#Sustainable Crafting

[fantasticfibers]

[kaasi-legacy-designs]

Sewing on buttons while troubleshooting some 20+ year old computers.

[handymasc]

Currently working on a drowned river witch costume for the Ren faire. So far I only had to buy the dye new: the dresses are made from old curtains, a scrap of fabric left over from another project, and wool that was gifted to me by someone who wasn’t using it. We love saving up ‘waste’ to make new stuff from here!

[jasperthehatchet]

I made some solarpunk soda tab jewelry!! Again. And I'm making more. (Image ID at the bottom of he post)

A choker, a pair of earrings, a belt/waist chain and some bracelets using 100% thrifted/recycled materials! The choker and the bracelets have two layers so that the sharp aluminum edges on the back of the tabs aren't making contact with skin, you can kinda see it in the pictures. Here are more pictures:

[Image ID: 8 images. The first one shows a choker made out of soda tabs, with black cord weaved through it forming x shapes. There's a silver spike charm hanging from every other tab about an inch apart from each other. Im in the picture wearing the choker, my face is not in frame but my pale as fuck neck is visible and so is my dark brown hair.

The second image shows a pair of clip-on earrings laying on a sage green background. Each earring is made of 6 soda tabs weaved into a flower shape with green yarn, and three dangles hanging from the bottom. The dangles are made of a wire link with a black bead on in and a silver spike charm hanging from that. The same spike charms I used for the choker.

The third image shows a 2 ft 7 inch long belt chain made of the soda tab flowers from the earring image. Each flower is made of six tabs weaved together with the same green yarn but they yarn fades to yellow towards the end of the chain. 16 soda tab flowers are linked together with large jump rings and there are large silver clasps on each end to attach to a belt.

The forth image is my hand wearing a black compression brace and two soda tab bracelets. They are weaved together the same way as the choker, with the cord forming x shapes, but the cord is orange and not black. The bracelets are the same size, 8 inches long when laying flat including the clasp. There are two layers of soda tabs which makes the bracelet a little thicker.

The next 2 images shows a dress form wearing the belt chain from two different angles. It had a black skirt with a soda tab belt, with various spikey chains hanging from it. There's a black strip of grommet tape hanging on the right side of the belt and my soda tab flower belt chain hanging on the left side.

The next image shows one of the bracelets at and angle so the double layers are visible, and the last image shows the bracelets, the choker, and an unfinished soda tab choker with green ribbon weaved through it all laying flat on a sage green background. End ID]

[jeraliey]

I found a pair of pants at a thrift store which really caught my eye, but had a giant hole in them...which turned out to be value-added, of course. So I filled it in with a big yellow scotch-darning patch:

And I was going to leave it with the big yellow blotch because I didn't really have the right colors in my thread box to match the fabric palette for embroidering......but then I was up way too late last night and decided that it would be fine if I just approximated them by using threads of two different colors.....

And I think it turned out pretty well!

Distance shot:

Yay for freehand embroidery practice! The more I do of these, the braver I'm getting!

[dresshistorynerd]

The Morrisian case against fast fashion

Today I discovered that H&M made a William Morris collection some years ago. The heath death of the universe can't come quickly enough. We can stop now. Satire is dead and we killed her.

It's not just the whole concept of H&M using William Morris' designs for their fast fashion which is insanity inducing, but also the critical response it garnered. Like sure, people did realize this is insane and there was a lot of think pieces about it at the time, but I read several of them and they all seem to still miss the point in spectacular way.

The basic premise of these think pieces go along the lines of: "Would William Morris spin in his grave with a speed of light because of the H&M collection of his designs? A difficult question indeed. William Morris was a complicated man. He wanted art to be affordable to everyone. Isn't H&M affordable? That kinda fits. Though probably he would have some concerns about H&M's practices."

On the surface - yes - but like in reality - fuck no. There's no nuance in this particular issue. He talked about many times what he though of the H&Ms of his time, the retailers selling poor quality industrially produced "fashionable" bullshit. We know exactly what he would have thought of H&M. Here's couple of quotes from his 1884 lecture "Art and Socialism", which makes it very clear.

"It would be an instructive day's work for any one of us who is strong enough to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London on a week-day, and take accurate note of everything in the shop windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious or unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants them, and to many people even of those who buy them they are obvious encumbrances to real work, thought and pleasure. But I beg you to think of the enormous mass of men who are occupied with this miserable trumpery, from the engineers who have had to make the machines for making them, down to the hapless clerks who sit day-long year after year in the horrible dens wherein the wholesale exchange of them is transacted, and the shopmen, who not daring to call their souls their own, retail them amidst numberless insults which they must not resent, to the idle public which doesn't want them but buys them to be bored by them and sick to death of them."

