The New Knitting: This Is Not Your Grandma's Arts & Crafts

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted July 28, 2008.

You don't have to handcraft your next checkbook cover out of an old plastic tennis racket sheath that you plucked from a neighbor's garbage bin, cut up and sewed. You don't have to adorn your bathroom curtain with repetitive designs (sea horses, say, or tugboats) using a chiseled half-potato and colorfast fabric paint. You could use the free checkbook cover the bank gave you and buy ready-made curtains. Nor must you snip the sleeves off that knitted top and replace them -- get out the matching thread --with floaty scarves. But hey.

The DIY movement wants you to make stuff. The DIY movement is huge, and sometimes it's charming and sometimes it's annoying and it is an anti-mass-production insurrection, a cuddly-soft revolt whose arsenal is crochet hooks, needles and glue guns. It is active in an all-too-passive age. It is a revolution against dehumanization in a programmed, processed world, and Doing It Yourself declares the self. It is an anti-retail uprising whose strategy is Make, don't buy -- at least not new, never full-price. It is one more way to recycle, restore, rescue and renew -- and every stenciled paper bag transformed into gift wrap, every lipstick tube transformed into a tampon case, cleans up the Earth while telling major industries: Fuck you.

A flood of books, many of them spawned by blogs, takes up that chorus. In Anticraft: Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister (North Light, 2007), Rene Rigdon and Zabet Stewart declare themselves "sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out." In Lotta Prints: How to Print with Anything, from Potatoes to Linoleum (Chronicle, 2008), Lotta Jansdotter suggests chiseled turnips and carrots as well. In Creepy Cute Crochet (Quirk, 2008), Christen Haden promises: "You can teach yourself to crochet, often in as little as one day (it's true!)." In Alternation (North Light, 2007), Shannon Okey and Alexandra Underhill hail "enviro-chic." In Subversive Seamster (Taunton, 2007), Melissa Rannels and Hope Meng declare: "We derive the most fashionable satisfaction from knowing that we are reusing and recycling what already exists in this material world -- and looking damn good doing it!"

You already know this, or you will: Crafting is back.

Not as it was when pioneers made dolls from clothespins -- when your average person even knew what clothespins were. But that's the point. This is not crafting by necessity. This is not crafting to kill time. This is crafting to claim identity, to save the world from soulless junk. To casual observers it looks like adults making toys and keeping them. But this is a resurgence with a vengeance.

By the start of this decade, the counterculture had reached a near-endgame. Just about every aesthetic and activity that could have been informed by punk already was. We might not have been aware of this as such, and still we might not credit it, but punk spawned so much of the angryuglybeautiful, the violent getpisseddestroy that we take for granted now. And DIY: Punk was DIY music, after all. Played in DIY costumes at DIY venues, with DIY announcements taped to poles. But by this decade, punk was one-plus generation back. What hadn't yet been long-since punkified? What had stayed so uncool so long as to still be untouched?

Did someone say "embroidery hoop"?

I craft too. Check out these bottle-cap-framed miniature colored-pencil portraits, this coquillage matchbox.

These new crafting books -- and dozens more, such as Khris Cochran's The DIY Bride and Kristen Rask's Plush You -- turn the toothpick-whittling our ancestors did beside the bonfire into something now performed in dorm rooms under Che posters. And just as postmodern crafters refashion polyester golf trousers into floofy plaid faux-feather boas, they are also deeply invested in refashioning the public image of crafting itself. It is imperative that they distance themselves from past crafters, who were not cool: from the toothpick-whittlers and the summer-camp lanyard-plaiters to the late-20th-century toilet-roll-cover knitters and tie-dyers. This is not your grandmother's crafting, they say -- literally. The Anticraft authors proclaim craft "de-grannified." Plush You! scorns a "stinky, grumpy old grandfather." Subversive Seamster's authors urge readers to raid "grandma's wardrobe" and make sexy corsets out of "old man pants." It's as if they feel compelled to keep reminding us that they're young.

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Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."

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