The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 5 Hope of Product

This is the fifth of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a short story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on.

This is also the second of three posts exploring the topic of work within the story and we are using William Morris' three requirements of meaningful work; hope of rest, hope of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself. If you missed the first one you can read it by clicking here, otherwise it's on to hope of product...

The twin concepts that Morris gives us of hope of product and hope of pleasure in making that product are, for him, closely related; in fact we could say that it is this very closeness that is at the heart of the arts & crafts movement, and which strikes so many of us as so radical even now. Nonetheless in this article I want to try and tease them apart a bit and focus on hope of product, the idea that our daily efforts should result in something meaningful and useful, which helps meet our needs.

What did you make today I wonder? What will you make tomorrow? The answer to these questions might be quite simple; perhaps you made a loaf of bread or a chair, if you’re a baker or chairmaker. If it isn’t bread or furniture, perhaps you made something else useful, a lamp or a book, a film or a bowl. Maybe you did. But I suspect you didn’t.

On the other hand you could be a nurse or doctor and so you made someone better or comforted them. But even this is quite rare.

Instead I wonder if you did what most people do? Make money; not for yourself, but for the person or persons who employ you.

We all know that someone who works in a high street clothing store doesn’t make clothes, instead their job is to sell clothes or, to be more precise, to encourage you to buy clothes from their shop, rather than the one next door. Think about it next time you go into a clothing shop; what does the assistant actually do, other than encourage you to buy, ensure the clothes are on the rack for you to buy and then take your money?

The same is true for Hugo in our story of course. He doesn’t make mobile phones, he may pretend to advise customers based on their needs, but actually his job is to persuade the public that they should buy from his shop rather than the other three down the street and that you should spend as much as you can. His product is profit for a group of people he is unlikely to ever meet.

What a market economy does (even in its most basic form) is replace the link between what you need and what you then produce. So if I needed a bowl, in a non-market, non-exchange society, I have to make one. And of course for most of human history this is how life worked, but slowly over time (long before capitalism) people started to specialise in making certain things, like bowls, and it maybe that they would make them for certain part of the day/week/year and then exchange the bowl for food or other essentials. However, I think it is fair to say that it was a very, very long time before this transformed into a situation where people only made bowls and never made things or grew food to meet their own needs, which of course is where we find ourselves now.

Another crucial difference is that the bowl maker has need of his bowls – nothing leaves his hands that he could not use or own for his own use. Compare this with the current situation where so many workers are producing goods they could never afford to own or have no use of.

 And so we move onto a capitalist system, where the average worker has two products; whatever it is they do or make and the products that they buy to meet their own needs, with the money they are given for their work. This ever increasing disconnect between the two – the genuine needs you have and the tasks you perform on a daily basis – was a concern to Morris and should be a concern for us now.

Morris, in a wonderfully Victorian passage, describes the situation Hugo find’s himself in:

‘…living as they do on wages from those whom they support, [they] cannot get for their use the goods which men naturally desire, but must put up with miserable makeshifts for them…’

Even if we follow this thinking of a market economy and call the product of Hugo’s labour the money he earns with which to buy a jumper, that is only enough to buy one of poor quality. The jumper is entirely constructed from cheap materials (e.g. cotton) and hence quickly becomes misshapen and worn. The stitching is perhaps weak and done in such haste that it did not catch all along the seams. Because it is mass produced it is made to ‘fit’ as many sizes as possible and so hangs a little on him. But the alternative, a properly fitting jumper, of good quality, made over time from excellent materials would be unaffordable to Hugo. And this is exactly the point Morris is making. He continues:

‘…[they] must put up with miserable makeshifts for them, with course food that does not nourish, with rotten rainment [clothing] which does not shelter, with wretched houses which may well make a town-dweller in civilization look back with regret to the tent of nomad tribe, or the cave of the pre-historic savage.’

The language has changed, but sadly the situation Morris describes has not. Our Bangladeshi worker will almost certainly live in substandard housing, that may well make a tent look plush. She may well be clothed in, at best, her traditional clothing made in a sweatshop in her own country or at worse second-hand clothing the west no longer wants, and yet each day she walks to make jumpers she could never afford. Her actual product (the jumper) is poor and her rewards so meagre that her own living (her product) is pitiful.

Her housing is not made from scrap because it is effective at keeping out the weather and elements, it is because it is cheap. It is cheap housing, because that is all she can afford. It is not unheard of for those in developing countries to have to raise a mortgage to afford a few sheets of corrugated iron to use as a roof.

As ever Morris describes it best:

‘But it is a waste of time to try and express in words due contempt of the productions of the much praised cheapness of our epoch. It must be enough to say that this cheapness is necessary to the system of exploiting on which modern manufacture rests. In other words, our society includes a great mass of slaves, who must be fed, clothed, housed and amused as slaves, and that their daily necessity compels them to make slave-wares whose use is the perpetuation of their slavery.’

