What Would Happen If You Had To Be Yourself?

Something very cool happened in my comments section yesterday. A really interesting discussion started to unfold - people started to talk about the whole "yourself as a brand" and "performing yourself in public " aspect of the craft/knitting business.If you've been reading Fourth Edition for a long time, you'll know this is one of my major hang-ups as an indie designer and tutor. (I even wrote a long post about it as part of the work I did with Glasgow University last year). I want to share some of the points made in the comments because I think they are asking some very important questions about branding, marketing, social media and (for a want of a better term) 'cult of personality'. It may not be straight up yarn-related but I hope it'll provide an interesting glimpse into what it means to work in the craft industry.

I was disquietened by her comments about the need to be positive all the time. Admittedly she is using herself as a brand and may want to keep back some stuff and have a private life. But the more we have this “you must always be positive” message around, the harder it is for us to be honest with one another about how we feel

- Stephanie of The Foggy Knitter

I find it’s very hard for me to come to terms with “personality as brand” and “public persona” but I realise that it is how the business works. I have struggled with this for a long time (how I would prefer to just lurk in the shadows!) but the podcast made me confront myself regarding this.

- Karie of Fourth Edition (that'll be yours truly!)

I struggle all the time with the need to be a “public persona,” or a “personality.” Especially since part of what I do for a living is teach classes! There’s a certain online pressure to be this happy, successful person who can share all the secrets of success. But what I’d rather do is gather quietly in classroom spaces with my students, and give them my all. That doesn’t make for sexy marketing copy, though. :-)

- Sister Diane of Craftypod

That “have to be happy” is a pressure we feel from both the big, lovely craft bloggers (my gorgeous living room! My sleeping baby!), but we also feel it from the inside of our own heads! No one wants to feel like a loser…and telling the internet that you’re not perfect (in a space dominated by the perfect) is a quick way to loser-town. (At least, in my own head.)

(..)

At the heart of all this is *expectations*. My expectations of myself. My reader’s/student’s/client’s expectations, and then all those expectations that I’m making assumptions about. Who even knows if they exist? But they certainly guide the way we act/present ourselves in this space.

- Tara Swiger

The podcast gave me a lot to think about & the blog post has added more. I, too, struggle with the personal brand idea. I’m quite shy which may be why.

- Anniken Allis of YarnAddict

Not in the comments section, but on her own blog, Vanessa reflected:

I’ve found that acknowledging that I’m feeling envy and it’s probably unfounded helps me let go of that anger. Then I try to really analyze just what pushed that button. Once I get to the root cause, I look at it from all sides. Is this image that person is presenting the whole truth? What am I not seeing? A messy house, uncombed hair, other to-dos that fell to the way side. Those aren’t presented on the internet.

There is so much to unpack here but the central question has to be What would happen if you had to be yourself?

A Dash of Colour, Beauty & Cynicism.

I have been working a lot with undyed yarns recently - one mossy green has crept into the Doggerland collection but otherwise I am using all natural fleece colours. I really enjoy it - of course I do - but I do yearn for some colour in my knitting. Just a little pop of something decadent.

A bit of birthday yarn arrived yesterday. My lovely gran sent me 1100 yrds of 2ply merino wool from Danish company, DesignClub. This red is marvellous - it has unusual depth to it and the yarn has some great bounce. It was spun at Henrichsens Uldspinneri, a Danish woollen mill dating back to the 19th century. I've used the yarn before and I am looking forward to using it again ..

I thought I'd also show you the necklace pendants which my friend Paula made for my birthday. They are so pretty.

I was recently sent a link to Craftypod - specifically an episode which discussed the idea of "the knitting celebrity" and internet jealousy. It is a really interesting podcast and if you can spare 30 minutes, I recommend you give it a listen.

First, though, some words from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. He was asked about being "internet famous"

Right now, I'm sitting in a public library minding my own business taking a break from what I was working on.  No one is likely to recognize or notice me here..

