yeah, that's a good point. the quality of certain built things is hugely dependent on assembly precision. build quality really counts, for instance, when it comes to complex mechanical devices like cameras and watches. it's even more important in the manufacture of musical instruments, where older conceptions of craft and craftsmanship are still dominant. otoh, build quality isn't terribly relevant to the perceived craft-value of an ipod, which seems an almost perfect instance of perceived quality as the product of design alone.
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 16:42 (ten years ago) link
worth noting that there isn't any significant movement to add cute indie/artisanal "specialness" value to hugely skill and material dependent craft objects like guitars.
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 16:52 (ten years ago) link
man that would be obnoxious, like reclaimed wood pianos or some shit
― PJ. Turquoise dealer. Chatroulette addict. Andersonville. (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 16:55 (ten years ago) link
Brooklyn Violin
― PJ. Turquoise dealer. Chatroulette addict. Andersonville. (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 16:56 (ten years ago) link
this is calling back, but on the gender binary stuff we had been discussing upthread --
i was watching a few documentary clips of tapestry weaver archie brennan, whose work i've been getting into,and during one point he talks about how contrary to how we might expect, tapestry weaving was long considered man's work. not out of any particular masculine affinity but because tapestry weaving was taught by apprenticeship. to his telling, masters were reluctant to take on any female apprentices because they felt their instruction would be "lost" or "wasted" once the pupil got married and had kids. i'm sure this has applied to many other trades
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 17:51 (ten years ago) link
That's also partly a function of that labor moving outside the home, though. Women did the spinning, weaving, and sewing for their households & family groups and also for sale, when those things were part of the domestic world.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 17:57 (ten years ago) link
oh absolutely -- i think brennan was speaking about was the first half of the 20th when he learned his trade. i gather that there was a distinction between tapestry and other types of weaving
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:03 (ten years ago) link
For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home under her direction. She spun and dyed the yarn that she wove into cloth and cut and hand-stitched the garments. She grew much of the food her family ate, and preserved enough to last the winter months, She made butter, cheese, bread, candles, and soap and knitted her family's stockings. ...Women also ran sawmills and gristmills, caned chairs and built furniture, operated slaughterhouses, printed cotton and other cloth, made lace, and owned and ran dry-goods and clothing stores. They worked in tobacco shops, drug shops (where they sold concoctions they made themselves), and general stores that sold everything from pins to meat scales. Women ground eyeglasses, made netting and rope, cut and stitched leather goods, made cards for wool carding, and even were housepainters. Often they were the town undertakers...-Barbara Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America
Women also ran sawmills and gristmills, caned chairs and built furniture, operated slaughterhouses, printed cotton and other cloth, made lace, and owned and ran dry-goods and clothing stores. They worked in tobacco shops, drug shops (where they sold concoctions they made themselves), and general stores that sold everything from pins to meat scales. Women ground eyeglasses, made netting and rope, cut and stitched leather goods, made cards for wool carding, and even were housepainters. Often they were the town undertakers...
-Barbara Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America
xp Agreeing w you, I just wanted to quote that bit. :)
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:06 (ten years ago) link
xp And that is describing pre-industrial revolution life, specifically.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:07 (ten years ago) link
there isn't any significant movement to add cute indie/artisanal "specialness" value to hugely skill and material dependent craft objects like guitars.
no, but you can make a ukelele from a pre-packaged kit!
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:09 (ten years ago) link
For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home under her direction. She spun and dyed the yarn that she wove into cloth and cut and hand-stitched the garments. She grew much of the food her family ate, and preserved enough to last the winter months, She made butter, cheese, bread, candles, and soap and knitted her family's stockings. ...
It's hard to tell what's meant exactly without more context, but I'm not sure this is exactly accurate -- women certainly, collectively, did all of these things, but I don't think it's correct that each respective women made all of these things for her own family. Or at least it sounds a little like one of those fantasies of a pre-trade world where every household was "self-sufficient."
― PJ. Turquoise dealer. Chatroulette addict. Andersonville. (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:14 (ten years ago) link
In a frontier agrarian economy with few/no neighbors and a long distance from commercial centers, every household was ""self-sufficient"" or else you just didn't have things. I don't have a citation for this, but I don't think most people would dispute that men, collectively, built cabins, cleared fields, tilled and planted fields, harvested crops, hunted and fished and had to be good shots and woodsmen, cared for and trained livestock, made furniture/did basic woodworking, and so on. If you were really bad at some of those things, your family just had to wear ill-fitting clothes or sit on wobbly stools...tho I guess you couldn't really afford to be "bad" at the ones that involved basic subsistence.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:21 (ten years ago) link
idk, I guess it would depend on how close you lived to a village or trading post or w/e? Would be genuinely interested in reading more detailed studies of this sort of thing. I thought I remembered Graeber or someone like that talking about how self-sufficiency pre-industrial-revolution is a bit exaggerated. You don't need the industrial revolution to have candlemakers or yarn makers or carpenters or whatever, but it's true that you would need some density of population.
