In the first minute of the TLC summer show “Craft Wars,” the host Tori Spelling says the word “craft” and its variants over a dozen times. It’s the “ultimate crafting competition.” Competitors have “every crafting tool they could dream of.” “As an avid crafter myself, with my own crafting line….” The repetition seems unnecessary, given the show’s title and the beauty wall behind Spelling featuring the full spectrum of fabric, thread, tools, and notions. But after listening to Spelling say “craft” a few dozen more times, without substitution, I realized her writers weren’t brand-crazy. They were just stumped. There are no synonyms for a word that has lost its meaning.
What “craft” mostly means on “Craft Wars” is the act of making things cuter. Take this shopping cart full of sports equipment and make a cute bag. Take this shopping cart full of school supplies and make a cute playhouse. That these bags will never be used, that some of them are not even completed, that, really, a duffel bag has already achieved ideal sports-bag form, are not considerations, not when a sawed-off tennis racket can be inserted “for ventilation” and tennis balls strung to make a “more comfortable” carrying strap. And what could be more delightful than a playhouse roofed in composition-book covers, never mind its ability to withstand rain?
Craft used to mean something, and it would never have been made with Mod Podge. You can buy a tea towel with the William Morris quotation, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” (It is a hundred per cent linen, so it is both.) What Morris, a designer, entrepreneur, futurist, and leader of the late nineteenth century Arts and Crafts Movement, proposed was a return to the medieval craft tradition, in which objects were made by hand by skilled workmen, and priced accordingly. Rather than three sets of elaborately decorated transferware china, you would have one set of handmade and glazed plates. Rather than rooms full of elaborate Victorian furniture, you would own a few chairs, hand hewn and joined with wood, not industrial glue.
Reformers like Morris proposed that we live with less, but better, much as the unconsumption movement does today. Recent books like “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Clothing” show the physical and environmental toll of a closet stuffed with ten-dollar why-not dresses, while blogs like “Make It Do,” “Unconsumption,” and “Stuff Does Matter” suggest new criteria for getting, spending, and discarding the contents of those closets and cupboards. And many of those criteria derive from the old-school definition of craft: make it yourself, buy better quality items, think about each purchase, keep it for a long time.
“Craft Wars,” in contrast, seesaws uneasily between the desire to make it beautiful and the desire to make it useful and usually ends up at neither. Two competitors, asked to craft a birdhouse out of the contents of a kitchen junk drawer, build chunky boxes out of wood, and start sticking the junk to them. (The Victorians would have used seashells, to better effect.) Asked to make patio furniture out of beach toys, the competitors give us wetsuit throw pillows and a plastic pail turned ice bucket versus a lounge chair made of boogie boards threaded together on a steel-pipe frame. The boogie-board lounge maker, the only male contestant in the first two episodes, is also the only crafter whose skill Morris would have recognized. Kevin Chartier, who was laid off an an art director, makes metal sculpture while working as a stay-at-home father and handyman. When confronted with a large scale, three-dimensional project, he didn’t separate the beautiful from the useful, but got out the blowtorch. It’s regrettable, given the overall demographics of the show’s audience, that it had to be a man with power tools that broke the show’s decorated box. The longstanding gender division between the craftsman working for money, and the craftswoman working to feed, clothe, and comfort her family seemed re-inscribed.
That’s a gender divide that has played out in much of the commentary on the rise of D.I.Y. On one side, there’s Matthew B. Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” which sets working with one’s hands against both the digital realm and the world of cheap manufactured goods. Crawford chose work as an electrician and a mechanic, rather than a cobbler or joiner, but the word “craft” is right there in his title, and it is working with one’s hands that he privileges. He chooses male-dominated, and well remunerated “crafts,” however. Versions of this handiwork-as-religion (or at least as mental release) have been taken up by the very knowledge-workers Crawford rejects: TechShop, a by-the-hour workshop franchise, was founded in Silicon Valley. Google has a workshop for metal, wood, welding, and electronics on its campus for employees to use. Facebook has a letterpress. These companies are trying to have it both ways, hand and head.
On the other side there was Sarah Mosle’s feminist critique of Etsy, a female-dominated online marketplace for handmade goods, as selling false hope that you could make a profession knitting, painting, sewing, or soldering. But is that the point? Like Chartier, many of Etsy’s sellers are stay-at-home parents; like Crawford, many of them find creative outlet in the goods they make for Etsy. In a rebuttal to Mosle’s post, Sadie Stein pointed out, “the question comes down to, does DIY have value? It’s easy to dismiss—part of what rankles is that Etsy seems like low-hanging fruit, and an unfair target—but its larger cultural import is of a piece with a lot of progressive movements which Mosle would be hard-pressed to dismiss.” Etsians, too, are hand-making things for their souls.
Given the interest in handicraft as an antidote to the machine-made world--and the growing desire to spend the time to make something unique, personal, and beautiful--why, then, does “Craft Wars” set the bar so low? Making things cute is not a business. It is not even a part time job. Instead, it’s a hobby. “Craft Wars” made me long for the heady early years of “Project Runway” when I was enthralled by the inherent drama of talented, thoughtful people making things (and making them well) on television.
The “Craft Wars” judges, Stephen Brown (a giftware entrepreneur), Erica Domesek (the founder of PS I Made This) and Jo Pearson (from the arts-and-crafts chain Michaels, which is a sponsor) do bring up construction from time to time, zeroing in on telling details, suggesting seams might better be sewn than glued, or that Mod Podge, the miracle sealant that makes decoupage a snap, needs to be used with restraint. They complimented Cheryl, the first episode’s winner, on the care with which she glued individual pencils to a board to make a school-themed window box. But in the final judgment, they took a big step back, assessing the playhouses for their visual execution, rather than whether they could withstand child’s play or the elements.
The contestants in the playhouse competition weren’t even constructing the house part: nameless team members wielded saws and hammers, while the (female) contestants added decoration to the plywood frame. It was a setup that forced them to be decorators, and it also narrowed the skill set required for a win to sewing, glueing, and painting. Stencils, stamps, glue guns, and paint are, of course, Michaels’ stock in trade (along with glitter, prominently featured in all of the promos). Would it hurt to let Home Depot have a moment in the sun, and to have a power-tool challenge? Or, conversely, to set up a couple of pottery wheels and let the clay fly? There would be more drama, if less sparkly results, in making the contestants try something new from the old world of “craft.”
Even more revolutionary would be to make television out of the unconsumption movement. For financial and environmental reasons, many people have stopped buying more things. “Craft Wars” seems unbelievably wasteful; contestants are essentially buying new things to hack and cut and paste into something no one will likely ever use. What about a “refashion” challenge, using clothes or furniture thrifted from the Goodwill? To make the word “craft” mean something again, to make a show with some soul, the producers need to explore the dual meaning embodied in that William Morris quote: skillful, but also skilled in making it work.
Illustration by Kim Demarco.