Creative consumption
I took today off work to drive to the Pennsylvania Relief Sale preview event, which happened down in Ephrata. I wanted to go see the quilts, which are being shown before the auction in April. The preview goes through Saturday, so I could've waited, but both the Sale itself and today's preview include a quilter's area, where they sell resources (fabric, orphan blocks, unfinished projects, books, patterns, buttons, old/worn quilts, supplies) for extremely low prices.
Of course, it's catch-as-catch-can. Some of the materials are stained or torn or worn or otherwise unusable. Ancient thread may not be reliable—I might use it for hand work but not machine. It's a popular event and things go fast. I wanted to get there early. I've posted what I got on Twitter. This post isn't about that. It's more a reflection on my own habits of consumption, how they intersect with creativity, what I'm trying to do, and why I know this isn't world-changing.
Consumptive anxiety
As someone born in the 80s, I learned early about pollution, the environment, the ozone layer, and global warming. Nukes too, particularly since my library kept a lot of those books quite a few years post-USSR. What actually broke me, though, was a very early viewing of the 1987 film The Brave Little Toaster. I didn't see it in theaters, thank goodness. But VHS was a thing and I saw it with friends. The overall message and the landfill scene, combined with the pictures I'd seen of landfills and my mother's urgings for mindfulness in consuming or discarding... something at that point went a little sideways (or a little rightways) in my young mind.
I don't think young me was wrong, but she wasn't healthy. Every time I threw something away, I would think about how long or whether it would decay, etc. I don't want to say that I was the perfect recycling sorter, but at periods of my life I became a little... obssessed.
The following paragraph is somewhat gross and oversharing, but also illlustrative...
After I reached menarche, I was distressed that something was making me throw away pads on pads every month (I was an extremely heavy bleeder, even as a pre-teen). I couldn't do anything about the debilitating cramps, but I could at least make pads stretch. And so I tried to find ways. I won't go into any more detail, but it was pretty gross. I think I would've done well (emotionally) in a world of washable pads, with all their horrors. When I met the "Diva Cup" I felt like it was an emotional salvation. By that age, I'd learned that I should not do these things my younger self had done, so I just carried the emotional burdens, if not the [redacted] pads.
I don't want to paint myself at any age as someone who was just the best at recycling, at reuse, at being smart about what to buy or not buy... but I was aware. I was always aware, sometimes to my very core, and sometimes to the detriment of my mental health.
Consumption and creativity
As a young crafter, I mostly had to pay for my own supplies or get my mom to buy them (there's a whole thread I should turn into a post about my mom and money), so I had stuff to work with, but not a lot. My mom wasn't a crafter at all, which also affected my access to tools/supplies (another thing to write about). For various reasons (including hiatuses), it wasn't until my late 20s that I really began thinking about crafting as well when I thought about consumption.
By then I'd lived through making the same object over and over for sale to excited fan-types and I'd developed a load of feelings about it.
What got at me wasn't waste. It was at the generation end of the supplies.
I know I've talked above about the anxiety related to getting rid of things, but I had much less about acquiring things because most of what I've gotten in my life which wasn't meant for immediate consumption, I've gotten used (not all, but over 50% for sure, at times over 75%). So while I knew about injustices to people and the globe on the creating end, I felt less connection to that.
But now? I have money for my creative habits. I've had for a while now. It's strange.
And, emotionally, I find myself feeling those same emotional hangups I did as a kid but on the other end. I don't know nearly as much as I could about the modern fabric trade, but I've read about it in past and present. About textiles in general. Nothing we can buy in stores is free from sin. But on the other hand, neither was cotton in the 1800s. Nor anything home-grown and home-canned or homespun on colonized land, including by Mennonites who let others do the colonizing for them.
That's not exculpation. It's recognition I can't seek out some pure thing. I can never claim I've found The WayTM. So, rather than seek The Way, I seek a practice with which my spirit can live.
Creativity in the odds and ends
Last summer, after purchasing project fabric which I hoped would keep me busy while my husband lived in CA, I realized that... my soul wasn't quite happy about it. It wasn't the anxiety attacks of childhood. It was more that the fabrics had acquired a dullness. Not that I didn't want to quilt. Not that I wanted other fabrics in the store more. It was more wondering whether and what I could instead.
And so I've begun more and more to seek out used or abandoned textiles. Textiles whose owners died. Those which have been acknowledged as "not going to happen" and are sold out of garages and yards. I've lately been asking folks for worn-out clothes (fraying, dirty, torn) which aren't suitable for donation. I have plans for those in particular. (With what I've read I've learned about US clothing donations deluging other cultures and harming local seamstresses and killing off practices, so the emotions I feel about taking clothes not quite worn through are only the lowest-key mixed.)
This, I recognize, is a practice which requires others to do the consumption first. It's not that I've divorced myself from these cycles. How could I? It's not that my reduced-participation will make a significant difference. I'm one person and I still do buy some manufactured fabric and backings and battings and newer threads. It's not that I have to (although I'm not a person who could spend thousands on quilting stuff annually, which done also do).
This is me trying to keep a few more things from going to waste vs. buying newly-made ones which I know will cause harms. This is me seeking out creative ways to use such things and trying to challenge my brain which loves routines and patterns to work with something which carries its own constraints (amount, or colors I'd not have chosen, or already-partly cut, and so on).
This, I think, is a little like walking into the woods after a tiring day in the city and knowing that my experience of the woods isn't free from the sins of colonialism, as mentioned above. And yet the soul feels a little quieter. A little more healed.