Textiles and Bicycles

The idea of progress has been heavily on my mind lately. I just went to my 5 year college reunion, which is surprising in itself since college was not the positive experience I think it is for most people (high school strangely was the more positive time). Reunions I think generally leave us questioning how far we’ve come as individuals and though I pretty much left without any substantial revelations (except that there were quite a few cool, like-minded people that I wish I had known better while I was actually stuck in small city Virginia), I did come away with the reaffirmation that I have indeed grown into a far better and cooler person than the self-conscious, de-energized version of me running around college those years ago.

This reunion also got me thinking about progress of humans in general. I have the benefit of living with a vegan who is a vegan simply because he believes that by this point, with all of our physical and mental development, we humans should have progressed past the need to subjugate animals and use them primarily as commodities. Yet after a few conversations with friends at this reunion (all of whom I have nothing but the greatest respect for), I realized that maybe most people still do believe that humans are just better than animals and not only can but should exert that dominance. In fact, animals don’t have the same depth of emotion or level of consciousness to know the difference. I personally do not believe even an ounce of this, but it’s an argument that constantly comes up in the discussion of animal rights: the word animal itself denotes a something less than. It’s a living thing, yes. But it doesn’t emote like a human and our inability to understand animals as deeply conscious and cerebral creatures prevents us from believing they are worth protecting or even respecting in many instances. The question I got in drunken jest was would I kill a puppy or kill a baby. I think the real question is can we think of real situation where we would really have to do one to save the other? What I came out of this whole thought exercise was that it’s a slow progress…and we haven’t even progressed beyond the subjugation and torture of fellow human beings, whose humanity and capacity for deep emotion we should in theory be able to understand pretty well.

Even if we as a human race are only making slow progress on this front, I as an individual am making lighting fast progress on what in this context is a more frivolous topic, my current knitting project:

My meshy Phildar sweater.

The pattern is nervousing because you set up a row at the beginning, then knit your dozens of centimeters and then drop stitches….so if you screw up…it’s all over.

It all worked out for the front piece and looks pretty fantastic so far.  And the pattern has delivered in teaching me new techniques: the twisted stitch to border dropped stitches.  It really tightens the stitch and makes for some really clean edges.

The end product will not be so fast coming I fear.  But soon.

I hope my dear knitting friends aren’t too annoyed that I made you go through my rant on the progress of humanity before getting to the knitting.  Maybe you were smart and just scrolled down to the pictures.

In June of this year a major Australian wool supplier (Elder Limited) will start sales of specifically non-mulesed wool for foreign markets.  You may already know that Australia is scheduled to phase out mulesing by 2010, but this is a preliminary step to start identifying whether wool is coming from a mulesed sheep or a non-mulesed sheep (as part of the Australian Wool Industry’s 2007 agreement with PETA).

I’m not sure how this will translate into labeling for consumer goods, but hopefully the identification will trickle down in a clear way.  Or else those that wish to know will have to research where labels source their materials…which is an unlikely practice en masse.

For those that don’t know what mulesing is, the wikipedia article on it is decent.  It’s hard to find objective sources of information…and the subject sparks a lot of heat between consumers and producers.

and no Mona in sight.

According to a few blogs I read, I’m missing the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. Given that it’s about an hour drive away, I feel like I’m missing an opportunity to be really irresponsible with my money.

I thought maybe today I would make it up there, but I couldn’t really get my act together.  I decided to tell myself that I couldn’t handle it. I think I probably share this attribute with a lot of people–I love to buy things, but I hate to shop. That is, I hate shopping after about an hour tops. In the past this feeling actually hasn’t extended to fabric shopping, which I could do for a VERY long time and be happy buying just a small bit of fabric.  Fabric shops are like museums to me, in fact my most favorite space in New York City is the Costume Institute at the Met and I also just found out that there’s a textile museum in DC.  But I’m not sure I have the same eye for yarn that I (think I) do with fabric. I’m still not sure how things will look knitted up, while I can have a pretty good sense of how a fabric will drape or look sewn up in a certain style. Experience has also taught me that the gravitational pull of a knitting design is way stronger than that of a particular yarn. So yarns I buy for the hell of it live forever untouched in my box o yarn unless by some stroke of luck they actually seem like they can work with a pattern I want to try out. That never happens with fabric–it’s always the opposite.

