Summer Slowdown: Crafting Thoughtfully through a Busy Season

In our last blog post we talked about spring cleaning and storing our handknits for the summer. Today we want to talk about moving through summertime, the season that tends to fly by faster than any other, with our eyes open, choosing projects thoughtfully, and attending to sometimes-neglected aspects of our crafts. We'll talk about tending to the things we love, look at a few recent projects from staff that required some thoughtful changing of lanes and expectations, and touch a little on how "slow fashion" goes beyond being a buzzword.

But first, please allow me to direct your attention to this amazing post showcasing the bounty of the Sow's Ear, inside and out, and let inspiration bloom. As ever, thanks to Jean Marie for being our incomparable garden fairy.

Tending to our Creative Lives

Yarn Manager Sara and I (Rose) have been talking this summer about being really thoughtful in the ways we tend to our creative lives, and to our creations themselves. Taking good care of our handknit/crocheted/woven/etc garments and accessories, so that they stay beautiful and last for years to come, is one of those things that is, on paper, a no-brainer. And yet, how many of us have stacks of sweaters that just need buttons, shawls that need to be re-blocked to make the lacework sing again, pullovers whose sleeves need to be shortened or lengthened just a little, blankets with a hole or a frayed edge... The list goes on.

(In case you have any doubts, I'm putting both my hands up.)

This struggle to understand why we procrastinate, and to find ways of putting our good intentions into practice in a way that fits into our lives, led me to the deep-dive into washing and storing that became the above-linked blog about spring cleaning. Now I hope to carry that momentum forward, to break down and understand another hurdle in my crafting life:

Caring for the things we love

We care for what we love - and we love the things we care for.

The experience of caring for an ailing pet or human loved one often deepens your connection. Tend a garden and feel the bond of connection and responsibility to the earth grow along with your flowers and vegetables. Care is, or can be, self-sustaining. I have several knitted items that I feel a love for that seems disproportionate to the fact that a shawl cannot love me back, and yet. The hours and hours I spent with that yarn and the hundreds and thousands of stitches, each of which passed directly through my hands, all of these add up to something I treasure deeply.

And yet:

I recently helped a customer brainstorm a fix for a frayed stitch that would cause a hole down the line if not tended to. I'm proud of my knowledge and skill in the realm of knitting that puts these kinds of practical solutions within my grasp, so why is it so hard to simply reach out and do the work?

I’m sure there are as many reasons as there are procrastinators on this planet. For me, I feel a similar sort of resistance as I do when I know I should gauge swatch, but I don’t want to. It’s not rational – I fully understand why these processes are important. And when I stop and think about it, I end up getting annoyed with myself because it seems to me that this resistance to taking care is at the heart of the “fast-everything” culture of waste and over-consumption that we are trying to push back against by the simple act of making our own clothes, by choosing to engage thoughtfully with the principles of “slow fashion.”

(More about slow fashion a little further down.)

Mindset shift: from Chore to Joy

I know that this is a mindset thing: the feeling that spending hundreds of hours making a sweater is a joy, but spending a few hours every year caring for that sweater is a chore. Luckily mindsets are malleable, and I’m going to work on changing mine. I would like to fold the routine of caring for my handknits into that same feeling of joy that comes from creating them in the first place.

Perhaps we can think about an annual assessment of the state of our woolens as a reunion of sorts; a chance to catch up with beloved items that we haven't spent much time with lately, reminding ourselves what we love about them, perhaps catching little warning signs of trouble before they become full-on problems (as we talked about last time, regularly checking on and airing your handknits can help you catch sign of fiber moths, mildew, and other dreaded problems), but also creating a space to think honestly about what's working, and what isn't, in your relationship with your wardrobe.

Because taking care also involves an element of realizing when something isn't right, and acting to fix it instead of leaving it to languish in the Drawer of Unworn FOs.

Don't just make do - Mend!

Now for the fun stuff - let's look at some recent staff projects!

Sara: Sweater Surgery

Have you seen Sara's revival of her DRK Everyday sweater, or what she playfully referred to as her 'Frankenstein project'?

In her own words: "This sweater has been on the needles for almost 3 years. I got distracted but came back every once in a while to work with this gorgeous yarn from @mosaicmoonyarn and this week when the talented Morwenna announced they were closing, I decided it needed to be finished. I had taken a design risk with stripes and regretted it, plus I needed to add some length. So I grabbed the scissors and got to work. Turned out quite nicely I believe."