― PJ. Turquoise dealer. Chatroulette addict. Andersonville. (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:25 (ten years ago) link
For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home under her direction.
i think i want to highlight because under her direction necessarily implies that the kids were doing a lot of the work, too
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:25 (ten years ago) link
Orbit, making these men sound attractive! Of course I wouldn't feel worthy unless my sewing and cooking skills were flawless. Room for improvement.
Wonder if there ever was a household with wonky furniture, children with tummy aches all the time, smell of burned baked items at least once a week, no needlework in the home and poorly sewn clothing. Has to have been?
― *tera, Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:29 (ten years ago) link
xp to elmo Oh def. The kids were doing a lot of the work that the fathers/men did, too. Anybody can get up early to milk a cow, or churn butter, or learn to shoot a gun or a lot of other necessary tasks.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:29 (ten years ago) link
i think it's also easy to overstate the "impossibility" of that sort of self-sustenance because we're just not attenuated to a lifestyle where you learn candlemaking with your mom by necessity because if you don't, you don't get to see at night & besides you can't let all that beef tallow will go to waste
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:32 (ten years ago) link
Actually, tera, I have an excerpt for that too!
...the pressures of home production left very little time for the tasks that we would recognize today as housework. By all accounts, pre-industrial revolution women were sloppy housekeepers by today's standards. Instead of the daily cleaning or the weekly cleaning, there was the spring cleaning. Meals were simple and repetitive; clothes were changed infrequently; and the household wash was allowed to accumulate, and the washing done once a month, or in some households once in three months. And of course since each wash required the carting and heating of many buckets of water, higher standards of cleanliness were easily discouraged.- Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, "The Manufacture of Housework," in Socialist Revolution, 1975
- Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, "The Manufacture of Housework," in Socialist Revolution, 1975
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:33 (ten years ago) link
and even their "bless this mess" placards are all fucked up
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:35 (ten years ago) link
At least re clothes, I know a few ways they were extended to save women labor: Skirts of dresses were made with deep pleats around the bottoms that could be taken up or let down if someone grew or clothes were handed down to a shorter girl. Also when fabrics got worn or stained on the outside, solid colors could be cut apart and the pieces turned inside-out and resewn to give the appearance of new cloth.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:38 (ten years ago) link
n a frontier agrarian economy with few/no neighbors and a long distance from commercial centers, every household was ""self-sufficient"" or else you just didn't have things. I don't have a citation for this, but I don't think most people would dispute that men, collectively, built cabins, cleared fields, tilled and planted fields, harvested crops, hunted and fished and had to be good shots and woodsmen, cared for and trained livestock, made furniture/did basic woodworking, and so on. If you were really bad at some of those things, your family just had to wear ill-fitting clothes or sit on wobbly stools...tho I guess you couldn't really afford to be "bad" at the ones that involved basic subsistence.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, July 24, 2013 2:21 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I just think it's more likely that some men were more oriented toward certain of these skills and some toward others, and that trade still took place to make up the difference, even among families that lived relatively remotely. Yes the average man or woman probably had a FAR wider range of subsistence skills than 99% of modern people, but I don't think that even in the colonial days most families did everything themselves. And there were specialists and tradesmen (who, again, would still probably have a range of other subsistence skills) way, way before the industrial revolution.
― PJ. Turquoise dealer. Chatroulette addict. Andersonville. (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:46 (ten years ago) link
Uh I don't think it's in dispute that the authors meant a conglomerate housewife or whatever. When you say, "the pre-industrial housewife" you're obviously not referring to the one and only woman who was ever a pre-industrial housewife. So I don't know who you're arguing with but it's pretty dumb.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 18:50 (ten years ago) link
yeah hurting, i don't think anyone was arguing against the existence of trade?? L's point seems to have been that this was work that was done ~at home~, rather than at a 'work-place', and that as such these tasks fell under a rubric of household management which was primarily the domain of women?
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 19:06 (ten years ago) link
yeah I guess I am kind of getting off on a different tangent, but I feel like the myth of complete "self-sufficiency" is sort of related to the thread topic as well, and it's something I was just talking about with a friend so it was on my mind.
― PJ. Turquoise dealer. Chatroulette addict. Andersonville. (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 19:12 (ten years ago) link
worth noting that there isn't any significant movement to add cute indie/artisanal "specialness" value to hugely skill and material dependent craft objects like guitars.― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Wednesday, July 24, 2013 4:52 PM (2 hours ago)
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Wednesday, July 24, 2013 4:52 PM (2 hours ago)
god how i wish this was true
― nice moderating dude (jjjusten), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 19:13 (ten years ago) link
Orbit: Thanks! That makes more sense...
― *tera, Wednesday, 24 July 2013 19:14 (ten years ago) link
custom shop guitars, boutique manufacturers, hand painted effects pedals, etc
― nice moderating dude (jjjusten), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 19:17 (ten years ago) link
on the topic of self-subsistence, you know who gets really crafty?? doomsday preppers!
