In my last post I described my plans for a sweater inspired by Harlequin costumes and Venice, and how I finally found the perfect pattern in a 37-year-old issue of Vogue Knitting.
The pattern is #2 Harlequin Pullover by Anne Mieke Louwerens. I got started by pulling out literally every partial and single skein of DK yarn I had, determined to absolutely decimate my stash. I also frogged a sweater that didn’t end up fitting how I wanted, and used the yarn from that – Stipple DK from Yarn Hero in the colorway Dagger – as my main color.
This yarn is so pretty–and discontinued, which I only noticed last night when I had a sudden feeling that I would need more to finish. Whoops. I might be playing yarn chicken with this project, especially since I added two repeats of the diamond motif to make the sweater bigger. Published in an era before knitters were grading size-inclusive designs, this sweater is “one-size-fits-all”* (*read: would definitely not fit me). I’ll manage though. I should definitely have enough for the front and the two sleeves, and I can live with a contrasting back if needed.
So far I’m most of the way through my front, which I’m also making a little longer with one additional row of diamonds, and finished one sleeve.
But it wouldn’t be honest of me if I didn’t reveal the shitshow underneath:
Yep. I’ve knit intarsia before, but this is by far the most complicated intarsia project I’ve done, with the most colors in play at once. The yarn management is unwieldy–if I want to get up from working on this, I either need to finish a row so that all the yarn is on one side of my body, or I have to slide out from under it to avoid mixing all the yarn balls together. It’s like a really bad seatbelt.
This project lives in the corner of the couch. A couch that belongs to my housemates, who I rent from, and their dog. If I work on this project every day, I can kind of justifying leaving it out, because putting it away means destroying the loose yarn ball organization system and having to spend a lot of time untangling when I want to bring it back out from the project bag.
Obviously this project can’t travel, and suddenly I’m commuting again. I recently started teaching for a local university’s college readiness program, and now I’m teaching writing and composition to high school seniors at two different schools. So I’m back on that city bus, traveling from one to the other, and I physically can’t ride public transport without a knitting or crochet project.
I’ve also been working on an improvised bandana for that cooler weather that’s supposed to be showing up soon. I’m using a lovely wool/cashmere blend, which I got from a yarn company that I will not name since they’ve since been exposed for toxic management. I had two balls of this, and used one to make a Wedding Necktie for my partner. Now I can match with my own neckwear.
So beautifully mindless that it’s impossible for to lose my place when going over a pothole. I decided to use an i-cord edge, but now I’m worried that it’s too tight and causing it to curl in too much. I’ll see how it looks after blocking–if that can’t fix the tension, I’ll redo it.
And that’s everything on the needles this WIP Wednesday. See you next time.
I began indulging my love for harlequin motifs with my Junco Sweater, but at the end of last month, I got to visit the harlequin homeland: Italy!
My partner, who is a freelance assistant camera operator, worked on Cover-Up, a documentary about journalist Seymour Hersh and directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. He was invited to attend its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and I got to go with!
This event was wild. Most of the time, I felt like I had snuck into the back door of a party I hadn’t been invited to. My partner noticed Mads Mikkelsen and was tempted to tell him how much he enjoyed his work in Death Stranding. I accidentally caught Tilda Swinton on camera trying to film an art installation. Willem Dafoe was hanging out in the hotel bar. I drank Negronis while watching people I can only assume were European royalty pass by in evening gowns. Guards walked around wearing military berets and machine guns. I was nervous to make sudden moves.
The level of wealth was strange to me. It was strange to witness in person. It was especially strange considering that Cover-Up is about a guy who blew the top off multiple war crimes committed by American’s military, namely, the My Lai massacre during the US invasion of Vietnam, and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion of Iraq. Hersh is a truly remarkable person who pursues the truth regardless of what people think, and what enemies he makes. He’s been accused of spreading conspiracy theories. He was the subject of angry, worried phone calls between Nixon and Kissinger. He’s on the left in this photo from Reuters.
Director Laura Poitras, director Mark Obenhaus and journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh pose during a photocall for the movie “Cover Up” out of competition, at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, Venice, Italy, August 29, 2025. REUTERS/Yara Nardi
The same day Cover-Up premiered, so did After the Hunt, a new Luca Guadagnino movie starring Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri. We passed the red carpet during their entrance but couldn’t see over the wall of photographers. But I do wish I had seen Roberts’s dress with my own eyes:
Roberts wore Atelier Versace, a long blue-black gown with a low-contrast pattern of diamonds cascading down the skirt and rising up the shoulders. I thought this was a fashionable nod to the history of comedia dell’arte and Harlequin in its country of origin.
In commedia dell’arte theater, Harlequin is a stock character, a servant and a trickster with two masters, undermining the authority of both. Which is also why Harley Quinn of DC comics makes such a good anti-hero: sometimes allied with the abusive Joker and sometimes Batman, she flips between her penchant for chaos and her moral agency.
HarlequinHarley Quinn
Harlequin’s costume patterns range from diamonds to patchwork triangles, often colorful and bright, but sometimes black and red. And in Venice, those motifs manifest in Carnevale masks. As a former Catholic, I still feel drawn to the gilded imagery of Catholic religious ritual, and the way it has adapted (or appropriated, in many cases) pagan traditions. It’s catnip to a heathen like me.
I also got to visit the Peggy Guggenheim collection, where they happened to have a temporary exhibit featuring the work of Helena Maria Vieira da Silva, a Portuguese abstract painter who mapped space using grids of colorful squares. I was really taken by this exhibit and Vieira da Silva’s style, and I think it’s no coincidence that she also worked in tapestry and stained glass – the way those forms naturally lead toward geometry, pixelation, and abstraction probably had an influence on her painting style, the signature use of a grid to create depth and find form in her depictions of movement, cityscapes, and interiors.
“Ballet, or The Harlequins”“Maria Helena II”, a portrait of Vieira da Silva by her husband, painter Árpád Szenes
Now that I’m back from Venice, I’ve been looking for ways to translate that interest in diamond motifs into knitwear. Through my searches on Ravelry, I came across this project by user SilasM.
That was it, that was exactly what I wanted to make. The pattern is Harlequin Pullover by Anne Mieke Louwerens, an artist who has worked in textiles and knitwear design, painting, graphic design, and ceramics.
But I had a small roadblock. I couldn’t find this pattern online anywhere, because it was originally published in the fall/winter 1988 issue of Vogue Knitting.
The Harlequin sweater modeled in the Vogue Issue.
But that’s why God made eBay, right? Luckily I found a hard copy of the issue from a seller on the site, who kept this magazine miraculously preserved for the last 36 years.
After looking at the pattern directions, I’m already planning a couple mods. To feel truly in the piebald spirit of Harlequin, I want to make all the contrast color diamonds different colors. I’m also planning to add some shoulder shaping, and sleeve decreases to preserve some yardage. I’m split on the cowl neck. I love how it looks, but I’m partial to lower necklines. It’s added by picking up the stitches around the neck after the rest of the sweater pieces are grafted together, so I won’t have to make a decision until much, much later.
The diamond motif wasn’t the only thing that caught my eye in Venice. Right now I’m also enamored with celestial imagery, which is all over the city (and other parts of Italy, according to my friend who has traveled more extensively there). So I was completely transfixed by the Torre dell’Orologio in San Marco Square, an astronomical clock tower depicting the 12 zodiac signs. It tells the time, and the positions of the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the astrological position of the sun.
