"Autumn overlooked my knitting"

Blocking action shot for my kiri shawl:


I'm really close to finishing my Bridie too:


I was reading about Emily Dickinson (as the quote probably indicates) and found this excerpt from a critical essay about her from 1937 by R.P. Blackmur:

She was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars...

I think that it's really interesting in the light of the whole pinny porn debate (summarised here very well) and what that means for women's activities in general. On the one hand I love the idea of writing (all kinds of writing, and not just women's writing) being something productive and useful like cooking or knitting, but the whole tone here (antimacassars!) is almost devaluing all those things together and putting them solidly inside the home. Yet, on the other hand, knitting and cooking are things I do for fun in my leisure time and the thing that makes me a bit uncomfortable about yarnstorm is the way they end up being fetishised and made into a whole aspirational value system (intenionally or not). It's not the beautiful things she creates that are the problem for me, it's the consumerism which gets elided by ideas about self-sufficiency and craft and all kinds of fuzzy-warm 'gentle' ideas. The idea is that spending money on beautiful things make the world better and I have a whole bag of issues with that.

Then also, somewhere in that middle ground between professional and amateur is the whole problem for the consumerism aspect of it: it's between creating something as a producer, and being at the end of a huge marketing industry that values stashing and acquisitiveness (the desire which makes pinny porn pinny porn!). It's such a weird dynamic going on between professional/amateur and producer/consumer at the same time.