>> Jean Railla is the author of the new domesticity manifesto Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec (Broadway Books). Obsessed with the craft of
cooking, she is researching a book on underground food cultures.
When it comes to the culinary arts, I’m obsessed. Every step of cooking dinner thrills me — from the recipe collections and cooking shows, to the visiting of purveyors like the farmer’s market, Pino’s Prime Meats, and Murray’s Cheeses, to the chopping, mixing, stirring, tasting, cooking, and consuming. The thing that most appeals to me about cooking is that the reward is almost instantaneous. I hate to wait.
My friend Tobi, on the other hand, is the epitome of patience and detail. He can wait. He likes the struggle and the challenge of, say, knitting a full lace shawl for his grandmother. Do you know how mind-numbingly hard it is to knit lace? How intricate? How seemingly insane this is? And he knit this lace shawl in the midst of producing fashion shows during New York City’s Fashion Week. He literally worked 16-hour days, and then came home, said “hi” to his boyfriend, and pulled out his knitting. Clearly, he doesn’t take on these huge, complicated projects because he has a bunch of time on his hands. Tobi simply likes his crafts hard and complicated.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was reorganizing my closets. Once again I was sorting through my huge pile of half-finished craft projects — the bright cranberry fat yarn that I actually made into a simple scarf, rather than the two matching hats I had planned for my sons. There was the half-done photomontage project for our hallway, all of the materials to make magic wands with the boys, and the gorgeous silk fabric in just the right robin’s-egg blue that I plan on using as closet doors to bring a splash of color to our bedroom. When it comes to crafting, I often have more desire than discipline.
I like my crafts fast and easy. If it can’t be done in a mindless fashion while watching Mystery! on
PBS, then I have to call Tobi and have him finish it for me. It’s not that I lack the time. I can braise short ribs, play three rounds of hide and seek, start four loads of laundry, and check my email by the time most of my friends wake up on Saturday morning. If I wanted to make time for really cool, complex crafts, then I could.
I used to feel like a bit of a fraud, running a modern crafting site and writing a book on the
new domesticity, when I’m such a lazy crafter. My motto hasn’t changed much since I was a twenty-something stoner — if it feels good and doesn’t hurt others, go for it. Whether it’s the brilliant dinner you make for friends, the socks you knit for your boyfriend, or just the way you organize your life so that you have more time to build a geodesic dome in the desert, I think the point of all this crafting is to be in touch with something meaningful and authentic. When we craft, even half-assed, we make something from nothing; we create rather than just consume. It’s a sort of alchemy that is suspiciously absent from our postindustrial, globalized economy. So stop fretting and start crafting. ×
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