russian roulette style pickles. 1/100 jars is poisoned.

you just need to stick with it, contenderizer, enough to get rid of all the programming big pickle has done to your tastes all these years -

WITHOUT YOUR EVEN REALIZING IT!!

vlasic more like vlascist