But I am, as the question asks, "Internet famous".  That phrase is vague and could mean a lot of things, but for me what it means is that Wikipedia is very very very famous and Wikia is very famous, and so I'm a little bit famous as a result..

Because of this, I'm able to meet with government officials all around the world to put forward my views on the importance of freedom of speech and openness and transparency.  I find this useful, and I believe in many cases I've had an impact.  (It is never easy to be sure.)

Back to the Craftypod podcast. I was struck by a couple of things.

1) Craft is HUGE. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of segmented markets and niches: knitting, crochet, scrap-booking, quilting, embroidery, dress-making.. These days knitting can be divided into a lot of niches too (I have written a bit more about that here).

Vickie Howell may talk about being a leader in the craft industry - but it is her corner of the craft industry in which she is a leader (gatekeeper is probably the better term). This probably makes me a bad person, but I had never heard of her before I listened to the podcast. I googled her subsequently and she's done craft TV in the States, works for a US yarn company and fronts her own yarn line. She looks like a cool person - but she is not part of my knitting landscape. And that is okay. I'd hate to have a totally uniform definition of "cool knitting" and what I "should be knitting".

2) There was also a lot of talk about "the 2005 generation" and marketing. The podcast served up a massive dollop of nostalgia for the good old days when you could upload a simple scarf pattern and people would go nuts for it.

I think there will always be people talking about the "good old days when things were simple". It is a generational thing and on the internet a generation is a very small, finite thing (maybe 2 years? 3 years?).

2008 was the year when I got back into knitting in a major, major way. I remember when the February Lady Sweater was published via Ravelry and it was a huge thing. Do we have that sort of knitting landscape these days? No.It is probably harder to get noticed across the board, but incredibly talented people do manage it. Designers have to up their game and I don't think that's a bad thing. Knitters everywhere are the winners in this scenario.

(Also, the segmented knitting landscape means that if you are really into designing crazy intarsia dog coats, for instance, you will find "your people" pretty quickly.)

3) I wasn't a fan of the whole cross-channel "hustling" mentioned in the podcast- but that's because I am one of those people who tune out people who endlessly promote themselves on as many channels as they can. Maybe I am just old in social media terms but there is a whole signal-to-noise thing which I think many marketeers often forget. Social media isn't always about quantity - quality plays a huge part too. But that's probably a whole 'nother topic. (Psst, this is a great blog post about using Twitter)

I'll be honest: that podcast made me feel very cynical and I don't like feeling cynical - especially not about knitting.

I am left here still thinking about Jimmy Wales' words. The Q&A I linked above also included these lines:

I don't have a lot of money.  I don't have a lot of power in the top-down command-and-control sense.  But I do have a lot of influence.  I like that part of it.

Jimmy Wales is a lot more famous than any knitting "celebrity" and wields a lot more power and influence than I can begin to imagine. Yet he speaks with humility and a wry sense of humour. I think we could all take a lesson from him.

Paused

My wrist is hurting. It happens occasionally as I have hypermobile joints. Hypermobility doesn't hamper me much in everyday life - I just struggle to open jars and my balance is a tad wonky. I do have recurrent problems with my hands and wrists: constant knitting and typing will cause RSI in most people, of course, but  I am particularly susceptible. So what is a girl to do when deadlines are looming and there must be knitting? She pauses.

I have taken two days off from knitting and tried to avoid using my hands too much (*fidgets*). Instead I have polished off a few books, begun reading another, and I've celebrated my mumble-mumble birthday.

My man and I went on a jaunty little trip to Edinburgh to see The National Museum of Scotland's special exhibition on Vikings. The exhibition was mainly made up of finds from a handful of Swedish high-status settlements - interesting to me since I am so familiar with every day Danish Viking finds, but also inexplicably never really explained by the exhibition itself. The lay-out was also odd as most displays could only be viewed by one or two people at a time (we waited between five and seven minutes between each display case).

But the spindle whorls were pretty.

