A PS:
John, I know what you mean about blankets in charity shops in England. A few years ago I witnessed what you are talking about when I had the strange job of visiting most of the charity shops in London over a hectic two-day period and buying up every red clothing item in every shop, and then, as part of a team, sewing them all into a 14′ x 28′ red workers’ flag for an artist friend’s show at Tate Modern. It was extremely interesting to see that thrift shops, as we call them here, aren’t that much different than they are in England, though I have to say ours seem worse. European items are much, much rarer here.

We don’t want to be elitist at all. In our own work we try to erase the distinction between craft and high design. So much of what we liberate from Value Village is undervalued craft that we try to re-value. What’s really distressing is when we find mountains of stuff that it’s clear no one values, whether they’re elite or non-elite. It creates the opposite sort of feedback loop, a downward spiral in which craft is more and more dismissed. I just don’t think this is about elitism. We wrote in the hope that we could look toward better materials, perhaps better techniques, and more useful results – not that many are reading this blog. I wouldn’t want to legislate craft to the level of high design and therefore disqualify amateur crafters. Maybe I do want to set a challenge to crafters to raise the bar a bit, but the bar seems lower now that it has been in a long time. The curious thing about craft is that it supposedly runs counter to the prevailing dictate that we should now buy everything because it’s cheaper and faster than making it ourselves. Craft supposedly resists that. And then what happens? The same economic logic begins to permeate the craft itself: let’s make it as cheaply – and sometimes as fast – as possible. There is a contradiction in there somewhere.

I was really talking about the qualitative difference, which I think most people can agree on, between the everyday products of pre-modern artisanal traditions and so many of the products of current-day craft hobbyists. There probably isn’t much point in lamenting it, but it does seem to be a fact that de-skilling and desensitization has taken place, and just as you say this is the result of our commodity economy in which much cheaper goods can be made elsewhere by slave-wage workers, as well as the fact that we are out of the habit of understanding textiles in the way people used to, when they actually raised the crops and animals, produced the fibres, and then produced their own textiles from them. We now buy the cheapest polyester possible. Why not buy wool or cotton for twice the price and spend longer making one item, rather than two? It’s not purely economics, I don’t think. I think it’s something else. I was looking at photos on Flickr of women making Afghan suzanis and they’re just heartbreakingly beautiful, so painstakingly made. Many of these women are technically what we could call amateurs, from what I can tell. For that matter, I’m technically an amateur, no formal training in textiles whatsoever.

We may mostly be in agreement, I’m not sure.

I personally have worked within the two spheres, craft and design and I must admit that the design world works on a definite professional basis. You are qualified as a designer or you are not. The craft world is much more muddled. There is, and has been since the nineteenth century, a healthy professional craft industry in Britain, but it is hopelessly outnumbered by an enthusiastic, but very often hopelessly untalented majority of amateurs. Admittedly some of these amateurs do have natural talent, but that still leaves a lot of people out there producing unfocused, sub-standard crafts at unrealistically low prices which undercuts the professional. The consumer often goes for the cheapest rather than the best made, that’s very often a product of human nature rather than our consumer led world.

I understand your point about North America, and you are probably right, it has become a homogenous soup of different uprooted cultures. However, the UK does not have the unbroken tradition of craft culture that you may think. The nineteenth century saw a huge drift to urban centres by the rural young who soon lost many of their traditions as they were no longer needed, so that today most British people have no interest or inclination to learn any craft skills. Many see them as ‘twee’ or pointlessly unpractical. Why learn to knit when you can buy clothes much cheaper than the yarn costs?

I think we start treading dangerous elitest ground when we begin talking about the control of products produced by amateurs. Unless someone plans to set up some form of quality police force, I don’t see how you can prevent an individual from producing an Afghan or baby booties. Many people get immense enjoyment from being creative, and if that creativity is in the form of a crocheted blanket, it is certainly not my job to tell them to desist.

As you say, it is a complex issue with no easy answers. Perhaps there could be a re-focusing of the enthusiasm expended in pointless throw-away craft projects, towards a more practical solution, so that instead of producing endless Afghans that no one seems to like, we can all expect more useful household items from our grannies.

I wonder if I could get mine to build me some sturdy oak bookcases?

I knew it was dicey to make this argument, but I clicked Publish anyway. Because, well, for a number of reasons. First, the sheer tonnage of these items that we encounter in thrift and at the rag house is really, really shocking. In six years we have easily seen enough of these to fill 10 or even 20 shipping containers, if not more. Clearly these blankets are not valued by even the families in which they are produced – I would guess they’re not even valued when new – and this suggests that they have neither enough function nor enough aesthetic value to be truly appreciated. Among other things this must have an effect on the image and status of the women who make them, which is sad given the time they invest in their work. Few people really use or like these things, as I found out when I asked around among people of varied class backgrounds. Pretty much everyone had one of these in their past somewhere, and they were almost universally reviled. “They aren’t warm, they don’t look nice, your fingers get stuck in the holes… we hid ours behind the couch and brought it out when our grandmother came over.” This seems to me the sign of a craft tradition that is not working. Craft is always fun for the maker, but it would seem preferable if the product produced were more thoughtful and actually differed in some way from the disposable, cheap commodities that have covered the face of North America, itself already a throwaway culture. Even the crafting on Etsy is often guilty of this – such a giant wealth of products made with hot glue and the expectation that one’s crafts should be cheap… I would like to see a different revaluing of textiles and craft, both at the producer end and the user end.