This is such an uplifting example of treating our relationships with our handknits as something that is open to change. Sara has a really personal connection to this dyer and her yarn: "It inspired me to start knitting," she says, adding that she is "so grateful for the creativity of others." Sara has been working with Mosaic Moon Yarn for seventeen years. With the company closing, the yarn became not just special but precious, and deserving of rescue from the fate of forever sitting in a drawer because it didn't look or fit quite right.

Click over to Sara's instagram to watch her sweater surgery process (it's a little scary - scissors! - and a lot inspiring), and then click here to revel with her in the end result.

Christine: Listening to the yarn

Above left is our store sample of the Sheep Camp Sweater by Jennifer Berg, making use of a glorious, color-shifting skein of Ewetopia Helix DK. Christine started knitting this pattern recently, using this rich, blue-to-green Helix that they absolutely loved in the skein. However, after getting through the yoke, Christine realized it just wasn't working, the colors weren't playing together in the way they'd imagined.

It takes a lot of courage to stop a project once you've already got a fair bit of time invested in it, and say no, this just isn't quite right. But that's what Christine did, prioritizing saving the Helix yarn, so they could turn around and use it not just for a different project - but for a different craft altogether. Above right you can see the way it's turning out when crocheted, rather than knitted. Since knit and crochet stitches use the yarn in different ways, variegated yarns will pool and shift and gradiate (I just made that word up, let's make it happen) very differently. Listening to the yarn, listening to your response to the yarn, is a huge part of ending up with a project you're happy with.

At one of our recent Queer & Ally Crafting Club stitch sessions, I once again got to see Christine's yarn whispering in action.

Below left is a closeup of Katia Volume, a thick and thin yarn that, as Christine says, does all the work of patterning for you. This is a yarn we have discovered that doesn't lend itself so well to crochet stitch patterns, so here Christine is using it to make a very simple stockinette stitch shawl to let those puffs of cotton really take center stage. And speaking of that, below middle is an instance of a gradient yarn working exactly as desired in a knit stitch. Christine is holding two yarns together for a custom marl; a Zauberball Crazy and a Kelbourne Woolens Skipper.

And we were all just loving the way this below right skein of Malabrigo was an ever-evolving delight in this bag which is essentially a sampler of many different stitches, all of them beautiful!

And now back to me, Rose, reporting to you from the Land of Good Intentions.

The Staple Linen Top by Joji Locatelli is one of my go-to patterns for summer yarn, and a few years back when Berroco discontinued their 100% linen chainette yarn Stonewash, first I was heartbroken and then I was excited, because it meant deep discounts as we clearanced out the remaining yarn. However, by the time I got to the sale bin, the only color left in any quantity to make a top was this peachy-pink color which, as it turns out, matches my skin tone almost exactly and makes me look naked when I wear it. And as a result I never wear it.

Well, I figure I have two options: I can work on getting a really deep tan, or I can overdye the finished top.

If I can transform this top into a nice charcoal color, I absolutely know it's going to live up its name as a wardrobe staple. I've had this bottle of Rit all-purpose dye for...about a year. The other day I took it out, and you can see how far I got:

Taking the first step into a totally new craft is intimidating, even something that seems as simple as single-color dyeing. I actually have dyed yarn before, in a workshop at Melissa's studio (she still has spots available in her August and September workshops if you're interested!), but I'm feeling it as a hurdle to go from her professional setup to my own kitchen.

However! I do plan to ask her advice. And that brings me to my final point on this subject: there is nothing we want more than for you to take full advantage of the expertise, born of years and years of experience across a multitude of fibercrafts, that has been gathered under one roof at The Sow's Ear.

We are about to celebrate our 25th year in business, and every day we are living into the vision that Amy and Melissa had for this little shop when they opened the doors back in 2000: creating a place for crafters to come together, learn from each other, and enjoy each other's company.

As always, we offer a treasure trove of classes and free craft-a-longs, not just knitting but Amigurumi as well as traditional and Tunisian crochet, crafts like weaving and embroidery, and hand-dyeing with Melissa as mentioned above.

A few specific classes/opportunities I want to mention as being in line with what we talked about today are:

1. These three with Holley, which can all be found here in this menu: Let's Start a Project, Let's Finish a Project, and Let's Figure This Out.
2. Leanna's Friday Lunch Help Sessions. $10 to drop in between 12 and 2.
3. Embroidery with Amber will give you the foundational skills for both decorative embroidery and visible mending, and our Sashiko Workshop on August 10th, which is all about visible mending!