For me, the Vikings feel so modern and seeing  needle-binding (again, not explained), dyeing, spinning and weaving tools just felt so .. natural. These methods are still in use, the tools are the same and we all like a bit of ornamentation on the tools we use the most.

Post-birthday the world seemed to pause and snow came tumbling down. I went out to take photos of a recently finished knitting object (and some other things but I cannot show you those). But I was stopped in my tracks.

A trickster snowman and his dog (bear?) had been built on the pathway. I loved them. Sinister, menacing, and melting.

I did manage to take some photos but taking photos of scarves are really difficult when your Official Photographer is at work and the snow had already begun to turn slushy.

Sarah Hatton's lovely Edith shawl/scarf knitted in Rowan Kidsilk Haze in the colourway "Fern".

I have long been wanting to knit it and since I have been working on some knitting maths lately (pro tip: never use a stitch pattern running over a prime number as your base unit), I wanted to try out Sarah's pattern because I knew her numbers would work beautifully. And I wanted the scarf too, of course! I went slightly off-pattern thanks to external distraction and the end result is soft, beautiful and a great deal more lacy than it should have been. It was a joy to knit. I love Kidsilk Haze so much.

Finally, a big thank you to my friend Paula who gave me a beautiful birthday present: two hand-stitched pendants made from silk with gorgeous, delicate flowers embroidered on top. I feel truly honoured to count some amazing crafters as friends and few are as talented as Paula.

Paused. Some time to think. Snow here and then gone. Kind gestures from people. I like my life like this.

10,328

I was going to write a long post about being strapped into a rollercoaster of woah and longing for days of meh. I had it all worked out in my head, but once I had written it down, my brilliant metaphors seemed significantly less brilliant and more .. belaboured. And as we all know that belaboured prose is one of the cardinal sins, I will quietly forget that blog post I composed in my head this morning over breakfast. Life is rushing past me at the moment and I find it difficult to catch my breath. I remember that feeling from my university days when I found a rich seam of information to mine and just lost myself in the library. It is so tempting to just step into that slipstream of excitement, fascination and intense, hard work - but these days I have some very good reasons as to why I cannot quite allow myself this. Back at university I would end up with ulcers - these days my body has other acute reactions that I should very much like to avoid (not that I am very good at avoiding them - as I am typing this, I have a very distinct headache brewing). It is just difficult to remember to say no to exciting opportunities - especially when I am having so much fun.

A fellow freelance knitting person recommended Asana to me the other day and it has already given me so much. It is a time and task management tool that is geared towards small teams, but works really well for this one-woman venture too. I have slotted in all my to-do tasks and I can already see where things are potentially clashing and how I can push one task into another time slot.So useful: I might even end up with some spare time on hands at some point!

I have already begun plotting what I would like to do with potential spare time: I'd like to whip up a few sewing projects, I'd like to finish my Acer cardigan in time for winter, I'd like to see some friends, and I'd like to read some proper books. My partner gave me a Kindle for our anniversary and while I have been using it a lot for nefarious knitting purposes, I have also devoured a lot of bad regency romances (which in itself is a sure sign of me being stressed).

(What? You think me plotting activities for my spare time is a sign of impending doom? I think you might be right. Ahem.)

Forthcoming:

+ if you have signed up to the Karie Bookish Knits/Old Maiden Aunt yarn club, the yarn parcels are under way and the first pattern will land in your inbox this Friday around noon UK time. This means I can finally blog about a Finished Object - that very thought thrills me no end!

+ I will be part of the "Reviving Woollen Traditions" Public Study Day at Glasgow's The Lighthouse Design Centre on October 18. This Public Study Day forms part of a Glasgow University research project and although the day is open to the public, I believe the organisers still would like you to sign up. It looks ace and I am looking forward to meeting a lot of online friends who are also participating.

Finally: 10,328? Ah. The number of stitches I knitted on Sunday. In laceweight. Doing lace. My wrists and shoulders are still aching.