How often have you bought something, only for it to break, not work or just be horrible to use, or been constrained by money to buy something you know will not last? True quality is such a rare thing in our societies that it is almost impossible to find, and, when we can, the market system makes the time and care it requires unaffordable. This is one of the key problems that craftspeople face; how can their product, which often takes so many hours to produce, ever be affordable to the general population? And so instead we are presented with cheaper imitations to help us make believe that our lives are richer than they are. Some of this we can counter ourselves; buy less and buy quality, make it yourself so that you don’t have to pay for the time it takes and buy second-hand – where quality doesn’t often reflect the price. And we should do these things, but let us be clear that this is tinkering at the edges, our current system cannot allow us all to reverse this system of cheap manufacturing it relies on.

Planned obsolescence has become a much more widely understood term since Annie Leonard’s excellent ‘Story of Stuff’ (if you haven’t watched it do), but it’s true that in a consumer society, that works by citizens buying new products constantly, the idea of something of quality, that lasts, is against the very principle of the system. And so in short, things have to brake, have to be cheaply made, so that you buy new ones. This is also the reason for constant innovation, as it brings new products to the market – replacing those before. Considered refinement of quality and reliability is much lower down the pecking order than “new!”.

Let us come back to our story and just review where we are. Our Bangladeshi woman’s hope of product is extremely poor, whether we are talking about the poorly made jumper she could not afford, and which she has no emotional attachment to or the meagre shelter, food and clothing she can afford with the money she makes from working at the factory.

Hugo, of course, doesn’t actually make anything, his product is simply profit for his ultimate employers; his ultimate personal product is the jumper that will last one year, which he has no input into the making of and which he has very little emotional attachment to.

And what of Mary? Well her product is very different to the others, because she is able to meet her own needs, through her own effort and skills. The end product is one of excellent quality, fitted to her size and shape, of her own design and suited to her needs. Because of this she has an emotional tie and investment in it, which enriches her experience of owning and wearing it.

Morris isn’t saying (and neither am I) that each of us should be capable of making everything and meeting our every need. In fact Morris berates the fact that he has to learn so many crafts, a situation he blames on the way society is constructed. And this leads us nicely into the next blog post, hope of pleasure in the work itself, because we need to reconnect our work with the needs we are trying to meet and create a society where people can develop their skills to create beautiful products, of real quality, for their communities own needs.

How to Make an Engineer's Tool Cabinet: Part One

My Poppa was a tool maker, ending his working life at a technical college in Basildon, a place that sprung up over his lifetime from the fields he knew and loved. He was one of these wonderful squirrel type characters, who knew that almost anything was of use one day and hated the idea of throwing anything out. Small pieces of metal, cutters etc would invariably find their rest in the already overflowing black engineers tool cabinet and on inheriting it I had the tough task of trying to decided what I felt would one day be useful and what should go on to be recycled and turned into something else. I was aided in this by my general ignorance with regard to engineering and metal work in general and so the little cabinet was soon emptied and cleaned, only to then be swiftly commandeered by the other half as a sewing box.

A little while ago I stumbled on another one, this time unstained, sat in the window of a small antique shop. As with so many (my Poppa’s included) it had lost it’s door, but was in good overall condition and had been cleaned and polished by the shop owner. We agreed a price that was fair and I brought it home to reline the draws (which I detailed on a previous blog post) and then sold it using a rather well known auction website, to a costume designer working on a Sci-fi film who was delighted with it. However, before I sent it to it’s new owner I took some measurements and drew out rough sketches in the back of my notebook, thinking that making one would be a very enjoyable project and handy for keeping various craft tools in place and easily transportable.

So when I signed up to a furniture making course at my own local technical college I knew exactly what I wanted to make and I went along to the first session, notebook in hand, and tried to explain to the tutors what my ideas where and what the cabinet looked like. It’s is so often the imbalance of knowledge that gives rise to confusion and this was certainly the case here and on reflection a photo or two would have made things so much clearer; instead I watched as they tried to make sense of my little partial drawings, that were marked with the readings from the micrometer I had used to measure it to 0.1 mm accuracy. The sketches and figures made sense to me, because I knew where they had been taken from and I knew how the cabinet worked as I had a mental picture of the finished piece. The second week I am not sure if I improved the situation when I turned up rather late and flustered (although I was the only one who cared), with several pages of scale drawings that once again made perfect sense to me.

Hopefully you'll understand then why it came as a huge relief when last night at our third session, the main tutor, studying my drawings, said ‘I get what you are making now, this is going to be a lovely little cabinet’ and was positive and encouraging about me building it. However, I had drawn the cabinet to the same dimensions as the original, only to discover that the oak timber I had available was not wide enough and had decided that my new one would need to be much narrower. The tutor asked if I was wedded to the idea of using the oak I had taken in and, mindful that something more exciting might be in the offing, I said not particularly. This led to me being taken out through a series of rooms and into the timber store and shown a huge piece of mahogany at the bottom of a stack. ‘Why not make it out of that?’ he asked.

