"Handmade 2.0" in the NYT
This article is the first one I’ve read in a long while about crafty topics in a major, non-craft publication that hasn’t completely squicked me out in some way. At least it didn’t go for either side of the usual “hipsters do crafts!” / “it’s not your grandma’s [x]” dichotomy most reporters choose, and there’s lot of interesting information about Etsy.
How are your holiday preparations going? I made my book deadline (well, the first part of it, anyway) and decided to go on a cooking frenzy around midnight, because I was still too wired to sleep. Rising on the stove right now is bread dough, plus there’s cookie dough waiting to be baked, a fresh quiche cooling on the countertop, pasta sauce from scratch and some other things packed into the fridge…
I’ve got a sweater that’s just about done, but it’s locked in a metal file cabinet upstairs so the cats can’t get it. Taking it out would surely wake up my boyfriend, who would be wholly unamused by “well, I ran out of things to bake and although it’s 3:00 in the morning, I felt like knitting” as an explanation.
Someone once asked me how I get so many things done. I said, sarcastically, that I am actually a robot, and I don’t sleep. But that’s a total lie. I love sleep! Love it! I just have a little too much caffeine left in my system from writing today. If you had a camera trained on me all day tomorrow, I could pretty much guarantee that I’ll be falling over by 2:00 p.m. or so. Good thing the shop is closed Mondays!
Later today, presuming I don’t fall over, I am going to solve a tricky sideways steeking problem for a pattern I’m writing. This is one reason you should always keep thrift store sweaters around for experimentation, it’s much faster than knitting swatches.
It was OK on the crafts, I suppose, but it was pretty stoopid on the children’s literature. Swimmy is a book by Leo Lionni, a great designer/art director who, by any reckoning, led one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century and wrote the autobiography to prove it. That the Esty founders chose Swimmy as a creation myth speaks well of them. That Walker or the Times editors didn’t happen to mention that Lionni wrote the book or seem to know its status as a children’s classic doesn’t speak so well of them.