Scottish Textiles Heritage - A Day in Paisley

You may remember that I have been involved with the University of Glasgow and their work on Scottish textiles heritage. Most of the talks from the workshops are now available to download from iTunes.

On a very related note, I travelled to Paisley today to have a closer look at their textiles heritage. Paisley is a town just south of Glasgow and it is steeped in textiles history - not only did it lend its name to the paisley pattern and the Paisley shawl, but it was also home to many textiles mills and weavers. Be warned - this is going to be a picture heavy post. For the full set of photos, do go to the Flickr photo set.

Mile End Mill is no longer a working cotton mill, but it used to be a part of Anchor Mills, home of Coats & Clark and the world-famous Anchor threads and crochet cotton. Coats & Clark still exist today and they still produce the Anchor threads, of course, but the company has left Paisley (though the Anchor emblem is scattered throughout Paisley as are statues of Messrs Coats and Clark). Today the Mile End Mill is a business centre with a gym and a nursery attached .. and a museum.

The Thread Mill Museum is symptomatic of many local museums: it has practically no funding and is run by volunteers - most of which are former mill workers who delight in talking about their former workplace and in keeping the memory of Paisley's industrial past alive. We were greeted by the lovely Eleanor who took us around the small space. There was much to interest the casual textile enthusiast.

Many of the machines on display had been rescued from skips or recovered by former mill workers.

Boxes of brightly coloured crochet cotton. 1970s?

Various stages of cotton thread production - from raw cotton via bobbins to finished dyed thread.

Mill workers leaving the Anchor mills, 1950s. Note the "mill wheel" on the gatehouse.

And that was what really struck me. When we visited, there was a small group of elderly ladies chatting in the room whilst leafing through photo albums. It soon became clear that when the last cotton mills finally closed in the late 1980s, Paisley did not just lose a lot of jobs; it lost a sense of community. The mills had not just provided a paycheck, but also a social structure around which lives were constructed. Tellingly, when a supermarket chain opened a new store in the mill area, it branded its building with anchors. We belong here, it screamed to me, and you belong to us.

Paisley's weaving industry can be examined in the Sma' Shot Cottages - a small cluster of buildings a short walk from the mill complex. They are found in Shuttle Street (Paisley street names are fantastic markers of textile history). I really enjoyed these cottages - I did not know nearly as much about weaving as I did about cotton mill production - and I found the place fascinating. Material history and social history twined together.

This sock-in-progress was too lovely not to photographed. One of the local guides was busy spinning yarn on her wheel when we arrived. I wondered if this was her work too?

A 18th century loom still in use today.

 The weavers of Paisley had a dispute with their employers in 1856 over the sma' (small) shot thread used to bind the weft and warp threads. As the sma' shot was not a visible part of the shawl, employers refused to pay for the thread leaving weavers to purchase the thread themselves. The weavers organised and eventually the employers had to back down. Paisley celebrates a Sma' Shot day today - the first Saturday of July - by staging a rally and burning an effigy of an employer. Ouch.

Paisley museum has an entire section devoted to Paisley shawls, as you might imagine. Sadly the museum is being refurbished and you can only access the shawl gallery by a side door. It is well worth the effort, though. The museum has some beautiful looms with great educational material displayed. And they have shawls. Photos do not do the shawls justice: their colours are deep and rich, and the patterns are intricate and exotic. The shawls were (mostly) woven using jacquard looms with punch cards (as pictured). Many of the punch cards reminded me of knitting charts.

I found it particularly interesting to see how fashion had an impact on the Paisley shawls. The stoles were particularly popular during the Regency period. The 1820s and early 830s favoured triangular shawls (the notes on these shawls called to mind knitted triangular shawls) and later squares became popular. The Paisley shawl was finally undone by the bustle - you did not want to hide your bustle under a shawl nor did you want anything to hide that tiny waist above the bustle. I have always been a fashion history geek and I had a bit of a moment there and then.