He is describing the birth of consumerism, which was taking form during his lifetime in the late Victorian Era, which fast fashion is the extreme logical conclusion of, and he fucking hated it. He specifically railed against endless consumerist products, which H&M is the perfect representation of. It was definitely not the art and beauty he believed everyone required and deserved. He makes the distinction often.

"Now if we are to have popular Art, or indeed Art of any kind, we must at once and for all be done with this luxury; it is the supplanter, the changeling of Art; so much so that by those who know of nothing better it has even been taken for Art, the divine solace of human labour, the romance of each day's hard practice of the difficult art of living."

"And here furthermore is at least a little sign whereby to distinguish between a rag of fashion and a work of Art: whereas the toys of fashion when the first gloss is worn off them do become obviously worthless even to the frivolous—a work of Art, be it ever so humble, is long lived; we never tire of it; as long as a scrap hangs together it is valuable and instructive to each new generation. All works of Art in short have the property of becoming venerable amidst decay: and reason good, for from the first there was a soul in them, the thought of man, which will be visible in them so long as the body exists in which they were implanted."

When he thought of popular Art he thought of the craftsmanship of the common people. The art people have made from useful everyday objects with skillful handicrafts. This is what he means by "divine solace of human labour". It's not reverence of Puritanical work ethic, on the contrary, it's the reverence of creation, of the earnest joy people feel when they get to express themselves through their creative pursuits. He certainly didn't believe in work for work's sake, work needed to be worthwhile and enjoyable. He summarized his own position on what labour should be thusly:

"It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do; and which should he done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious."

He urged his middle class audience to reject consumerism (the lecture was for a very much middle class atheist society):

"For I say again that in buying these things: 'Tis the lives of men you buy! Will you from mere folly and thoughtlessness make yourselves partakers of the guilt of those who compel their fellow men to labour uselessly?"

I think it's glaringly obvious H&M and fast fashion in general is what he would consider luxury. Rags of fashion that are just churned out and discarded without thought and produced by compelling people to labour uselessly. It's not popular art that's made by workers and craftsmen, who are able to express themselves through it. There's no agency for the abused workers in H&M's sweatshops, they are not expressing their joy of creation, they are simply labouring uselessly.

Morris didn't shame workers for buying affortable things even if they weren't Art with big A, because that's the problem he despised the whole economic system for, for taking away the popular Art from people, making it inaccessible, and selling back mass produced products with very little practical or aesthetic value. So I don't think he would have problem with people who can only afford fast fashion today. They are the victims of capitalism too, because Art has been taken away from them. But the idea that some of these think pieces had that perhaps the H&M's Morris collection can be good actually if you squint, that H&M has the capacity to bring the art and beauty Morris advocated for for the people, is level of stupidity that's hard to express in words.

Morris didn't believe anything made with exploited labour could be truly beautiful, truly art. In his 1879 lecture "The Art of the People" he put it like this:

"That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour."

The way I understand this, is that art is communication. Through it we communicate feelings, ideas and thoughts, that is it's purpose. So for that communication to work, for it to be imbued with message, the person making it needs to feel passion and love for it's creation. How can there be love and passion if the hands making the garment belong to a tired exploited worker who has no agency what so ever in their work and can only think about survival to the next day?

Beyond the fundamental exploitativeness of H&M and fast fashion, this collection would still get zero points on aesthetic values from Morris even with his own designs. Because the work itself was such an important part of art for Morris, good design was nothing without good craftsmanship. Good design in his mind was always relative and dependent on it's purpose.

"For everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent." (The Lesser Arts, 1877)

Here when he says nature, he means the nature of the thing that is made - basically it's purpose and function - and the nature of the materials it's made from. Basically, the design must always be made to bring out the function of the art and the qualities of the material it's made from, not fight against them. This is because he believed handicrafts were uniquely suitable for expressing the love of creation, therefore superior labour, and to really bring out the qualities of the craftsmanship and enjoy the creative process, the design should be suitable for that craft. The other side, which was the joy of using and experiencing art, required the craft to be selected for the suitable purpose. Using poorly functioning furniture for example is not very enjoyable, nor is using clothing that's made from materials that are not suitable for the climactic conditions it's supposed to be used in.

H&M of course utterly fails in this. They use Morris' designs in fully unsuitable ways. They print patterns made for example for wall papers on poor quality fabrics with synthetics dyes they weren't made for. This line from one blog post I came across really got me: "Therefore, without cheapening the artistic value of Morris’ designs, H&M’s collection offers an unparalleled potential for accessibility to them." No. Fuck no. They do in fact cheapen Morris' designs in every single way possible. Literally this is atrocious.

Despite the popular depiction, Morris wasn't in fact against industrial machinery or industrial art even, or at least he wasn't once his views on art and politics matured. He did think technology was useful, but he thought the people should use industrial methods for the benefit of all, not be enslaved by the industrial machine.

