Microblog Monday – crafty thoughts

I went to the craft fair this weekend.  G came along as well, but was too tired to last long. So I was by myself for a while.  I went to two presentations that made me think.  The first was a show about repurposing and mending to create vintage looks.  It was about how people didn’t used to have a lot of clothes, and there were tricks to stretch the use and update looks.  An interesting meditation on how wasteful fast fashion is.

The second was a class on “boro boro” stitching.  This is a Japanese concept, basically sewing together scraps of cloth with running stich to create padded and quilted clothing out of remnants of cloth. Another way to reuse old things.  It was a rural technique that went dcidely out of fashion as modern clothes became available and there isn’t much left.  There was a small exhibit of boro boro pieces at the show, and I took a class to make some coasters in that style.  Yes I am aware of the irony there, that someone has cut up scraps deliberately,  but it is a useful technique for using the little fabric scraps that accrue.

And this has made me think about my crafting in general.  In the last few years I have been trying to make things that are at least somewhat functional- turning stitched pieces into pincushions, or coasters etc.  I still have a lot of kits to make cross stitched pictures, but I would like to think about alternative uses.

The other thing I did this weekend was finish off a Mollie makes cover kit.  It was a tiny weaving kit.  It was interesting to complete, but I can’t help feeling it is a bit useless.

I have nowhere to hang it, I don’t actually like wall hangings much and well why? I can kind of understand having these sorts of kits around so the idea of weaving is not lost (because at some point civilisation is going to need to know this) but I am not going to be weaving anything useful any time soon.

And so much of crafting seems to be of this type- a useful technique used in a way that seems incredibly wasteful and indulgent.

Hmm, not so micro!