The refurbishment meant the Textiles Department was in a bit of a disarray but we were lucky enough to meet up with Dan Coughlan who works as the Curator of Textiles at Paisley museum. This proved to be my personal highlight of the day. Unfortunately we were not able to leaf through the museum's collection of paisley pattern books, but we saw photographs as well as various types of looms. Dan also spoke passionately about the need to highlight not just Paisley's but Scotland's textiles heritage. I could not agree more.

It was raining all day long but I did not mind the rain. There is such a rich seam of textile history in Paisley and it is a shame that this is not discussed with same fervour as Bradford or Leeds.  I wish funding was in place to fully support Paisley's textile and industrial heritage - as it stands, much depends upon volunteers to keep places running. Do visit and do support the hard work all these people are doing. I learned a lot today. I think you would too.

A Creative Life Is Mine

I was asked for career advice recently - and quite apart by being floored by being asked, it also made me think very hard about what it is I do and why.  This coincided with a friend sharing this blog post about creativity, process and blogging with me. Forgive my rambling, meandering post, but I have thoughts in my head..

One of the most common reasons people give preventing them from doing something creative is that it has already been done. (..) It is as if there should only be a certain number of people in any creative field, as if it were a party in a small house and could get too crowded.

I believe strongly that everybody is creative - this imaginative spark is what makes us human. When I run craft workshops, I always try to push people into embracing their creative sides: 'what happens if you do X & Y? Which colours do you like? Try to combine those.' It always comes as a shock to people but I don't have a textile degree - yet I work within the knitting industry as a craft teacher and a knitting designer among other things. I don't have an art degree, yet I have exhibited my work in galleries. Does this invalidate me as a Creative? No. It just means I am autodidact and I take some interesting detours during my work process.

We are taught that creativity is the expression of a higher ideal in a finished object of great beauty and skilled execution (..) We look with lust and desire at finished products and believe they are created by specialists using talents beyond our mortal capacity to understand.

Our brains try to trick us into thinking that unless we are Picasso, Mozart or Shakespeare, we have no right to express ourselves creatively. I once read Plato. He had a few things to say about ideal beauty and our human inability to attain this. Also, the only way to become better at doing something is by doing it.  I am not a great artist, but the more I draw, the better I become. One of these days I might even become capable of describe the world I see!

We are (..) separated from our own creative power which is what makes us depend on shopping to satisfy all our psycho-spiritual needs. 

And this is key. All marketing depends upon us wanting to be someone else than ourselves. Do you want to be exotic and gorgeous? Try this dress? Do you want to be quirky and creative? Here is the perfect scarf! But what if you could make a dress that feels like you - wouldn't you feel better about yourself because you made the dress yourself, it is exactly how you want it to be, and you get to express who you are?

Even those who appear to be such ‘natural’ creators, those that have identified themselves as ‘creatives’ early in life have had some crucial intervention, some teacher or parent who told them they had talent (..) .

I guess I try to be that crucial intervention whenever I run workshops because I think it's never, ever too late to embrace to inner desire to make stuff.

Now for the crucial quotes:

The value is in the process and the finished product is a continuation of that process, affecting the lives of others, that scarf you made for your dad lives on in the process of his life. Value itself is a living process not to be confined to a number or a thing.

Yes, it is cheaper to buy the scarf and no, your scarf won't look like it was machine-knitted in China - but you created that scarf. Without you, that ball of yarn would just be a long string balled up. This is what still gets me about creation to this very day - that whole thing about making (on a related note, in Scots English a poet is a makar which plays wonderfully into the whole language-as-creation idea I once adored so much).

And

Success, slick production values, money, attention, these are all byproducts of a process of self discovery that will last a lifetime. And they may never come. If the process is right for you it won’t even matter anymore. Any stage of that process is as essential as any other.

This. This.

I don't work with knitting because I made a career decision ages ago. Working within the knitting industry is hard work, I scrape by, and it is far less romantic than you may think. But knitting defines me. I do this because I cannot not do this. It is who I am. And I am more like you than you know.