"I have spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary labour; and I know that to some cultivated people, people of the artistic turn of mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I don't quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays. In other words, it is the token of the terrible crime we have fallen into of using our control of the powers of Nature for the purpose of enslaving people, we care less meantime of how much happiness we rob their lives of." ("How we live and how we might live", 1887)

However, he thought that the designer should approach it the way they approached any craft, by designing for the strengths of the machine work.

"But if you have to design for machine-work, at least let your design show clearly what it is. Make it mechanical with a vengeance, at the same time as simple at possible. Don't try, for instance, to make a printed plate look like a hand-painted one: make it something which no one would try to do if he were painting by hand..." ("Art and the Beauty of the Earth", 1881)

He did use some machinery for fabric and wall paper printing, but he was very intentional about their use. Still his designs weren't made for the type of methods these modern H&M machinery uses and he did for example use natural dyes. Particularly insulting is that some of the H&M clothes are made from viscose, rayon made with viscose method. Viscose method is extremely toxic and is known to cause long term health consequences for the workers and the people in surrounding areas. This has been well proven knowledge for ages. William Morris' wall paper factory in the beginning used the typical method used at the time which involved arsenic, but once he learned this could pose risks for the workers, he changed the method. Many of the new synthetic dyes were toxic at the time, which is the major reason he so favoured natural dyes, known to not cause health issues for workers or pollute the environment.

The question many of these think pieces about the H&M Morris collection posed was, would Morris disapprove and should we care? The first part of that is very easy to answer. Yes. Of course Morris would disapprove. He is currently powering the whole of British Isles with purely the kinetic energy his grave-spinning produces. Should we care though? If you care about Morris' art, if you want to see more of that kind of art in this world, you should care. Morris' art is not about the superficial qualities. Copying his designs and aesthetics and styles, will only lead to hollow imitations, that are exactly what he described the rags of fashion to be; as the shininess of novelty wears off they will reveal themselves to be soulless, useless and utterly empty. This collection is just that. To see more of the kind of art that makes you feel like his art makes you feel, not just something that reminds you of that feeling, you should focus more on the way the art is made and less on the specific aesthetics. If his vision of labour and art was realised, all art produced of course wouldn't be loved by every person, but all of it would be loved by someone, even if that someone was just the maker. And that would be more worthwhile than every single rag of fast fashion.

I will stop William-Morris-posting now and return to my thesis.

The full texts I quoted here:

Art and Socialism The Art of the People The Lesser Arts How We Live and How We Might Live Art and the Beauty of the Earth

[noxx-notions]

Suggestion of a crafting resource for people to look for in their communities because I didn't know it existed near me and others may not know to look for it!

There's a place in my town called a creative reuse center that is dedicated to reducing material waste and making art materials accessible to the community. The way it works at mine is they take material donations from customers but also from local businesses getting rid of excess materials and other stuff and sell it at a reduced cost. Here they sell some individually priced items, but most of it is by weight at $2/3 per pound. And literally it could be anything you may need for any type of project. There's fabric, yarn, thread, paining supplies, office supplies, old books and magazines for collaging, poster board, paper, and then just like random items that could be used in different projects like cds, corks, empty spools, cardboard tunes, leather, cigar boxes, literally anything.

I got all of this vintage tatting and mending thread (plus some dmc) for literally less than 50 cents the other day.

I saw someone recently who was a teacher walk out with four full grocery bags of crafting supplies for her students for about $40.

At this one they also host community events and classes which I haven't gotten the chance to attend yet but I'm looking forward to it!

Like I said this was something I didn't even know to look for until I came across it mostly by chance, so if you are looking to reduce your crafting waste by buying second hand or lower costs or looking to get rid of and donate some supplies maybe check to see it there's something like that near you!

[thedimelion]

The results will be a unique and slightly rustic flag. In general, I want people to be aware of their impact when it comes to buying textiles, and that there is alternatives when wanting new clothing or similarities.

[froggyforest]

The top is pretty much done. I may add more blank patches in the future

[queer-ecopunk]

After:

Before:

Fuck tiny pockets!! I finally got around to extending the pockets on these corduroy pants I thrifted over a month ago! My handsewing looks like shit but they're functional

[ninamation]

Sweater collar mend

Thrifted this sweater for $3 and immediately ripped the back of the collar when I washed it. There are probably better and prettier ways to mend this, but I just ironed on some interfacing and secured it with a few stitches.

Current works in progress:

Tons of origami roses for the wedding

Make up bags for my bridesmaids

Painting a thrifted coat hook with folk art inspired designs

Knitting a hat for my fiancé

Lots of mends for other people that I put off

[kaasi-legacy-designs]

More Crazy Quilt stitching to do.

