Tag Archives: crafts

Pine Straw Necklaces

Age: 22

Context: My friend told me how her aunt taught her how to make necklaces out of pine straws.

Text:

“My aunt taught me how to make necklaces out of the pine straws from a pine tree. And then you just kind of loop it and then you make a loop kind of chain neecklace. It’s really cool.”

Analysis:

This was a very sweet interaction between family practices intertwined with nature. Although I’m not sure where her aunt learned to make the necklaces herself, I do find it interesting that she must have learned to make one as a child. Although this was a practice purely for aesthetic and fun, it’s sweet how sometimes even small things/gestures stick with us as children. Something as simple as tree straws being twisted into temporary jewelry stayed with my friend for years, showing its impact.

Making Daisy Chain

Text:

Context:

This text was collected from a close friend of mine, who shared a photo of a daisy chain she had made. Daisy chain making is a traditional craft in which flower stems are linked together to create a wearable object, typically worn as a crown or bracelet. I learned the technique from a YouTube tutorial and subsequently taught it to my friend in person, who then practiced independently and shared the result. The practice is typically associated with outdoor settings and leisure time, and carries a nostalgic aesthetic. My friend photographed only half of the finished chain, suggesting the image was shared casually and informally rather than as a deliberate documentation of the craft.

Analysis

This piece raises interesting questions about the boundaries of folklore in the digital age. The transmission chain here — YouTube to me to my friend — exemplifies the post-modern collapse between oral and digital culture, where informal skill-sharing that once happened exclusively face-to-face now moves fluidly between online and interpersonal contexts. The YouTuber functions as what Von Sydow would call an active tradition bearer, putting a personal spin on a widely shared traditional craft and broadcasting it to a mass audience, yet the craft itself remains folkloric because it exists in multiplicity and variation and is disseminated informally. The in-person transmission from collector to friend represents the more classical folk process, learning by demonstration and example rather than through any official instruction. This piece also connects to discussions of folklorism: daisy chain making is an ancient craft now circulating through commercial platforms like YouTube, raising questions about whether the folk process is preserved or subtly transformed when it moves through digital spaces. The craft’s persistence across these shifting transmission channels speaks to its deep roots as a form of vernacular, embodied knowledge.




The Sweater Curse

Background: The sweater curse is a superstition commonly held in knitting communities. My informant is a 28 year old knitter from California who has friends who have claimed they experienced this phenomenon. 

Me: I’m more of a crochet kind of girl, but I dabble in knitting. I’ve definitely heard of the sweater curse on the internet. I actually first found out about it like, right after I had the thought I should make one for my boyfriend. It was spooky! But anyway, what’s it all about?

A: Yeah, the sweater curse. Brutal stuff… Basically, the sweater curse affects girls [or boys, nonbinary people] who are knitting a sweater for their boyfriend [or partner, assume all characters can be genderswapped or gender neutral], and says that they will break up. Probably before the sweater is finished. It’s only supposed to affect unmarried couples, so it’s not that everyone who knits their partner a sweater is doomed. But yeah, knit your boyfriend a sweater too soon and you will pay the price. 

Me: Geez yeah, why do you think this happens? Because anecdotally, this is totally true. Do you believe it?

A: I mean… yeah, I think there’s something to it. It happened to a close friend of mine a few years back. she was 25 and her boyfriend was the same age, and they’d been dating for like, 8 months maybe. She started working on this sweater for him as a Christmas present, like, back in the summer. Knitters can get so involved in their projects, you know that. I think probably even more so when you’re making it for someone special, so she was knitting ferociously and was putting a lot of her time into this, like, fairly complex sweater. Anyway, they broke up sometime around thanksgiving, which is kind of a thing of its own, y’know, breaking up before you have to meet parents… Family is stressful, being close to someone is stressful, and I think that’s why the sweater curse has merit to it. So much effort and love goes into making a sweater, it can be too much for some people. I think my friend’s boyfriend found out about the sweater around the time they broke up, and I don’t know too much about how it went down, but I think he might have been a little… off put. The sweater can signify a lot of commitment…

Me: Yeah, especially if that commitment is one-sided… I feel like girls who knit are pretty dedicated people. 

