…That you may not have read.

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about online consumption vs. online production, and wondering how my view on both went so askew. As I’ve been puttering around with my own work, I’ve sorely been neglecting passing on what feeds me creatively, so here are a few examples. There will be more like that soon when the 1st newsletter finally goes out in December… forestalled by well, life, and family health things.

It’s ridiculous how often we forget that usually when it’s we start freaking out because we think we need to post/blog/tweet/reply and are having a hard time finding the time/energy/wherewithal, it’s generally because we’re worried much too much about production and not enough about feeding ourselves… Which leads to nothing much but feeling worse and hungry for sustenance.

While I know full well that craft and creativity can feed us, now that I work a full-time job and no longer have the time to devote that I did in academia (sniff!), I neglect to take the time to read and learn and digest and take in because I’m fretting about what needs to go out. [Note to those of you out there in academia who work and research full time on craft-related things: Embrace it. One day, perhaps I’ve have the chance to join you again!]

And thus, as it always does, the fretting takes 5 times the energy out of you than taking a few hours out to read, question, scribble and think. Maybe things in your world have gotten a little askew lately, too. If so, here’s a few bits and bobs that have helped me start to get back to balance.

1957. Rio de Janeiro. My mother, aged 15, looks out the window. She’s waiting for a chair. A chair that has been measured, designed and handcrafted in Jacaranda just for her by the local maker down the road. When my grandmother died, this chair was shipped from Brazil to Sydney, then down to Tasmania for my young daughter. Although she shouldn’t, she swings on it the just as her grandmother’s did fifty years earlier.

This is furniture with a story. Furniture made to last. Handcrafted, to be used and loved. In my mind this is deep sustainability. After all, an item that is made well can be mended and re-made again.

Fuad-Luke* nailed it in 2005 when he wrote: “What is clear is that modernist, organic, post-modern or any other doctrine with recognisable semiotics, is easily subverted in the service of industry and to the glory of consumerism and economic progress. … Corporate ambition, encouraged by the capitalist political doctrine, continues to ensure that inbuilt obsolescence, the touchstone of industrial design, keeps producers producing, consumers consuming and designers designing.” …. the question then becomes, what am I going to do about it?

Read the rest here. [Article written by Laura McCusker, which you can learn more about via @McCusker_Design or her website. Post written for Craft Australia Link: HT @namitagw.

Whenever yarn is donated to the group – which happens a lot – Evans has a rule they all follow: donated yarn becomes a donated project.

“It’s my opinion that if it’s donated yarn, you need to pay it forward and use that yarn not for yourself but for someone else,” said Evans, who became coordinator last year.

“Some of these people (in the group) are on a fixed income. They would love to make things for other people, but they can’t afford to go out and buy whole a lot of yarn.”

I think one of my favorite quotes of the article is, however, “Knitting is not just for grandmothers,” Evans said, “but we have lots of them, too.”

More here.

Also on the radar: Counter-Craft.org was recently created by for her DIY Cultures class.

*Alastair Fuad-Luke