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Slow Fashion: An Invitation to Go Beyond the Buzz

The terms fast fashion and slow fashion have reached the saturation point where they cease to carry much meaning, and in some cases take on new meanings that tend to make people feel the need to choose sides and form judgments about those on the outside or other side.

Just for a minute, I’d like to look past whatever baggage those terms might have for each of us, and integrate it into a holistic way of thinking about the world. I said above that I felt that taking care of our handknits was the antidote to fast fashion, the very thing we are trying to push back against by the simple act of making our own clothes. That small, simple realization, involving as it did something that is very real to me, something tactile and close to my heart, opened the doors to a large-scale understanding that resistance to the very idea of taking care is at the heart of the “fast-everything” moment we are living in.

The time we live in is quite extraordinary. And I’m using that term in its very traditional sense of being ‘outside the ordinary.’ In just a few generations, industrialization, modernization and globalization have made the world unrecognizable as the place our ancestors inhabited for thousands of years before.

The exchange of resources – including of course fiber, textile – has almost universally become the extraction of resources. Labor, water, raw materials, etc, are extracted from one country with devastating disregard for people and environment, and moved around the world to benefit a different country, where waste and overconsumption is encouraged to keep money and resources flowing in that direction. The few who benefit from this system are insulated from its worst effects, the many who are exploited by this system are made vulnerable to its entire spectrum of effects. This is the intersection of colonialism, capitalism, and the climate crisis; they are inextricably woven together.

What can slow fashion do to mitigate this? Maybe nothing, but as Maria Popova says, we “Telescop[e] from the particular to the universal.” So maybe starting here can be a pathway to a new (which is of course an old) way of looking at our world and our resources and seeing ourselves as part of a web of relationships. From the sheep in the pasture to the yarn on our needles to the clothes on our bodies, we make choices about who we support, what practices we support. These farms and scourers and spinners and dyers and shops may look like individual points on a map, but they are interconnected. A culture that values individuality above all will necessarily begin to devalue these connections, and deprioritize taking care.

We talk about summer feeling like a whirlwind that passes us by while we try to ‘keep up’ and ‘make the most of it.’ I see this, too, as a result of ‘fast everything’ culture, where time is treated as a commodity and we are constantly un-satisfied.

Taking care, slowing down, prioritizing actions, small as they may seem, that support others – be they companies or individuals – who are also prioritizing the things you value, these are choices we can make. In a time when it is simply not possible to keep up with everything that is taking place around us or to process how quickly the world is changing, keeping our minds open to see the choices before us is powerful – but difficult. Anxiety tends to narrow our focus and limit us to seeing fewer choices – and especially fewer good choices – which leads to paralysis. Keeping our minds open so that we can see more than just the few, limited choices that are handed to us, is crucial to combat feelings of paralysis and powerlessness. I think this is what Viktor Frankl would call our freedom of will, our ability to choose how we react to our circumstances.

Before I telescope out too far, let’s bring it back home and end on this note: I vote for keeping the conversation going around slow fashion, recognizing that it is not a single, niche topic that’s only relevant to the crafting or fashion community.

Here is the article from which I borrowed the line about telescoping from the particular to the universal, Maria Popova’s lyrical essay: Viktor Frankl on Humor as a Lifeline to Sanity and Survival.

If you’re looking for something to read that interweaves big-picture realism with optimism grounded in specific action, check out: It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform our World by Mikaela Loach. Yes, it is a book about the environment, but it’s really a book about everything, and she paints a powerful picture of how our interconnectedness could be leveraged to affect sweeping positive change across what have been traditionally packaged as unconnected issues. As one review said, “Reading It's Not That Radical feels like having a conversation with a well-informed but compassionate friend.” (This book is available in our local library system but once again I have the only copy checked out. However I feel like this book needs to be everywhere so if you’re interested, please suggest that your local library buys a copy!)

And as always, Indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer's writing offers an antidote to the "tragedy of the commons" mindset that posits competition for resources as a societal inevitability, thereby seeming to excuse greed and exploitation as inalienable human characteristics. Check out The Serviceberry (buy, borrow) for a mindset-shifting look at how we can move from considering our economies as rooted in scarcity, to rooted in gratitude and abundance.