A Moment of Silence

Join me as we take a moment to mourn the passing of Churchill Weavers in Berea, KY. After 85 years in business, Churchill Weavers has decided to close its doors. Competition from cheaper, foreign imports is one of the reasons sited for the decline in business.

It has always seemed odd to me that we are reluctant to pay more for handcrafted items. We go to doctors and attorneys who bill out their time at more than $100 an hour. When we call in a plumber or electrician, we expect to pay a good deal for their labor. Anyone who has taken their car to the shop to have a headlight replaced because it requires tools or contortions of the human hand not intended by either Creator or evolution, knows that the bulb costs $15 - 25, but the 20 minutes it costs to replace it $75. Yet, when it comes to handcrafted items we balk.

I have witnessed this phenomenon myself at many a craft expo. People walk up and look at an item, say a baby blanket. Then they see the price tag: $200. What I see next in their face angers and disheartens me. First, they look at the yarn, do some calculations based on the cheapest materials available. Then, wait for it, there it is. "The I'm not paying $200 for something that cost $20 to make." The automatic assumption is that the labor involved is free. The underlying disrespect is that the craftspersonship, the skill doesn't add value to the price of the raw material.

To my mind this is the result of the Wal-Mart-ization of our consumer mentality. We have so bought into (pun intended) this concept of the cheapest possible price for anything we might desire that we have devalued the price of labor, craft and skill. I don't believe that this is a new phenomenon. The Industrial Revolution drove the home based textile "businesses" to bankruptcy and their workers to the factory floors. This was the true dawn of the quicker, cheaper, unvarying product consistency age.

I am not a Luddite. I know that technological change is a fact of life. I likes my Tivo, my lattes, and my I-Pod. Where I balk at my embrace of modernization and innovation lies in wondering what is the true costs of these advances. Can we appreciate the cost before it's too late? Does modernization and innovation require us to give up our sense of foresight? I don't know.

What I do know is that I embrace fiber arts as an antidote to the relentless push toward the next newest thing. In knitting I find the space to reflect, to breathe as the stitches form and the garment takes shape. Knitting allows me to control space and time, allowing me to unravel time to my last big mistake and go forward from there. I knit because I enjoy knitting. I knit because I have the time and money to do so. Today I appreciate this luxury a bit more, although with a slight sadness that others in the fiber arts community aren't so lucky.