I also found that there was something that kind of irked me about the festival.  There are a few events or tents or something dedicated to lamb and sheep meat.  Duh, right? It’s a SHEEP and Wool festival.  The thing is I always forget about that element of things.  Like when I was researching wildlife management areas in Maryland and the main page I found (run by the state) was mostly focused on encouraging people to get them a hunting permit and hunt them some Maryland bear.  I was kind of incredibly shocked and appalled.  It’s possible I let the urban, liberal bubble close up around me every once in while, but hunting and the like also aren’t really a part of Indian culture…so it surprises me every once in while.

I think everyone has a line somewhere when it comes to animal cruelty/rights/welfare/whatever. For some the meat industry and hunting falls within their moral limits and for others using wool doesn’t even do that. I’m in between. I don’t really have a problem with using wool, though I completely understand the argument that animals should have agency — especially when the animal itself is presented solely as a product. I can imagine a sheep on the auction block where its value is in the flavor of its flesh and the softness of its fleece. And that makes me sad, because I think it becomes a spotlight for how we view everything, including ourselves.  I often fall into that trap of assessing my worth based on how valuable I think I am to others or how “marketable” I am (ewwww!).   But unfortunately I think every living thing on this earth is viewed to some degree by what they can offer the world — a product, an expertise, an attractive appearance, whatever. There’s just something unsettling when what you’re offering to the world has to be your life.  So that’s where I draw the line. For myself.

In any case,  I have a strong feeling that veggie/vegan knitters still enjoy the festival despite the meat offerings.  And the thing is there were a bunch of events not involving meat and not involving buying yarn that I really would have found fascinating — like the sheep shearing demonstration, or “Hands-on Basic Shepherding”, or the parade of sheep breeds!!  All in all I wish I had been able to pull it together and go see what festivals like this are really all about.  Next year maybe.  I’ll be excited to see the blog posts and pictures from those that went.

You know when I really think about it, it’s my use of wool yarn that makes me interested in sheep at all….I’m not sure I ever thought about sheep much before.

So one great thing about having a blog is I can keep reliving my lovely Italian adventure by blogging about it.

The reason I had planned on even going to Italy was to visit my best friend, who is of Italian descent and was staying with her mother for a couple of months while in between jobs. One of the things she warned me about was the astonishing amount of fur I would see in Italy.

And wowza was she right.

It seemed like foxes and minks and chinchillas dropped from the sky onto Italian women (and even some men) everywhere.

I personally think furs are gnarly. It’s gross from an animal rights perspective, obviously. And that whole argument that it’s great to use the whole animal, as though they actually get leather and fur from animals used for meat (or other things) is kind of BS. There are often different industries for the different uses for animal products–all using different animals on different farms, all wasting lots of the animal.

But, aside from all that, I think they’re just kind of unnerving…like I got eaten and am now living inside a big furry animal. I also think it’s like wearing money, which is always annoying. I didn’t even think people really wore furs until I moved to New York, where a trip to the upper east side was quite educational. Snooty old women in fur coats…fun.

But Italy was another world. So I thought I would take a day and try and photograph every fur coat I saw. It would easily come to like 100 and I could make a fur mosaic a la the Sistine Chapel…(the mosaics, not the furs). I only got like 3 or 4 people before my man expressed his embarrassment and asked me to stop. It wasn’t nice to take pictures of people when they don’t know it. Like, whatever. I think the furry little creatures they were wearing would beg to differ…says I to the sensitive vegan. Anyway, that wasn’t my real argument. Photographers always photograph people that are unaware of it…the subjects are unidentifiable in my photos anyway.

So here’s what I came up with:

This next one was my favorite…2 in one shot.

On the topic of fur, I’ve heard of 2 gross things: fur yarn, the implication being that it’s made of fur (???) and faux fur isn’t so faux–it can and sometimes does include fur from less cute and cuddly animals, like rats for instance. Ewwww! I hate nothing more than rats. Nothing. Wait, maybe a rat fur coat.

I’m not 100% sure on that last one, but I’ve heard it from respected personal sources…