I also found plenty of inspiration in the tile floors at San Giorgio, a church and monastery. The island, San Giorgio Maggiore, is also home to a photography gallery, which had an exhibit on Robert Mapplethorpe while we visited.
Fellow weebs will recognize San Giorgio as the location where King Crimson is revealed in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5
In addition to Venice’s classic sights, we were invited by the Cover-Up production team to the Biennale Architetturra to see the installation “Calculating Empires” by Kate Crawford, a researcher who has been studying AI for the past decade, and artist Vladen Joler. I got to speak a little with Dr. Crawford, who was so extremely cool. The project is available to view online here.
Also at the Biennale Architetturra was Necto, an installation made from knit fiber and LED lights. Read the full details here.
This is what I was filming when Tilda Swinton’s tour group came through.
And besides the “official” art, there were tons of murals and graffiti all around Venice. Much of it was anti-Amazon and anti-Bezos, since he had just completely shut down the city for his own wedding just a few months prior. Most of it was in support of a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
And last, the two funniest images I took. On the left, a young man whose whole job is to carry a falcon around to scare pigeons away from this rooftop bar. On the right, a trio of suited, ear wire-wearing tough guy security guards at the Film Festival take a much-needed gelato break.
I’m really on a cardigan kick! The ones that I’ve made in the past have become too small for me, with the exception of my Felix Cardigan, which is an excellent staple piece that pretty much goes with anything. But lately I’ve been wanting showstoppers and statement-makers, especially when they can eat up as much of my stash as possible. A two-color brioche design like the Oliveros is ideal for this.
Brioche is an intimidating technique to learn, and fairly time-intensive (you basically work every row/round twice), but it creates one of the most relaxed fabrics in knitting. Cleo Malone, the designer, embraces that with a construction mostly unfettered by anything that constricts the stitches too much. No picking-up of stitches, no seaming. While well-designed, there’s very little structure. The whole sweater grows like organic matter from a central point at the back of the neck and over the shoulders, stretching with the body to let those flashes of contrast color shine through.
Of course, the relaxed nature of this pattern means it will grow significantly during blocking, which is what happened to me. The sleeves are actually quite a few inches past my wrist (and my fingertips). That’s okay with me, though, I’ll just cuff the sleeves. But if you want something more to your measurements, block with caution.
There’s a distinct cloak-iness to this pattern, so I decided to go full fantasy with the color choices. Blue and gold has always reminded me of magic and wizards, so from my stash I chose a deep navy/teal mystery yarn that I had left over from a sweater I made for my dad, “Willow” from Yarn Nouveau (an antique gold shade), and “Tectonic” from Feederbrook Farm, a prismatic marl with gold, blue, orange, and periwinkle. I have a whole Pinterest board of wizardy visuals, and I’m a sucker for the celestial aesthetic.
What I’m listening to
The wizardly inspiration isn’t surprising when I’ve been hosing down episodes of “The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One” from Worlds Beyond Number, a D&D actual play podcast with some giants of the TTRPG world: Aabria Iyengar, Lou Wilson, Erika Ishii, and Brennan Lee Mulligan. Iyengar plays the Wizard Sky (Suvi to her friends – the naming conventions of wizards is a whole thing in this universe), a magical prodigy balancing her duty to the institution that raised her with the outsider perspectives of her close companions: Ame, a rural-dwelling witch whose power comes from communion with nature and spirits (Ishii); and Eursulon, a spirit who has become stranded in the mortal plane where he is at risk of persecution (Wilson).
Iyengar and Mulligan, the dungeon master who runs this campaign, have created a very different vision of wizards than I’m used to. In table-top games, wizards can cast powerful spells and learn many different kinds of magic, but are known for being “squishy”, or easy to physically harm. The image of an old bearded sage in a tall brimmed hat persists.
Not here. Suvi is a young Black woman with a hot boyfriend and a caffeine addiction. Her adoptive mother figure is a sword-wielding valkyrie of a mage. The Citadel where they live is both an academic and military headquarters. There are spells that become people – a personified mage hand cantrip works as a baker and makes Suvi’s favorite sandwich. Wizards can donate their unused spell slots to other wizards who might need them more. They can imbue physical objects, including weapons, with spells. In “WWWO”, what is possible when magic can reshape reality is truly and thoroughly explored. Why couldn’t a wizard be anything, really?
It’s actually a little terrifying. I’m not very far into the campaign, but I’m waiting for the shoe – the shoe being that the Imperium and the Citadel are unsustainably powerful and, for all their wonder, must be dismantled before it embroils the world in unending war – drops. Highly recommend.
Well, my quest to reduce my stash continues as I’ve begun AquaMarline by Park Williams. I recently finished two cardigans (I’ll cover those in a FO Friday post) and I was itching to start something new, mainly because I will be traveling soon and I wanted to have a project in-progress for the planes, trains, and automobiles.
Four of the many colors that will comprise the sweater. Clockwise from bottom left: Hamilton, David Hess, and Block Party in Rustic Fingering from Neighborhood Fiber Co, and a Skinny Single from Hedgehog Fibres (lost the label so I’m not sure of the color name!)
Is a bulky sweater knit primarily from four strands of single-ply fingering the most practical choice for a travel project? No, but I’ve been on a large project kick for a while, so I stuffed the project and all four yarn balls into my backpack and moved a pair of shoes into my partner’s luggage.
I didn’t notice until I went to cast on that AquaMarline is a raglan knit from the bottom up. And it wasn’t until I was nearly done with the torso that I thought that might interrupt the marling gradient; I didn’t want the sleeves, knit separately and then attached to the body, to have a completely different color scheme and then have a noticeable border when they joined. So instead of starting the sleeves from the cuff, I started them from the other end. I did a crochet cast-on for the number of stitches needed for the widest part of the sleeve, and knit a couple of rounds in the same colors used in the torso. Then I attached the sleeves, and when I finish the body, I’ll return and knit the sleeves down to the cuffs. A crochet cast-on, like a provisional cast-on, will let me pick up live stitches when I’m ready.
The torso of my Aquamarline with the beginnings of the sleeves attached.
I think this pattern would offer much smoother color distribution if it was designed to be top-down rather than bottom-up, but as the design description says, this pattern is all about playing with color and experimenting. Maybe I’m just a little too much of a control freak to allow for some heavily randomized color schemes.
Where I’m traveling
I brought my Aquamarline with me on the Amtrak to Philadelphia, where I saw one of my very favorite bands at Citizen’s Bank Arena. Yes, after 20 years of trying to see them live, I finally saw My Chemical Romance in concert. Truly, truly a dream come true for me. In the days since I’ve been relishing the feeling of being 13 years old again listening to Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. It’s such a deep nostalgia for not just a time in my life, but for the imagination my preteen self had and how this particular band helped me indulge it.
This MCR tour is all about The Black Parade, which is the album that broke them into the mainstream. The first act of their performance, or pageant, really was the entirety of the album. The band dressed in their marching-band outfits and acted as the entertainment for a dictator of a fictional nation called Draag. During the set there was a firing squad, an appearance by the Philly Phanatic, Variety Puzzles, a launch of a nuclear warhead, a murder by a clown, a burlesque performance by the clown, and a suicide bombing by the clown. If MCR is good at anything, they are experts at theatrics.