[improbable-implosions]

Another multi-parter for both thighs across the main seam of a pair of jeans! This is a VERY common canvas for sashiko 'round this household, seeing as both Razz and I have pretty thorough thighs. Luckily, having learned my lesson (somewhat) from the giant patches in the same area I did previously, I split this into two designs, even if the patch fabric itself was one piece. Both designs are from wrenbirdart's stick and stitch collections, barring that little section on the first one I pencilled myself, as the main pattern was slightly too small.

First up we've got this genuinely delightful set of little asterisks, formed out of vertical, horizontal, and two diagonal sets of stitches. The first set of stitches immediately make clear that I really should be more careful about my math when I'm trying to duplicate the wrenbirdarts patterns onto my own dissolvable backing. Sure, that set all the way on the right is off by increasing increments of a quarter inch with each set, but I actually don't mind that look too badly in the end. The general look of all the eight-pointed overlapping crosses works super well, and I may take some inspiration from the mildly-fumbled pattern on that hand-pencilled section to make an alternating pattern of standard crosses and the asterisks, in the future.

Secondly, there's this pine forest design! I really had a love hate relationship with this one, as the pattern itself is SUPER pretty, I mean, look at that final picture! It's so beautiful! The major downside, though, is that it doesn't lend a lot of opportunities to load up straight stitches in a row. As you can kinda see in the progress shots, you do that central "coordinate grid" of a given pine top, then go quarter by quarter, filling in the other stitches, one by one, individually. Which, to me, is SUPER boring, I much prefer to load up a bunch of straight stitches in a row, then pull them all through, smoothing the fabric afterwards. So, partially because I wanted to get it done and over with as fast as possible, and partially because my jean shorts were in DIRE need of fast repairs before I could wear them in the (then incoming) summer heat, I somewhat sped my way through the pattern, in hopes that I can later come back to this pattern, and develop a more-loadable version that still keeps the pine-like beauty of the finished piece here.

[jasperthehatchet]

my bag 🌿⛓️🌻⚙️ more details in the image ID and more pics below

I found a small plain black leather backpack at the thrift store for $6 and made it my own :) I used silver sharpie for the swirls and made the buttons all myself with the exception of the metal ones

[Image ID: a small black leather backpack covered in patches, buttons, safety pins, studs and silver and metalic green spirals in the spaces with no patches. There are four patches on the front, an orange patch with a white trans rights symbol sewn on with white thread, and a circular green patch with a simplistic sun and moon drawin on it in black (a mirrormask patch) sewn on with black thread. And on the front pocket on the bottom, theres a dark green band patch with white lettering that says "she past away" sewn on with white thread and a black patch next to it with a red anarchy symbol sewn on the bag with red thread. There are silver spike studs lining the edges of the bag along the zipper and on the front pocket as well as soda tabs sewn onto the front pocket flap with off-white thread. And on both sides of the pocket there are safety pins decorating the empty space next to it. There are four pins on the side of the bag, a light green and white spiral pin, a light green and white "eat the rich" pin, and a metal fairy pin on the top half, and theres a metal frog with an umbrella pin on the front pocket in-between the two patches. Theres also a small orange carabiner on the pocket zipper.

On the left side of the bag, there is a patch on the bottom where a side pocket would normally be. An off-white band patch that says "bauhaus" in black lettering and it's sewn on with black thread, and there are silver spirals around it filling the space. There are some areas I left blank to make the swirls/spirals look like they're hanging down or growing up the bag like vines. There's a horizontal seam above all this that makes the area look like a pocket, and above this seam there's a metal pin with a sun, moon and stars on it.

The right side of the bag, there's no patch where a pocket should be, I instead filled this space with some spirals and more handmade bottle cap buttons. Two buttons, a larger type o negative band button that's black with white thorny vines, and a smaller red band button that says "doom scroll" on it in off-white lettering. Above the seam on this side I drew a bunch of silver spirals that look like they are growing out from behind the seam.

All thread mentioned in this post is embroidery thread, and some groups of spirals drawn on the bag are metallic green. End ID]

Here's the top of the bag as well as the straps that hang down

[Image ID: the bag has a rounded arch shape, and across the top of the leather I drew a cluster of green spirals in between the silver spirals I drew on the sides. There are some blank spots to avoid making the bag look busier than it already is. The loop at the top for hanging the bag is embroidered with a green leafy vine pattern. The same pattern is embroidered on the right strap that hangs down from the bottom of the bag, and on the right one, a gray barbed wire pattern is embroidered. I plan on sewing some more soda tabs onto the top of the bag at some point for the sake of adding more shiny things and also fill up some of that space I mentioned because while I don't want the bag to be too busy, I think the blank space i left on the top is a little too much blank space. End ID]

[kafkasapartment]

"If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves. Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves. How can I dare to guess about humans in the far future?

It is, I think, only a matter of natural selection. If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no futüre." ~ Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

[belligerentbagel]

suffuse