A: You have to be if you tackle those big projects! If you date a guy who just isn’t reciprocating that energy, it’s probably not going to work out. You should save your sweater for someone you’ve uh, vetted better *laughter*

My thoughts: This superstition sounds silly at first, but there are a lot of reasons why a large, personal gift like a sweater can cause a reevaluation of the relationship, especially if the relationship is relatively new. I don’t think that anything handmade is a bad gift idea, but a sweater represents commitment to a degree that people are understandably uncomfortable with. The sweater itself can represent strangulation quite literally if it’s poor-fitting. It can also be very possessive, wanting to clothe someone in your work. I don’t think the intention is usually so negative, but the reception is what matters.

For more information on the sweater curse, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweater_curse

Secrets of the Lanyard

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 19th, 2021
Primary Language: English
Language: N/A

Main Piece:

Informant: I know how to start a lanyard– I was the girl everyone went to.

Collector (Me): Could you explain how to start a lanyard?

Informant: Okay. So it’s so simple you just get the two pieces of string and you lay them in like, a cross, like, so like the middles intersect, and then you more or less just do the normal lanyard pattern, like over the little cross where they intersect. And then when you pull it you’ve started the lanyard and you can just keep going. 

Collector: That’s so inspirational. 

Informant: (laughing) I was a hero at my summer camp.

Background: 

My informant is one of my friends, a sophomore at USC. She went to summer camps when she was a child, and a popular craft activity there would be making box stitch lanyards out of colorful plastic strings. Usually most girls at the camp would know how to weave the strings together into a lanyard, but the difficult part was knowing how to start it. Another girl would be the one to start it. My informant, however, did know how to begin a lanyard, and as a result she was the one that other girls went to when they needed help working on lanyards at summer camp, and in the eyes of her peers, was seen as higher status.

Context: 

This piece came up when my informant, another participant, and I were talking about the various activities we used to do during summer camps. We discussed jump rope games and songs, then moved onto crafts— specifically lanyards, and if anyone knew how they were started in the first place.

My thoughts: 

I liked this piece because it reminded me of my own memories of summer camp when I was a child and also struggled to start lanyards. I remember having to find someone who knew how to start them, but what struck me as I listened to my informant was that while I knew of people who could start lanyards, the instructions were always kept secret. In fact, the notion of secrets plays a significant role in children’s folklore. For children, who should be seen as their own cultural group (a repressed minority) when being studied, secrets are akin to obtaining status and power. Secrets solidify groups within the larger peer group of children, and withholding knowledge from others can elevate a child’s status in the hierarchy. This is seen through what my informant told me: by knowing how to start a lanyard, she was viewed with high esteem by the other girls at summer camp. She also mentioned the same status applied if you knew how to do a variation of the lanyard pattern, meaning that the skills of making lanyards were also valued in the peer group. 

Homemade Anti-Viral Mask

Nationality: White American
Age: 22
Occupation: Barista
Residence: San Francisco, California
Performance Date: 4/20/20
Primary Language: English

Context:

The informant (MS) is a San Franciscan in her twenties who lives in a small apartment in Bernal Heights. She made these masks for my parents and I for use during the COVID-19 pandemic. California legislators issued an order to shelter in place and leave home only for essential errands. The government has recommended the use of protective masks in order to lessen the likelihood of respiratory transmission. She taught herself to sew the masks by reverse-engineering a homemade mask given to her by a neighbor and by watching several instructional you-tube videos. She made them because “it feels more personalized and cute rather than wearing the medical store bought masks.” She told me that it was “a fun project to occupy my time.”

Text:

Thoughts:

This is but one example of the many folkloric responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the early stages of the pandemic, authorities told us that masks would not help to protect us, a statement which intended to prevent surgical mask hoarding and mask shortages for healthcare workers. The CDC now recommends the use of cloth face coverings and has instructions published on their website on how to construct cloth masks from various household items such as t-shirts, bits of extra cloth, bandanas, and elastic. The construction of these homemade masks, owing to the difficulty of obtaining factory-made surgical masks, has proliferated as a form of expressive material culture in its own right. This mask, with its floral design, improvised folds, and double-sided fabrics is an example of one of these expressive, fashionable, yet practical coronavirus masks. For my informant, who has been unemployed due to the virus, the home project of creating these masks has helped to pass the time while in quarantine. It is also a means of helping out her family and friends. The colorful design expresses an indomitable playfulness and aesthetic concern invested even in the practical, state-mandated, and utilitarian cloth mask. It seems to express hope during the pandemic, or at least a care for preserving creativity and self-expression through what one wears. These masks have had their own fashion lives in the US, changing and responding to changes of style. People have been adapting their masks to express their own identities and even political beliefs. They have become a visual symbol for life in the time of coronavirus and a platform for self-expression and stylization throughout the suppressive necessities of social distancing.