So, I have got to go back to the drawings, rather pleasantly and rework it not just to the original size, but on his suggestion a little larger so that the door fits cleanly in the bottom when in use. I’ll be documenting the progression of building it here and will publish the plans and photos of the finished cabinet; hopefully it will put a smile on the face of my Poppa and give me somewhere to poke the bits that are 'too good to throw away'!

In the meantime please do visit Adam Cherubini’s blog Arts & Mysteries where you’ll find him contemplating and building a very similar piece.

Back on the loom again...

If you could see me, you would see a big fat grin on my face. Because after almost a year and half I am actually doing some more weaving. As I have mentioned before we acquired the loom in December 2010 and made three scarves and a tie as presents (literally finishing late into the night before we left to be with the family for the holiday) and since then it has sat unused.
 

The three warps marked up

Whilst they all came out quite well, we were always battling the warp – both in terms of getting it onto the loom and inconsistent tension. Most of this was caused by the fact we didn’t have a warping frame and was using a upturned sofa or two chairs stood apart. Neither worked well – unsurprisingly! However, as you’ll see here I finally got around to making a new warping frame at the start of this year.


Now, in typical me style, as soon as the warp frame was finished (actually there was still one peg to do!) I decided to weave a 12m (39ft) length of fabric, at the full width of the loom, which is 36”. As you see from a photo on that previous blog post from a couple of months ago, I even warped out half of it. However, I got into a right old pickle, the tension still didn’t feel quite right, even on the warping frame and I couldn’t remember how to warp the loom, never mind that I had added a homemade raddle into the mix since.

And so the whole project ground to a halt and I found myself unable to see the wood for the trees – inertia invariably took over and still the loom sat unused.
 

After 1 1/2 years the first new warp
being woven on the loom

Then last week someone suggested that perhaps I should start a little smaller. Put the troublesome 39ft warp to one side and try again, with scrap yarn on a short warp. Hmm... now that sounds obvious written down, but at the time it was just the prompt I needed. And so I wound a short 2m (6ft) warp onto the warping frame and... well... buggered it up! I didn’t have the raddle cross and the thread cross at the right end!

But no matter, scrap yarn that I can use for something else, take two...

I can’t remember what went wrong with take two... but something did. Time for some help, time for youtube. So I went looking for a step-by-step guide to warping the loom and found myself being helped along by Barbara Elkins.

Finally warp three was a success, a real success actually. A nice even tension, that so far has persisted through the warp and I even managed to do it single handed.

3/8" stripes, but soft lines because of the
slugs in the cream yarn

 I deliberately haven’t loaded a ‘useful’ length of warp onto the loom, so that I don’t get seduced into trying to ‘make something’. The point is that this is a tester warp, for trial and error...

The yarn is one my mother-in-law found at a charity shop a while back and to look at it on the cone I wasn’t too keen, but actually on the loom it doesn’t look too bad. The label says it’s a wool/cashmere mix, but it also seems to have a cotton or poly core to it, under the slugs. I only set the warp to 8 ends per inch (epi), so that I didn’t waste too much yarn until I got the knack of warping and with the intention that I would do two more tester warps, at 16epi and 24epi, so that I can see the difference that increasing the number of warp threads has - perhaps doing the same designs as I have on this one so I can compare.

I started out trying a very loose weave, with the same yarn as the warp. This looked nice, but moved easily up and down the warp so that the pattern never held. I then tried a block of weaving, in both tabby and twill, again with the same yarn. Nice, but perhaps a bit 1980s Marks & Spencer.
 

A 5" tester sample piece
and then on to something new.

On the shuttle bobbin I had a pale blue silk/cotton mix yarn that had come from a jumper we bought at a charity shop (see the post here on recycling wool). It’s a fine yarn, but I thought I would give it a go and I was rather pleased with the result. Again it moves up and down the warp a bit (I assume this will stop when I increase the epi), but I actually quite liked the ribbed effect. It is beating in at around 160 picks per inch.

After an inch or so I decided to try a striped pattern, using a tabby weave on the blue silk/cotton and twill on the wool/cashmere, in 3/8” bands. I am really pleased with the result – the colours and pattern have an almost Georgian undertone – but looser and softer. The slugs in the wool/cashmere yarn stop it from ever being ridged or precise, which is good as even this is moving up and down the warp a bit (not quite sure how it will sit once off the loom). The twill would have benefited from floating selvedges, which I’ll do next time, but I am pleased with the silk selvedge.


I could have quite happily have done a whole warp of this and made something out it... but that’s not the point is it? So I restricted myself to a 5” square block and now it’s on to try something new...