Their second set was very stripped back. After Gerard Way, the lead singer, had his throat slashed and the rest of the members were taken off the stage with bags on their heads by Draag’s secret police, they reappeared on a second stage in the middle of the crowd and played a selection from their other albums. I don’t think there was a single person in the audience who didn’t know the words to every song, in either set. Here’s my selection of bad photos – I wish I had more but my phone battery was at 20% by the time they took the stage.
The Variety Puzzle bit was very exciting for me. I love Variety Puzzles.
The next day my partner and I spent the day wandering Philadelphia. After checking out of the hotel, we found a very high-quality cafe, Thank You Thank You, offering lots of different roasts that my partner has been wanting to try – he’s a huge coffee enthusiast – and had a couple of pourovers. Then i foudn the nearest yarn store, which was Yarnphoria just south of Center City. This is a lovely spot with cool, contemporary samples, displays of crocheted amigurumi, and the cutest little shop dog there ever was: Gertie.
Gertie ❤
When we walked in there were already some customers there who looked very much like they had also been to the concert the night before, so I felt very at home. The owner (or who I assume was the owner) was extremely welcoming and helpful, pointing out all the local brands they had available. I left with two skeins of Scout from Kelbourne Woolens, which is also a local Philadelphia business. At one point, Gertie got up from her couch, barked, and individually sniffed every person in the store. Definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in town. I would have loved to visit Wild Hand as well, but unfortunately we didn’t have time that day to travel to the Mt. Airy neighborhood from downtown.
And in just under a week, I’ll be leaving town again for Venice! My partner, who works in the film industry as an AC (assistant camera), worked on the documentary Cover Up about the career of Seymour Hersh. The documentary is from Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus (Citizenfour), and it was accepted to premier at the Venice Film Festival. This documentary is probably my partner’s favorite of the work he’s done, as he’s an ardent follower of politics and history, so it was beyond exciting for him that he was invited to attend the premiere. And I’m even luckier that I get to join him!
A comprehensive guide to avoiding Karen behaviors and how deregulation contributed to them.
This post contains a brief mention of suicidal ideation that I’ve witnessed.
With lots of experience in retail and food service, I know how not to be a Karen. I’ve worked at a cafe, a bookstore, at a Michaels, and then the yarn store. I’ve had a full adult stomp their feet at me. Been called a bitch, and stupid. Dealt with harassment, and so much passive aggression that it’s now my policy not to respond to it at all.
I have a not-so-secret secret: My real name (not Smitty) is very close to “Karen”. I don’t find its new meaning offensive, but sometimes I feel a little awkward introducing myself. I even give baristas a different name so I don’t scare them. I kind of wish the term wasn’t a name so that it could at least apply easily to men (who are often very, very bad Karens).
Once my dad asked me if it bothered me, my name being so close to Karen, and my brother joked “Yeah, you should get on fixing that.”
So I am!
Have you had dozens of bad shopping experiences where it just seems like you can never get the help you’re seeking? Does your blood pressure rise every time you walk through a shop entrance? Do cashiers’ eyes widen when you approach? Well, you might be a Karen.
Here are some common Karen behaviors.
Refusing to follow a worker’s directions about where to find something, how to pay, or how to access the thing you need because you believe it’s a waste of your time.
Asking for special allowances (an appointment when there’s no availability, expired coupon use, an unearned discount), and retaliating when the minimum wage worker cannot give it.
Saying “I shop here all the time, do you know how much money I’ve spent here?” when you are not acquiesced to. Nobody cares, or knows who you are.
Trauma dumping on a captive audience. This is pretty frequent for service workers. I’ve learned a shocking amount about a customer’s medical problems, divorce, family member’s death, addiction, and suicidal ideation in the time it takes to ring up their order.
And these are just a few examples, before the escalation to name-calling, screaming, and throwing stuff. In extreme instances, it escalates to assault.
If you recognize yourself in any of these examples (and the list is not exhaustive), here are some suggestions on how to better handle the situation.
Trust that the person knows what they’re doing. You may be a very smart person, but the worker is the expert on how things work. They know what is possible for them to help you. Be clear about what you need, and calmly ask follow-up questions if something is confusing.
Remember that you are not the only person in the store/restaurant/cafe, and that the worker has other people to help. They cannot offer specialized service to every person who walks in the door. Take a deep breath and accept that you are but a drop in the ocean that is the universe, and take comfort in the zen of anonymity and insignificance.
Relinquish the idea that you have status as a regular or a big spender. Sometimes the barista or the cashier will recognize you, but most of the time they won’t! They also could not give less of a fuck how much you spend, especially at a chain establishment, because your big spending has never increased their wages. They are required to be there because it is their job, not because they are a personal servant.
If you feel the need to share life updates or personal issues with the worker, consider if it would be better shared with a good friend, or even a therapist. The worker is likely not trained to help you with a personal crisis or chronic medical problem.
But this post is not just to punish or kvetch. Part of me is sympathetic to the Karens. Some of them are purely out to make people miserable, that is certain. But I think a lot of them simply still expect a customer service experience that they grew up with. Once upon a time in America, you shopped at stores owned by your neighbors and run by their families. The cashier did know you and what was going on in your life. Business owners had some authority over prices, what they stocked, and shop policy. They started those businesses with knowledge a specific field, and staffed them with people who were similarly knowledgeable. A business was likely small enough to be dedicated to one category of good/service that the owner was an expert in, as opposed to large chain department stores like Walmart or Target, where it can’t be expected that an employee can be an expert on workout equipment and cell phones and baby supplies and whatever else that business is selling.
During my first food service management job, I dealt with a lot of turnover and no-shows, often working 11+ hour days to cover shifts, and constantly training people I was certain would not stay in the position for more than a couple of weeks. My conclusion: “What can I expect? These people are only making minimum wage. They just don’t make enough to care what happens here.”
So what happened? Chains stores and restaurants grew, their protection from failure and ability to provide cheap goods compounded forever by their growth, growth achieved by paying their employees less and less, making many people more and more dependent on the cheap prices they provide.
And aren’t we seeing this happen with our beloved LYSs? Natural fiber yarn is at a price point many can’t afford, but is necessary to keep an independent business open and pay their employees a livable wage, but then fewer can afford to shop there. Add in some of the other problems that LYSs have been diagnosed with (haughtiness and racism, namely) and we find ourselves with a declining customer base despite it seeming like knitting and crochet are getting more and more popular (a statistic that is admittedly hard to quantify). Younger crafters tend to find yarn online instead of in store, speaking to the convenience of online shopping for a generation largely accused of being less social. But the internet offers more possibility for affordability, and big retailers like Hobbi and Knitpicks offer cheaper yarns in smaller units. No hate to people who shop there, I do too (though not at Knitpicks since I heard they were being accused of a carpet beetle infestation).
I am far, far from being any kind of economic expert, so I had to do some research about the decline of small businesses. The rise of large businesses has been happening since the 19th century, when the first department stores were established, and when transcontinental shipping infrastructure allowed for easier transport of supplies and products. According to Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the growth of wealth during the turn of the 20th century went largely unregulated, reaching a peak in 1913, until that growth was flattened by two world wars and concentrated government policy meant to help the citizens of those countries recover from the physical destruction and financial devastation of war. Piketty’s research shows a significant 10% decrease in the amount of wealth owned by the top decile during the years between 1945-1975. But that percentage started climbing again in the late 70s and early 80s with the deregulation movement, which has two notable mascots: Thatcher and Reagan.
FUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOUUUUUUUU
To be fair, it wasn’t just America and the UK pulling the rug out from rising wealth equality. In France, where Piketty is from, a economic liberal parliament defeated socialists who favored greater regulation during the Trente Glorieuses period when France bounced back after WWII.
A result of this deregulation and lack of oversight is the emergence of an isolated class of wealth managers skyrocketing to an echelon that can’t be reached by other people who work for a living. Those managers, as Piketty writes, “have the power to set their own remuneration, in some cases without limit and in many cases without any clear relation to their individual productivity.” This trend in income equality is mirrored by wealth inequality – assets are increasingly owned by a smaller and smaller number of people who happened to already be wealthy from inheritance. In the current economic climate, these conditions are caused when the rate of return on investment is greater than economic growth. The rich get richer while wages and job opportunities stagnate. You know how people say the Kardashians are famous for being famous? The same goes here – some people are wealthy because they’re wealthy.
Once a person or entity reaches that point, it seems that the money just makes itself. They can dodge taxation by attributing profits to subsidiaries in zones with lower tax rates, for instance. They can out-compete new, smaller businesses simply by having the capital to absorb business costs for longer. As long as rate outpaces growth, they have a smaller pool of competition because the first step to wealth ownership becomes more and more insurmountable. And they are guarded by wealth managers who need deregulation in order to make their own money, much like remoras who live in the slipstream of sharks.
And here’s where my sympathy for the Karen ends, because in my experience, many a Karen has voted in favor of these conditions, and the only thing that has trickled down to them is a jaded labor force. But what makes a Karen a Karen, is that they punish the worker in front of them, the person who’s just trying to survive, instead of the owners of companies that put their neighbor’s shops and restaurants out of business. Unless, of course, their neighbors stay open by underpaying their employees.
I’ll end my rant with a Karen anecdote for my own community of knitters and crocheters. A few years ago I attended a large fiber event at a convention center with the company I worked for. We often ate in the hotel restaurant/bar, which was filled with convention attendees. As we left one evening, we thanked our excellent server and explained what the event was.
“I hope our people are treating you right”, I said.
“Uh well…”
“Are they at least tipping you like they should?” I asked, horrified.
“Not exactly.”
Having been to multiple industry events like this, I know that the people who can attend them and shop at them can afford to tip at least 20%. Do fucking better, Fiber Karens.
One of the things that made me most uncomfortable about my yarn job was being a salesperson. Sometimes I would be in the middle of talking to a customer – maybe while I was recommending a yarn, or telling a stale joke – I would see myself from the outside and think: “God look how fake I’m being. They can totally tell I’m full of shit.”
It got very uncomfortable when the items people were interested in buying were out of their price range, because a lot of times I’d agree that something was a little ridiculous to spend money on. Not necessarily the yarn, but notions. Of course, I could never say “yeah, I get it, $17 is a lot to spend on scissors and the pair in my junk drawer at home work just fine for cutting yarn.” Because both of us knew it’s my job to sell things, and that the customer was there to buy things, and at the end of the day I needed the business to make money in order to keep my job.
I never got sleazy. I never lied about a product being able to do something it couldn’t, or promised that the experience of having it would make someone a better crafter. Once a pair of young sisters, somewhere between 14-18 year olds, came in because they wanted to make one of those mega jumbo blankets that are knit on, like, US 50 needles.
You know ’em from being every other pin on Pinterest for years.
They were asking about using roving to make one of their own. I was completely honest. Roving would have fallen apart immediately, and would have been prohibitively expensive. It was one of the only times I said to someone that Michaels carried a yarn specifically manufactured for this trend and they’d be better off going there. And it’s not like I would have made a sale on roving anyway, because who’s going to shell out upwards of $500 on the amount of roving they’d need.
I also think of my own experiences as a customer. It was hard for me to be an engaging salesperson because I HATE attracting the attention of a salesperson while I’m shopping. The affect of selling repels me, and I assume it’s just as uncomfortable for the salesperson to pretend to be my friend as it is for me. Which is why as much as I like Lush and its products, I dread shopping there.
Inside this store is a 20-something waiting to sell you soap with a CIA-level intensity
I’m currently job-hunting, and I’m really hoping to not find myself in retail again, even though that’s where my professional skill-set is. With that in mind, I want to use this post to do the opposite of selling you something. Let’s deinfluence.
Deinfluencing is a reaction to overconsumption. It’s a reaction against “hauls”, unboxing videos, sponsored content, and ads in general. It’s why I always link to the designers whose patterns I use, but never the yarn. I want to give people credit, but I’m not trying to sell you anything. And I’m extremely aware of how expensive yarn can be, because I have spent too much of my own money on it over the years.
One of the hardest things to explain to non-knitters or crocheters is the amount of brand loyalty people have for certain yarn brands. One of the oldest jokes I would have to pretend to laugh at is that “buying yarn and using it are two separate hobbies.” People buy yarn not just just because they’re excited to use it, but just to have. I’m one of those people, and I’m trying not to be. But then there’s people who buy yarn from a company just because it’s rom that company. They collect yarn from premium brands like each skein is a Berkin. Yarn, in this subculture, has become a status symbol.
It brings to mind a time I visited a yarn shop in my city, which has been closed for a long time. The location was on the edge of a trendy neighborhood with lots of walking traffic, boutiques and bistros. Across the street from the shop was a housing project. I got talking to the owner about her selection, and she let me know that despite many potential customers from that project wishing they could shop there, they simply couldn’t afford the brands she carried. Instead of listening to them, the owner told me she just couldn’t imagine stocking acrylic. Again, this store is no longer in business, probably because the owner was catering to imaginary big spenders instead of her very real neighbors and their needs.
The glamorization of name brands, aspiration to buy, the flooding of new products into the market are not unique to the fiber world, but it is as pervasive here as it is anywhere. So here are my alternative, low- or no-cost alternatives that I have personally used.
Indie dyers and LYSs
Supporting small independent businesses is wonderful, I’m not arguing that. But again, not everyone can afford the selection at these places. For an alternative, sustainable option, I suggest the growing number of consignment craft stores. SCRAP USA is a nonprofit with multiple locations, for instance, but there are plenty of smaller 501(c)(3)s with the same model. Jess Crafts compiled an extremely thorough list of over 60 locations on her site.
Notions
Here are some of the re-used alternatives to new tools that I’ve personally used. They might not be as fancy, or have all the bells and whistles, but they work just as well. You might already have them in your house.
Project Bags
My regular purse
Reusable shopping totes
Zip-lock plastic bags – if you ever shop online for clothes, chances are you’ve gotten a ton of these.
Bedding packaging – new bedsets often come in clear, plastic bags, and they often come with handles!
Stitch Markers and progress markers
Paperclips (classic option)
Safety pins (progress marker)
Can tabs – I drink a lot of seltzer and boy have these come in handy when I’ve inevitably lost all my stitch markers to my couch cushions.
Yarn scraps – just tie off a tiny loop in a contrasting color.
