My closet is a museum of abandoned and failed craft projects. A box of bookbinding materials lies buried under patterns for clothes I haven’t gotten around to making, yet. A smaller box nearby holds beads strung in patterns on pieces of wire and elastic I didn’t manage to fashion into anything. Whenever the box is jostled, another bead falls off to roll around in the box. There’s a silver bracelet in there, too, I made in a jewelry-making class. I hadn’t figured on the tips of the leaves I’d carved around it being so sharp. Accidentally knock your wrist against something while wearing my bracelet and you’ll puncture a vein. It lives in my closet, now, where it can’t hurt anyone, along with origami papers and a handful of little origami boxes I meant to make dozens of and string around my apartment, along with beeswax and ribbons and essential oils, buttons and embroidery hoops, along with a box of sweaters in various stages of completion. All of it evidence of a preference for dreaming things up rather than finishing them. 

The last project I did finish was a scarf that took me thirty hours to knit. I could have bought a perfectly adequate, even attractive scarf in less than half the time for less than half the money, so should I have? The popularity of knitting and other crafts aside, I know there are plenty of people who would think so, who find making things by hand a waste of time. I should admit that I’ve always been a person for whom the word “efficiency” has negative connotations and the word “handmade” has been synonymous with “beauty” and — I’m cringing because I feel some discomfort with the word, but in the interest of honesty — “virtue.” But I’m having second thoughts.

The last time I was in New York I went to a knitting café on the lower east side. The space was enticing: a sleek, modern café on one side featuring expensive baked goods, coffee, and fancy organic juices, the opposite wall a feast of colors and textures with yarns spilling out of cubbyholes, and metal tables with illustrated knitting books on them, inviting patrons to sit and dream up their next projects, maybe start on them over a latte. I felt seduced by the place but also wary. Its hip presentation of the best of everything seemed too perfect. All you needed to step into this vision of the creative life in all its bohemianism and quirky originality was enough cash. Knitting isn’t cheap. Yarn for a sweater can cost upwards of a hundred dollars. There’s cheaper yarn out there, but it’s not as pretty, and if you’re going to spend a few months working on something, you want to take pleasure in just handling the materials. 

That it should cost more to make something than to buy it seems perverse to me, but perhaps it’s time to get over that. In this country, knitting and other crafts are leisure activities for the middle and upper classes, after all. We don’t knit sweaters out of necessity. I’m not some Luddite who thinks life would have been better in pre-industrial times. There are plenty of things I would rather not have to make and am quite happy to buy — uninspiring things I nevertheless really do need, like underwear and socks. I know it would take some of the fun out of making things if I really did have to make them, since I find that having to do just about anything takes some of the fun out of it.

I grew up in a household with something of a mania for the homemade. My mother is an artist, and along with painting she has always spent time making things, first out of thrift and later, perhaps more out of pleasure and the conviction that homemade things have an integrity store-bought things don’t. As a teenager in the sixties, she sewed enough miniskirts that she could wear a different one each day of the week. As a young wife and mother, she made clothes for my father and me, toys, curtains, napkins, tablecloths, needlepoint pillows. She painted scenes on walls and furniture, made decoupage boxes, reupholstered chairs. Early Christmas ornaments were all homemade — bells and trees sewn in felt, animal shapes baked in dough and painted, cardboard glitter stars. I came across them in the attic a few years ago while looking for the fancier, store-bought ornaments we’ve been using for years now and felt moved by my mother’s industriousness. My father, too, has always been a maker of things. Fishing rods, flies to fish with, and wine, mainly, though he also did all the cooking when I was growing up, and made apple cider and maple syrup, some years. Lately, there’s been talk of caning chairs and making fishing nets in his retirement.

I suppose it’s typical to feel some nostalgia for the simpler time of your life, or the life of your family, when there was less money to buy things and more necessity for innovation. Unless you grew up poor and never achieved a basic level of comfort, you probably feel a sort of pride in an early period of making-do and self-reliance. Maybe that’s what’s missing for me now in my own craftmaking. I haven’t got any money, and the things I make aren’t saving me any. If anything, my pursuit of crafts has been an extension of my consumeristic tendencies.

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