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 19:18 (ten years ago) link
stupid effects pedals are deeply offensive to me
― loosely inspired by Dr. Dre (crüt), Wednesday, 24 July 2013 19:19 (ten years ago) link
kinda lost me with iphone / apple / steve jobs stuff, tho.
uh, yeah, think i lost myself a bit tbh. it was a cackhanded attempt at trying to find modern parallels - an association of craftsmanship with a modern item, where industrial methods of production didn't preclude the notion of craftsmanship in the design (a dissociation of the physical notion of crafting from the notion of the 'pride of the producer' and the subsequent difficulty of maintaining that 'tradition'. Put plain - how does a company or product at the top stay at the top - the problem of progress or putrefaction/petrification. Don't really think it works - at least without several quite significant intermediary steps - but i'd had a couple I'm afraid.
― Fizzles, Wednesday, 24 July 2013 21:47 (ten years ago) link
where industrial methods of production didn't preclude the notion of craftsmanship in the design
i can think of a lot of examples of this, mostly in textiles and apparel
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:08 (ten years ago) link
relevant:
S.E.H Kelly makes garments with the makers of the British Isles. The best mills and factories in the Isles, these makers — and, with them, every cloth is woven, and every garment is made, with the unstinting standards, and the characteristic sturdiness, of the best British make.
http://www.sehkelly.com/about/
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:11 (ten years ago) link
their photo tumblr is one of my absolute favorites, as far as menswear stuff goes. most of the photos focus on the materials, processes, and technologies that go into the producing the garments, rather than their design or how the finished product is sold / styled. it is def a fetishistic catalog in a way; it has a sort of preoccupation with tools. the process of clothing manufacture is so largely obscured from the view of the consumer that i find the focus pretty engaging, even if i know it's a kind of a silly nostalgic view of the nobility and purity of the way things used to be made.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/3dbdb86a82d4280d8215c97551b352dc/tumblr_mpikvyTAye1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:25 (ten years ago) link
http://24.media.tumblr.com/abe962e0197aab76364d5eec53508a41/tumblr_mntu4zVbvQ1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:27 (ten years ago) link
http://24.media.tumblr.com/df174e703aeddc9f2ba1fe87318db807/tumblr_mmzzmsCqDW1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:29 (ten years ago) link
ok i'm done
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:31 (ten years ago) link
No, more!!!
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:32 (ten years ago) link
loads more here:
http://sehkelly.tumblr.com/
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:35 (ten years ago) link
strange noodle looms
― 乒乓, Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:56 (ten years ago) link
on the level of personal experience, tho -- i work for my family's business, a t-shirt company. we are something of a specialty printer but first and foremost we are known for our tie-dye designs. in most people's experience tie-dye is rightly epitome of 'crunchy craft' insomuch as it's results are highly random & notoriously difficult to control with precision. color matching is not always easy, but there's also the question of coming up with large-scale manufacturing process that will reliably produce the desired pattern over & over again. we produce a lot of inventory, so there are standardized folding & pleating techniques, templates, dye recipes & ratios, laundry procedures, methods of dye dispensing, etc etc -- all of which go into standardizing output of this particular craft, which is the basis of our reputation, on a large scale.
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Thursday, 25 July 2013 14:22 (ten years ago) link
Love SEH Kelly! Beyond love!
I have always wished I was part of some family business that included being skilled in a trade that I needed to learn and become great at. It always clashed with my sister's wish that we were just an old money family (boring). My family is made up of various office and teaching jobs. I'm the only one who does anything crafty. Grandmother's did thread pulling and needlework to relax and that's about it.
― *tera, Thursday, 25 July 2013 16:01 (ten years ago) link
http://www.jpeterman.com/One-of-a-Kind
― scott seward, Thursday, 25 July 2013 16:05 (ten years ago) link
first google result http://pandpguitars.com
"Every guitar is meticulously crafted from carefully selected pieces of reclaimed timber. Each is unique in appearance, sound, and story. Over a century ago a carpenter built a barn. Milled timbers of ash were hand hewn and framed to last for ages. The builder probably didn't consider that 150 years later that timber takes a second life as an electric guitar, but stories like this are what makes each piece special."
― wk, Thursday, 25 July 2013 16:24 (ten years ago) link
retracted
― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Thursday, 25 July 2013 16:28 (ten years ago) link
buy our stories
― Aimless, Thursday, 25 July 2013 16:58 (ten years ago) link
It's funny because if it's the story of the wood itself that's interesting then maybe they shouldn't sand it down, destroy the patina, and make it into something else that's brand new and doesn't have a story. People should just start collecting reclaimed wood planks and displaying them as art pieces.
― wk, Thursday, 25 July 2013 17:07 (ten years ago) link
http://www.etsy.com/listing/110976884/reclaimed-wood-art
― *tera, Thursday, 25 July 2013 19:24 (ten years ago) link
really wish I could find the SNL driftwood sculptor bit with John Malkovich
― PJ. Turquoise dealer. Chatroulette addict. Andersonville. (Hurting 2), Thursday, 25 July 2013 19:24 (ten years ago) link
i like that wood art thing
― Treeship, Thursday, 25 July 2013 19:25 (ten years ago) link
Ha!!Loved that driftwood sketch!
this woman...http://olga66.wordpress.com/my-works/
― *tera, Thursday, 25 July 2013 19:27 (ten years ago) link