Stitch Holders
Any scrap yarn, string, or thread you have hanging around.
Pattern Stands
A clipboard and a post-it note so you can keep track of what row you’re on.
Your computer – I don’t own a printer and very rarely use physical copies of patterns. I usually just scroll so my row is right at the top of the screen. Obviously a computer is expensive, but since I have one for other purposes anyway, it’s what works for me.
Blocking Boards
Interlocking playmats for kids – they may not be printed with a grid of lines 1″ part, but they do the job and are usually the same size (and a lot cheaper than the ones sold by knitting brands).
Stitch Stoppers
Save your wine corks and stick ’em on!
Poster putty
There’s nothing wrong with buying notions or yarn that you know you’re going to use. As my own stash shows, I’m not one to judge. I love my needle gauge earrings, I have a strong preference for steel needles, and my swift/ball winder combo is pretty sweet. But the fanciness or aesthetics of yarn or notions will not make anyone a better crafter than they are, and that’s the most important thing to remember. And as I look at my own spending habits (especially in my time of voluntary unemployment), I think twice before pressing “checkout”.
While I’m here, maybe I can influence you about something else.
This past week Donald Trump made an unconstitutional decision to bomb Iran, threatening millions of innocent people with death and war. If you’ve read this far, I beg you to contact your representatives and ask them to oppose all further military action toward Iran and to stop arms sales to Israel, who instigated this conflict by attacking Iran. We also need to pressure our reps to impeach Trump. Again.
Our government has been hanging the vague threat of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons for decades, and there’s never been evidence of it. Even if Iran did have nuclear warheads, so does the US, and we’re the only country who has every used one in war. Does that mean it’s justified to invade our country?
It’s the same excuse we used to invade Iraq in 2002. After hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties and over 4,000 American servicepeople killed, we cannot fall for this lie again. I was 9 years old when 9/11 happened. Over the last 24 years, the consolidation of power under the executive office has been allowed to grow and grow, eroding our checks and balances system. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden are all guilty of using this power to bomb 8 countries between 2001-2025. I don’t care about governments, but I care about people, and peace should be nonpartisan.
Luddites, labor organization, and why you should be able to get yarn and plumbing supplies in the same place.
With the total closing of Joann stores around the US, there’s been much discussion about where sewists can go to get fabric. Sure, Michaels has just announced that they’ve bought Joann’s brand IPs and are beginning to carry more fabric in stores, and I hope that will help crafters, especially those who don’t live near independent fabric businesses or dislike shopping online for materials. In the big box craft store war, I’m team Michaels, and I believe the only reason to step foot in a Hobby Lobby is if you’re planning to steal.
RIP girl we’ll miss you
I have another suggestion: hardware stores should start carrying craft supplies.
I think it’s a natural progression. I should be able to get every kind of tool for a DIY project at a Lowes. If you’re building furniture, shouldn’t you be able to buy upholstery fabric in one stop? If you’re painting your living room, why not get materials to make your own decorations as well? There’s nothing less cosmetic about picking a lighting fixture as there is in picking hardware for a hand-sewn dress.
And don’t get me started on the cosplayers. Sewing, hammering armor, shaping foam, 3D-printing, engineering electronics into a mech suit – they would eat this shit up.
But most importantly, I’m invested in the idea of dissolving the borders between “trades” and “crafts”. I follow the delightful Brian Kochan, a fiber artist and content creator, and he posted a video recently that really struck me.
A screenshot of Brian’s video. He holds up an unspun batt of royal blue fiber. He looks directly in the camera, and over the image is text that reads “This and mending the divide between craftsmen & tradesmen cultivated by the elite to make it harder for us to organize in Unions & Guilds”In this screenshot, Brian is spinning the fiber. He looks directly in the camera, and over the image is text that reads “This and mending the divide between craftsmen & tradesmen cultivated by the elite to make it harder for us to organize in Unions & Guilds”
The caption of the video reads “A propaganda campaign the wealthy have been running since the Industrial Revolution…Divides among the working class are not accidental and do not benefit us.”
The Industrial Revolution-era brought machine-made textiles and with it, a class of working people who were losing their livelihoods. This created the Luddite movement, made of anti-mechanization textile workers who would protest their disenfranchisement by destroying textile machinery. The Luddites were named for Ned Ludd, who is mythologized as having lost his job as a textile apprentice, was whipped for being a “vagrant”, and then took a hammer to a mechanized loom (McGaughey, 2018). Even if it is a myth, a man who was replaced by machines and then punished for having been replaced by machines is a powerful symbol of the movement, and still feels relevant 250 years later as corporations promise that generative AI is the answer to everything.
Get fucked, Clegg
In school, I was usually taught that the Industrial Revolution was a universally good thing. It did have benefits, namely, fomenting a working class consciousness that give us many rights that we enjoy today like weekends, work breaks, 8-hour shifts, overtime pay, labor unions, OSHA, and child labor laws. Of course, these things only came after incredible tragedy and deadly working class struggle (The Battle of Blair Mountain, The Haymarket Riot and ensuing unjust executions, and many other protests that drew brutal policing and state military interventions). The rights most Americans enjoy now are the work of the people in labor unions, Marxists, anarchists, and undercover muck-raking journalists – not a direct result of the Industrial Revolution itself.
Another promise of the Industrial Revolution was cheap goods. Items previously only accessible by the wealthy could now be mass-produced and sold at lower prices. Isn’t that nice? The poors can have things too. But as the Luddites had the skills to make the same things at home (and at better quality) that steam-powered machines were now being used to fabricate, had they really gained anything?
This is the trick: We have to recognize when new technologies are being used to disenfranchise us and then sell us worse versions of our own productivity. And we have to consider what share of resources these new technologies require. If the machinery demands more raw material – let’s say, thread and yarn – because it can create products faster and those products break down faster because they’re worse quality, it becomes more difficult and more expensive for a craftsperson to obtain those same materials. It becomes more difficult and expensive for that craftsperson to even maintain their craft.
The most obvious contemporary example is fast-fashion grindmills like Shein. The promise of looking cool for cheap, constantly being on trend without breaking the bank, has been advertised as a solution for those who can’t afford quality or designer names. But these clothing items are still handmade by craftspeople. If you have one person sitting at a sewing machine in their craft room or at their dining room table, who has bought fabric and a pattern from a boutique shop, making clothes for themselves or their kids, and another person (most likely a woman) sitting behind a sewing machine in a factory where their working hours, air quality, safety, and pay is totally at the mercy of their bosses and the insatiable demand of the customer – what really is the difference between them? That person in the factory is not less skilled, less creative; they’re using the same equipment as the sewist who would call themselves an artisan or a maker. But while the US attempts to celebrate itself for workers’ rights, its companies have simply moved production to countries whose imperialism-created poverty and unstable governments promises them cheap labor and a higher profit margin. Those companies have not been forced to become more ethical or compassionate following the labor movements in the US, they’ve simply moved their Industrial Revolution-era exploitation to places we don’t care to think about.
So when the Trump administration tries to promise the return of factory jobs and manufacturing to the US by levying tariffs, don’t think for a second that those jobs will be well-paid, union, safe, or equitable across race and gender. Hand-in-hand with Republican economics is the philosophy of deregulation, and they would have us working 16-hour days 7 days a week if they could. Nothing trickles down except for their bullshit.