That brings me to the second point, which is about modernity and the ensuing loss of craft traditions that commanded a depth of knowledge about materials, techniques and the cultural meanings behind their aesthetics. While working abroad in places which did, admittedly, still have a connection to their premodern roots, I noticed that domestic daily items not only seemed to have infinitely more aesthetic and cultural integrity than the “afghan” blanket, but many of them were easily worthy of display in museums. I’m not sure that the idea that domestic items can afford to be uglier than public items would make much sense to these cultures, and I really feel that the home is precisely where beauty and meaning is most important. Even if the process is unconscious, an ethic of care and workmanship and considered creativity is absorbed by osmosis from well-made, well-planned things. This idea is well-accepted in architecture and it should be in craft too. It would be easy to say that this is a nostalgic position, but that’s just a way of saying that one is not allowed to compare a knowledgeable pre-modern craft tradition, which most of the ordinary women of the time would have been involved in, with a present-day, modern “make it up from scratch” approach. One of the “afghan blanket” crotchet styles is named “Mile a Minute” which just about sums things up. Nostalgia is homesickness for what never was, and I’m not sure if that’s what I’m guilty of, but either way, I’m completely willing to admit that I am bemoaning a loss of these traditions because what they insured was that even without real talent or taste, a beautiful, functional object could still result. Everyone’s work was elevated. Here textile craft is not only relegated to the female realm, it’s relegated to the realm of reviled kitsch. This can not be good for anyone.

I should note here that I am not talking about quilting, which is a whole other issue. Gee’s Bend quilts, the Amish quilts, even many unsung, normal, everyday quilts – completely amazing.

This brings me to a related point, and that is that Eva and John, the previous commenters, are in Germany and England, respectively. North America is a very specific phenomenon. The idea of the New World may suggest the excitement of inventing things from whole cloth, so to speak, but the downside is that we represent an exaggerated case of modernity’s loss of artisan knowledge and a cutting off from roots, and the results can be pretty patchy. I can remember watching Mad Max and thinking that the hidden children’s colony, with its own culture and language patched together from the shreds of knowledge remembered by war orphans and reassembled into a kind of garbled patois and clumsy cosmology, was a good analogy for the North American experience. Mass immigration – usually without the grandmothers, and certainly without enough individuals to sustain the continuity of any craft tradition – represented a much less subtle march to modernity and loss of roots than has ever occurred in Europe, where there is only the change in mode of production to drive other changes. In North America the inevitable and often deliberate farewell to tradition can be seen everywhere in the sort of higgledy piggledy manner of putting together cities, towns, houses and craftwork, not to mention philosophies and psychologies. While this can be exciting, millennia of trial and error are wiped out whole hog. What you often sense is sort of the energy and ineptitude of a bunch of well-meaning teenagers and a constant reinvention of the wheel. I just am not sure what purpose it would serve to only praise this. I think craft represents a really important part of our material culture and self-image, both as a culture – and particularly as women, since women are the ones often making these things. I’m not proposing a solution to this problem here, because that’s very complicated, but I felt I wanted to say something. Because the careless meaninglessness of objects in North America is really discouraging. We are just drowning in garbage. It would be great to see less quantity and more quality. And we could do without the outrage North Americans feel when an object is priced at more than 30 dollars, when infinitely more than that is spent weekly on soft drinks and coffee, magazines and video games. Craft and artisanry in North America is too often held to the same standards as we hold imported disposable commodities. Huge confusion prevails on the topic of craft here – no one knows what its status is or should be. It’s all mixed up with gender issues, expectation of giant buying power and endless availability of cheap, undervalued commodities, and with an automatic, kneejerk anti-intellectual, anti-historical bent where individual creativity and impulse trumps a knowledge of history. Hence the unloved, politically incorrectly named, toxic object we call the afghan blanket. If I were Afghani I’d be really perturbed.

One simple step? An international agreement banning toxic, petroleum-based synthetics. That would automatically improve the situation.

As Eva says, these Afghans were usually just ongoing projects for amateur idle hands. I also agree that it would be fairer to compare and contrast the best of American quilting with Afghani textile work, rather than some casual knit and crochet.

However, interesting article as it throws up all sorts of questions about amateur skills and where Afgans fit into the domestic history of America.

By the way, there are just as many unwanted crochet blankets in UK charity shops, which seems a little sad, as there must have been an element of enthusiasm in the original making which is now long gone.