Where did our fondness for home-made crafts go?

By ANN MARIE HOURIHANE

Quilts, jumpers and making your own stuff have ceased to be part of daily life. Sure you can buy everything now
THERE are probably many methods of fighting one’s way through the recession but it is not everybody who would have thought of making penguins out of marzipan. Yet a lady called Kirstie Allsopp has had exactly this thought, and indeed many more like it. See Kirstie Allsopp Craft, by Kirstie Allsopp.
Christmas exists on many different consumer levels, but this year the truly fashionable will be giving home-made craft gifts. Brace yourself for the avalanche of lavender bags and wobbly biscuits. Actually it sounds rather nice.
And those of us who have attempted to make lavender bags in the past will be doubly impressed. And of course very much aware that all this stitching and sticking and painting with cochineal is taking place because both the European Union and capitalism have collapsed and materialism is – temporarily – in the doghouse.
Craft is a funny old concept, and in many ways one which is foreign to Ireland. On the whole, it is true to say that the majority of people in this country couldn’t wait to give up knitting our own sweaters – and indeed making our own penguins – just as soon as that nice supermarket arrived in town. For us, home-made was always second-best.
It took the American Martha Stewart to persuade us otherwise; I am talking here about Martha before she did time. Even then the Irish hired in the labour to tend the Martha Stewart garden, and to paint all that woodwork dark green. Our Gustavian furniture was distressed when it arrived. We might have dredged a bit of icing sugar over the mince pies but that’s as far as your Irish domestic goddess would go. She was too busy buying houses to actually sit down and quilt in them.
In Ireland, the domestic crafts, now made so extraordinarily fashionable by Kirstie and her mates, died unmourned. The one exception, both to the dying and to the mourning, was the lady who reads Woman’s Weekly. She continued with her handicrafts throughout the boom period and beyond. This week’s Woman’s Weekly contains a knitting pattern for an elegant sweater, Flattering Frill, which is made of a fine-weight yarn in stocking stitch, with a garter-stitch and lace border.
Woman’s Weekly also contains a comprehensive Cross-Stitch Cushion Cover Kit. You can choose to stitch a pansy, a kingfisher, a Yorkie dog, or blue tits. You get a kit for £24.99, which I would have thought quite pricey. You get the kit for all four cushions kits for £91.86.
Not much can go wrong with this sensible Woman’s Weekly world, and the people who quietly go about getting enjoyment from it, knitting and sewing and batch-making Christmas meals for the freezer – an excellent plan.
It is the newcomers to the craft business who are worrying. They are a symptom of the New Puritanism, and ambitious with it. They have arrived in our happily plastic culture festooned with several home-made lampshades and with a strange glint in their eye. They’re going to show us all how to do Fair Isle knitting over a 34-week series. Buy Part One now, and get Part Two free!
What a seductive consumer paradise this holds out to us all, as we stand at the bus stop in the freezing cold. The new craft movement seems to offer us a window on an older, lovelier world before the computer and the euro were invented.
As Conor Pope illustrated in this newspaper on Saturday, the Irish are the big spenders of Europe when it comes to Christmas; even this year each household is predicted to spend almost €1,000 on the festive cheer. We do hurl money at problems: we believe that this is, as Kurt Vonnegut famously remarked, what money is for. Were we really so very wrong in this? Alright, so now there are several reasons why we should think about how lovely it would be for us to make our own bath bombs. That doesn’t mean that everything that went before was a mistake.
There are problems with the New Puritanism too, and that adhesive glitter, no matter how liberally thrown around, doesn’t cover all the cracks. Just as one reaches the age when you realise that there are no new beauty tips, and that actually Elizabeth Arden’s 8-Hour Cream is not all it’s cracked up to be by enthusiastic celebrities, so gradually it becomes clear just how difficult it is to stick together a brave new world with Pritt Stick.
Making your own Christmas cards is one thing; quilting is quite another, and rather messy as I recall. (You’re picking those little hexagons of check out of the bottom of the wardrobe for years.)
Yes, I am afraid that the road to Home-made Heaven is paved with disillusion. There are skilled people who get a lot of pleasure out of making enormous bedspreads, but it’s not something you can just turn up to when you feel like it.
I don’t want to harp on about the lavender bags, but have you any idea how much lavender you need to make lavender bags? And have you any idea how strong that lavender has to be to be discernible in your average modern sock drawer?
Don’t go there.