Listen, I’m no working class hero. I went to private school, I have two degrees, both of my parents worked at high schools and colleges my entire life. But as I think of how to relearn crafting as labor, I look to trade unions for inspiration. Welding, carpentry, electrical engineering, plumbing – these are occupations whose practitioners have long protected themselves through unionization, and are unlikely to be replaced by automation (it’s hard to imagine inviting a robot into your home to fix or clog or painstakingly bring your wiring up to code). These are people from a legacy of hard-won battles over workers’ rights, but what has protected these while textile workers still face major exploitation and danger?
Again, I believe gender has a lot to do with it. Trades are still largely male-dominated, fomenting a culture hostile to non-men (Bridges et al., 2020). But then women are also challenged to find dignity and liberation in female-dominated labor sectors that were once at the heart of the labor movement. On top of the retaliation owners and management tend to take against striking and organizing workers, female workers are at much higher risk for gender-based violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment, and firing a person once they become pregnant is commonplace (Robertson, 2024), leaving parents without income to support their kids and creating generational poverty. The different ways women are discriminated against makes the stakes much higher, and they can be potentially traumatized in more varied ways than their male counterparts. This is a global issue, happening here and America and the countries with even less labor regulation – countries we allow companies to operate in so they can squeeze out larger profits. And much of it, culturally, is because we don’t find “women’s work” as valuable as men’s.
I know that much of the language I’m using about gender is very binary. It’s difficult to include the labor experiences of non-binary people when labor is so separated along a binary, and that binary makes it easier to privilege the labor of one gender over all others. As women can often face gendered and sexual violence from men, TLGBQ+ workers are deal with queerphobia on top of other intersecting identities that are often discriminated against.
That’s not to say the cultures of trades isn’t changing. The IWW has a page outlining its inclusion policies. According to data recorded in 2021, more women than ever were working in the trades. While one survey by the UK Construction Industry Council showed that 1% of workers identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, this survey did not seem to include verbiage about trans or nonbinary people. I also couldn’t find comparative data on LGBTQ+ people in the trades that showed an increase or decrease over time.
Unfortunately, cruelly, disgustingly, though, this progress is being undone by the current administration. As they seek to demonize DEI policies, gut Medicare that allows people to get affordable health care, and actively abduct workers off the street, they attempt to erode our solidarity with one another.
To the last point, ICE is a threat to everyone, undocumented or otherwise, in the US. They’ve detained US citizens without cause, arrested people who were complying with ADP (alternative detention programs), and arrested people whose visas were cancelled with no warning. Mohsan Mohdawi was arrested at his citizenship interview. ICE does this without identification, while masking their faces so that they can’t be identified and held accountable. They don’t care if a person is attempting to become a citizen “the right way”, a phrase I hear so often from people trying to qualify their fear of immigrants to only the “illegal” kind. This is race-based, state-sponsored terrorism, and it’s not new. Our governments have always deployed military-level policing to shut down progressive movements, from the early days of industry to now.
So as I write to you, fellow crafters, sewers, knitters, crocheters, weavers, I beg you to activate in favor of working people. As you engage with the hobby you love, remember the workers forced to use their crafting skills in dangerous factories for pennies. Support unions, and support the power they gain through diversity. Protect your neighbors, whoever they are, because they are not your enemy.
With LA under siege and many more cities likely to start protesting against ICE, I have to speak on this because it’s a matter of urgency. I highly recommend the Freedom for Immigrants organization and the National Immigration Law Center for more information, as they operate nationally and I don’t know where you could be reading from.
This WIP Wednesday I’m happy to share a project I’ve been hoping to start for a loooooong time: the Artus Shawl by Natasja Hornby. What was stopping me? Well, despite the unforgiveable size of my stash, I could not pull together 5 different colors of sport-weight yarn.
I love the challenge of a wider color palette, which I consider to be 5 colors or more. I’ve been using Pinterest a lot lately and started a board just for aesthetic photos that contain intriguing color combos, and an interesting trend emerged: I’m really into purple and green right now. Not to be all Joker-y about it though.
Golds and oranges have also been popping out to me, and I like the contrast of earthy ochres in rock formations and tree bark and more mystical, mermaidy shades that appear in luna moths (and Cape May Fiber had a Luna Moth colorway!), seashells, and tilework. So when I attended the Frederick Fiber Festival and Maryland Sheep and Wool, I went with a mission to find some of these particular shades. I got nearly everything from these trips, and then rounded our my palette with a purchase from Brooklyn Tweed. BT has recently stopped producing their own yarn (but will still be publishing patterns), and they were running a clearance sale. Their beautiful inky blue-violet color “Tapestry”. was a perfect fit, and I ended up getting enough skeins for this shawl and a future sweater.
The Artus palette: Tapestry (deep purple) in Imbue Sport by Brooklyn Tweed, Luna Moth (light green) in Merino Cashmere Silk Sport, Ochre (gold) and Aubergine in Making Tracks Lite by Junction Fiber Mill, and a mystery stash yarn in a deep blue-green.
Now that I’ve cast on I’m locked the fuck in on this shawl. I’m extremely engaged. There are three small sections of stranded colorwork at the top of the pattern that I was kind of dreading (I’m not great at stranded, and even worse at it on the wrong side)n and Hornsby made these sections mercifully short – my finger joints thank her. I’m now in the mosaic sections, at the trim of the shawl, where I’m only handling one color of yarn at once. Because mosaic stitches tend to be more tense than stitches worked with no slips, there’s a risk that the long side of the shawl will bend downward instead of maintaining a triangle with straight, defined lines. To avoid this, I’m stretching the slipped stitches in the mosaic charts to the absolute maximum to.keep a similar gauge to the stitches in the waffle stitch section. And I think it’s working! I won’t be able to tell until it’s completely off the needles and blocked, but I’m feeling optimistic.
Now that all five colors have been worked into the project, I’m excited to share a photo that really shows how the palette works.
You know, now that I look at this diamond motif, it vaguely reminds me of someone…
Lol whoops
What I’m Listening to
I got to see one of my favorite bands last week, Amyl and the Sniffers. They’re an Australian punk/pub rock band whose latest album has a little bit of glam, although they haven’t lost a speck of their edge; their single “Jerkin’” is about as catchy and contemptuous as can be imagined. But among their harder, nastier songs like “GFY”, they have plenty of tracks that are deeply heartfelt and earnest, like “Knifey”, which is dedicated to victims of femicide, and “Big Dreams”, which offer words of encouragement to anyone struggling to figure out their life’s trajectory. That sincerity feels like a binding element of the band, judging by the ease of their on-stage banter with each other (which includes some great, groan-worthy dad jokes). Amyl and the Sniffers offers a truly electric live performance, and I can’t wait for their return to the US.
The cover of Amyl and the Sniffers’ newest album, Cartoon Darkness
What does my knitting have to do with my gender? More than I’d like. Less than you’d think.
I sometimes wonder what people assume about me when I knit in public. I wonder, and worry, if it’s assumed that I’m invested in the sort of traditional femininity that knitting seems to represent. I’ve discussed this a little in a previous post – do these so-called “alpha” manosphere assholes see knitting as a sign of the kind of woman they believe we should all be.
A clip from a manosphere Youtube channel where two men wonder if women actually have hobbies, and decide that knitting is an acceptable hobby for a woman to have because it’s “nurturing” and feminine. Don’t worry, I didn’t go to their actual YT channel to get this screenshot because I would never give them the views to poison my algorithm. Thanks to Chad Chad for taking that one for the team.
I don’t knit because I’m a woman. I don’t knit in a feminine way. I also don’t knit in a feminist, reclaiming-the-power-of-the-craft way. I knit and crochet because I like it (and probably because I’m stimming, but that’s another blog post). I look at pretty much anything I do and wonder how much of it has to do with me being a woman.
I feel best about myself when I feel feminine, but I recently realized that what I have been conditioned to understand as feminine is also what I have been conditioned to understand as beautiful. And chat, I do not feel beautiful. I also don’t feel nurturing, or supportive, or emotionally intelligent. I’m not motherly. I’ve never found traditional fulfillment in these traits or any power.
So when we think of knitting and crochet, or any fiber craft, as a feminine activity, I question if my aversion to that is personal or if there really is a larger societal misattribution happening.
Earlier this month I read an article in Art News about the burgeoning presence of fiber in the arts scene this year. “Fiber Art Has Officially Taken Over New York’s Museums and Galleries” by Alex Greenberger covers multiple exhibits, features, and retrospectives of fiber as painting and sculpture, at commercial galleries and museums like the MOMA.
Almost all the artists mentioned and profiled in the article, as might be expected, are women. Greenberger credits the phenomenon of fiber-centered exhibits to a cultural correction of misogynist exclusion:
Why so much fiber all of a sudden? The simple answer has to do with the changing face of recent art history. Weavings, embroideries, and the like have long been awarded an asterisk in the canon—if they’ve been accepted into the canon at all. Typically, art in those mediums has been classed separately as craft in the West or denigrated as “women’s work.” Thanks to the work of dedicated scholars, curators, and critics, fiber art has finally come in for reassessment.
I wrote briefly in my post about chromatic politics about the shoehorning of women artists in the Bauhaus school to textile-based art forms. And how while fiber arts and decorative arts are often relegated to the superficial, their influence on the so-called “fine arts” is hard to ignore, like that of the mostly-female weavers of the Aymara on the aesthetics of architect Freddie Mamani.
I don’t disagree with Greenberger’s theory of the gender pendulum swinging back in the direction of equity, and that the fiber art rage has been part of that. The way that the binary genders – men and women – have been separated and tiered has a lot to do with the way “art” and “craft” has been separated and tiered, which has given men a lot of fame and status and women a lot of obscurity. But I can’t help but wonder (!) what a gender utopia, a world where misogyny and queerphobia don’t exist, looks like.
I have a list of evolving, circular desires for gender and art – a gender ouroboros maybe.
I want to see women included in “fine art” – painting, sculpture, architecture, etc. because women are capable of doing whatever they pursue.
I love seeing “craft” and the women artists who practice it included in the genres of fine art, because craft requires the same level of technique and intellect that the traditional “fine arts” require. It’s important to me that the disciplines and materials we associate with fine art gets expanded in order to perforate the gender separation that’s been engineered in the art world.
I don’t want to see fiber “craft” forever associated with women because not that all fiber artists are women and not all women are naturally fiber artists, and to believe so is gender essentialist in a way that gives me hives.
To call craft “women’s work” at all is colonial. Craft exists across the globe, in virtually every culture, and not all cultures divide labor along the same gender lines. For instance, textile crafters in West Africa were often men (Osborne, 2024), but during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the white slave-owning class demanded that enslaved women perform it because it was more in line with the white/European division of labor by gender (Golden, 2023).
Not everyone lived by a gender binary like Christian Europeans did. Numerous cultures around the world recognize more than two genders, and the various nonbinary genders in those cultures also fulfilled traditional roles. Nonbinary people have also existed in binary gender cultures forever without being recognized. To only be talking about the elevation of women’s art erases the many trans nonbinary identities that are currently under attack, even by people claiming to be feminist*.
Even as objects previously tiered as “craft” are elevated to “art”, and artists working with materials often thought of as “craft supplies” instead of “artist materials”, are being curated for the fine arts scenes, will women and nonbinary artists be fairly represented alongside male artists without their gender or cultural background novelized alongside the medium?
*If your brand of feminism aligns with Republican/right-wing politics or if you find that Nazis are agreeing with you, then you’re not a fucking feminist.
To the last point, Greenberger makes a poignant criticism of the Woven Histories exhibit at the MOMA:
The exhibition is unclear about the ties that bind many of its artists: what, for example, links an abstract painting from the ’70s by Jack Whitten and a raffia net from the ’60s by Ed Rossbach?…The exhibition also stumbles when presenting artists awaiting canonization such as Yvonne Koolmatrie, a Ngarrindjeri weaver who makes sinuous sculptures from sedge, a type of grass. These works are…lumped together with baskets by Indigenous artists, an awkward, reductive gesture that makes them feel like an afterthought.
Here, Koolmatrie’s artistry is hitched to that of other indigenous artists with, as Greenberger suggests, no real curation as to why. Is it enough to say that “we all weave”, or does this decontextualize the places and cultures these individual artists come from? The importance of cultural specificity to art and craft cannot be overstated, and it is frequently missing from a lot of discourse about art and gender that I’ve seen and read. Race and gender are linked in systems of oppression, so they have to be discussed together in cultural criticism. After all, the Western/European art institutions that have displayed stolen precolonial indigenous art have historically not challenged the binary thinking of gender by acknowledging nonbinary artists.
I grew up near the Baltimore Museum of Art, and even as a child I could understand the way most of the exhibits were organized. These rooms, the impressionists. Over here, the impressive collection of Matisses. In this stark white and angular wing, the contemporary exhibit. And over here… “African Art.” All the art the museum had from across the continent, from across centuries, in cramped glass display cases instead of mounted on walls or installed like the European and American paintings and sculptures. Looking back on it now, this exhibit was distinctly anthropological, archeological, in nature. These were not meant to be considered cerebrally like the Monets and Warhols. I wasn’t meant to think about the objects’ makers as individuals. It was just a room full of things with a single tenuous connection between them: the 11.7 million square mile continent of origin.
Decades later, the BMA has gone through a total overhaul. That vague exhibit no longer exists. The new curators have gone full force into featuring living artists whose works they can fully contextualize. They’ve sold a number of extremely famous works (to the rage of many white patrons) to fund the acquisition of art by Black, indigenous, and queer artists. Last year, they installed “Walk a Mile in My Dreams” an exhibit dedicated to the work of Joyce J. Scott, a Baltimore artist who works in a plethora of different mediums and techniques, including fiber, weaving, and crochet. Scott’s work explores race, sexuality, violence, and natural destruction, and she’s as influenced by the cultures and artistic techniques of the many places she’s traveled as she is by her own family’s long history of making.
I haven’t visited the Woven Histories exhibit myself, so I can’t speak personally to the level of explanation provided by the curator as to the connection between the different works, but it sounds like more specific context is needed to draw these connections. Maybe it takes an artist-specific installation, like “Walk a Mile in My Dreams”, to fully do justice to any artist.
I have been thinking about my relationship to my gender for my entire life, and Greenberger’s article gave me a great vehicle to talk about it in relationship to the fiber crafts that have become such a big part of my day-to-day life (and my livelihood, at one point). This hobby, once necessary labor in a preindustrial age, taken for granted as “women’s work”; this women’s work that my own 94-year-old meat-and-potatoes mans’ man Navy veteran grandfather was taught as a boy; this women’s work that I have seen loved by cis men, gay and straight; this women’s work that I have seen relished by trans and non-binary people at fiber festivals.
Even though us cis women are overrepresented in fiber arts, they don’t belong to us, and that makes me feel free. It’s not enough that I should feel empowered by the things that make me “feminine” – I want a femininity that demands nothing of me. The gender utopia I hope for is a decolonized one, a non-binary one. One where every singular person is recognized for their skills and artistry no matter their identity, without it having to reflect on anyone else.
It’s WIP Wednesday and this week’s theme for #showmeyourknits is cardigans! Fortunately my wip this week is the Pivoine Cardigan by Audrey Borrego, a drop-shoulder cardi with lovely lace detailing at the bottom of the torso.
Borrego recently stepped away from the knitwear design game a few months ago, and very generously made all her patterns free on Ravelry. When I checked Ravelry that day and saw that she was all over the first three pages of the Hot Right Now feed, I had the same thought as some other folks: “Holy shit, did something happen to her?” Nope! Just a voluntary change in life direction. Hero portfolio of 100+ patterns is an amazing gift from a very prolific designer, and I hope she’s having a wonderful time in the next chapter of her life.
I’m using Knit Picks Stroll Tweed, which I picked up a few years ago during a Halloween sale (they discounted all their black, orange, green, and purple yarn). The pattern calls for sport-weight, but considering the suggested needle size for the body is US 3, a fingering like this is working nicely as a substitute. I’m knitting size 7, and the depth of the armholes is perfect – I really like wearing big t-shirts, and there’s plenty of room for my tee sleeves to fit without weird bunching at the shoulders.
I also plan to add significant length to the body so it covers my butt, and now that I’ve passed my natural waist I’m adding increases to accommodate my hips circumference. I’m adding increases at the same rate as the pattern calls for decreases in the sleeve, and I’ll just have to make sure I stop when my stitch count reaches the correct multiple for the lace pattern.
There’s a possibility I’ll run out of the yarn before I get to the sleeves, but honestly, I’m hoping that will be the case. I have plenty of other fingering-weight skeins in my stash that need to be used, and I think contrast sleeves would be very striking for this project. The stash bust continues!
And now, a lightly cuss-seasoned rant about generative AI
While on Ravelry this week I came across a “design” whose picture was clearly generative AI and reported it. As far as I can tell, it’s been taken down. I figured Ravelry wouldn’t be AI-friendly (I was not the only person to report the page) but it would be great if the mods could make a policy statement about AI use, if only to encourage its users to take a broader critical stance against generative AI.
Obviously AI in knitting patterns is a problem. If the “designer” can’t even produce a finished object from their own written pattern, they’re clearly a scammer and unable to write a pattern to begin with. There’s no reason to trust that the pattern will be any more real than the generated image they’re using to advertise. But generative AI is a much larger problem that has infiltrated pretty much everything we interact with on a daily basis. I believe it poses extremely bleak outcomes for creativity and critical thinking.
Before I go off I want to point out that I’m not immune to the draw of AI and how it can be used. When I was studying creative writing, I wrote an experimental poem using the predictive text AI on my phone. I presented it to my workshop, completely transparent that I had used predictive text, because I was intrigued that the data my phone had stored about my typing history created a digital mirror of my personality. I called it “Runecasting with Predictive Text”. This was back in 2017, when generative AI was still producing eye-burning fractal nonsense images that could never be confused with a photograph or human-made artwork. Now I look back at that little experiment and shudder. I want to share my shame with you.
Generative AI is way more refined now. It’s replacing human labor, especially creative jobs like writing, art, and design. It’s widely used in political campaigns to smear opponents and create propaganda. It’s even being used to write public policy that we’re all supposed to live under. NYC Mayoral Candidate and sexual predator Andrew Cuomo faced criticism for using ChatGPt to write parts of his campaign’s housing policy. And yet our social media networks, job hunting sites, even this blogging platform I use proudly advertise how they’re “harnessing the exciting potential of AI” or some such bullshit to appear cutting edge to its users. The little sparkly AI icon is menacingly ubiquitous.
Left: WordPress invites me to generate an image with AI instead of using this screenshot. Right: The aforementioned sparkle icon.
AI provides no new information to us. It plagiarizes artists and writers. It only reflects, and all it reflects is existing human thought, including our worst prejudices and bigotries; it just delivers them back to us faster. And if it’s used by elected officials that are too fucking smooth-brained and lazy to come up with new ideas or to think critically, then I don’t want to live here anymore. And we probably won’t live here for long anyway, because generative AI is pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and sucking up our water supply.
Last, I want to address the argument that generative AI helps people be creative. Nothing could be less true. Artists love the process. They love practice. That’s why great masters’ sketches are valued by art collectors and museums, not just their finished works. That’s why there are so many musical compositions called “etudes” (studies). It’s why dancers and athletes and musicians and anyone who uses their body to do anything has to spend so much time conditioning their muscles and joints for performance. If you have an idea for an image and want it to exist, and you use AI to make it exist immediately, then that isn’t artistry – it’s spectatorship.
There’s nothing wrong with being a spectator. But the ethical thing to do is hire an artist. Support artists and writers who are using their brains and bodies, who are making truly creative and critical decisions about art. Or do it yourself! Actually do it yourself. Accept that your first try at a creative endeavor might be messy, poorly executed, or embarrassing. No one needs to be perfect. We just need each other to try.
If you’re newer to the concept of generative AI or just want some help spotting it, here are things I look out for.
In images
Look at any letters, fingers, or (in the case of knitting and crochet patterns) stitches. AI has a harder time generating fine details like these; words will often be illegible, hands will have too many/too few fingers, and stitches will not make any physical sense.
The depth of focus is really shallow. Gen AI will often blur backgrounds and even the edges of a subject to reduce the amount of detail it has to create.
Everything is oddly smooth. If the image looks like it’s lacking texture and human figures look like they have silicone for skin, it might be AI.
In videos – many of the above red flags apply
Multiple people seem to have the same face or look extremely similar.
People moving toward the “camera” do not appear to be getting any closer.
A person’s face is moving but their body is not, or the head and body are moving out of sync with each other.
A celebrity starts talking like they’re an SEO-optimized ad – they start talking using words like “viral”, “Hollywood”, “diet” in relation to a specific product. It’s likely a deepfake using actual footage of the celebrity with a generated voiceover. Obviously anybody could actually be saying these words, but if it’s in relation to a weight loss plan or beauty product, exercise caution.
In writing
The author’s portrait appears AI-generated. Unfortunately publications are faking writers along with plagiarized writing.
The same ideas are repeated in re-worded phrases or sentences.
The sentence structure is repetitive.
There are a lot of words over-used by AI; this Reddit thread has a good compilation of examples.
The website or publisher has recently laid off large portions of its staff; it’s likely they’ll rely more on AI now that they’ve cut their human workforce.
I think that’s all for this week. Until the next WIP Wednesday, my dudes, and watch out for that AI slop!
Smitty is Knitting 