Crafty Bitches

Susan Beal's home office is cluttered with the tools of her trade.

Against one wall, an IKEA bookshelf is packed with neatly folded yards of fabrics in bright colors and patterns. Piled almost to the ceiling, they give the effect of a vibrant quilt draped against the wall. Next to the shelf, in a corner near a window overlooking Southeast Division Street, dozens of spools of different colored thread are packed together like crayons. Against another wall, rows of vintage sewing manuals, craft books and knitting patterns promise hours of reading and many more hours of tedious, eye-blurring, finger-cramping labor.

Beal, who has long brown hair, a quick smile and a penchant for all things cute, quilts, sews clothing and embroiders, and she's a member of PDX Super Crafty, a nationally known group of four sock-monkey-loving, glitter-happy women. In all, she's one crafty bitch.

She is also something of a revolutionary.

Married and 33 years old, Beal is a self-described feminist: empowered, liberated and fulfilled. At 8, she marched with her mother, a city planner, in support of the federal Equal Rights Amendment, a rallying point for feminists in the '70s and early '80s. (And she was crushed when it failed to win enough votes for ratification.)

"When I was in high school, I was so determined not to be typical that I never took sewing," Beal says, sitting in her lofty apartment where a felt pillow with an adorable whale competes for attention with the Lightning Bolt concert photo above it. "I signed up for auto mechanics, and, of course, I hated it. I dropped the class and ended up taking another art class instead. I tried so hard to resist the typical, but I found myself right back in the middle of it."

Today, she thinks crafting can be a feminist act, a bold reclamation of what generations before her devalued or took for granted. At the very least, it's hip. "There are people taking granny crafts and modernizing them and making them a little bit naughty," says Cathy Pitters, one of Beal's friends from PDX Super Crafty.

It can also be profitable—to a degree.

"In another era, I would have done this as a hobby, but the fact that I can earn my living with my creativity feels very feminist to me," Beal says. "I don't know if I would say it's the new bra-burning, but I definitely think it's a radical act…to make something that's homemade when it's so easy to buy something that was made in Bangladesh."

In a city where "do it yourself" is almost a religion, Beal's pro-feminist, anti-consumerist ideals find many kindred spirits. Crafters who have small children see even greater potential. Aided by the Internet, an increasing number of them can work at home and find customers without ever setting foot outside. Of course, they do that, too.

Yet craft's long association with "women's work" gives some people pause. For one thing, a pair of handmade mittens will never earn a crafter the same amount of money as a computer program that took the same number of hours to create.

Kristin Yount, a 36-year-old potter and mother who sells her dishes online and at fairs, says she works in her ceramics studio to support her family, although some of her objects would earn her less than a dollar an hour. "I don't have all day to sit around and make casserole dishes for my friends," Yount says. "I craft because I need to. I need to have a job, and I need to have money."

But her neighbor, she says, was aghast to see Yount wearing an old-fashioned apron recently. "'Those new feminists will crochet their own nooses,'" the neighbor told her. "'Don't they know knitting is work?'"

If you haven't been paying attention, you may have missed the craft phenomenon that has overtaken Portland in the past decade. Beal herself is evidence for its meteoric rise.

Fresh out of college, Beal moved to Portland in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in American studies from the University of North Carolina. By 2000, she had taken up sewing and was selling skirts at Seaplane, which had then just opened on Southeast Belmont Street and is now on Northwest Trendy-Third. Soon she was writing about crafts for getcrafty.com, "home of the craftistas," and Bust magazine, an early arbiter of cool crafts co-founded by the woman who created the popular Stitch 'n Bitch collection of knitting manuals. (If anyone's ever knitted you a wristband with the word "geek" on it, you have her to thank—or blame, depending on your view).

Beal has taught craft classes at the DIY Lounge inside Collage on Northeast Alberta Street. She sells her handmade jewelry and clothing on her own website, susanstars.com. And she created a virtual shop on Etsy.com, the 2-year-old online lovechild of eBay-style hucksterism and Martha Stewart-style distinction. More than 1,000 people in Portland also have shops on Etsy, which rhymes with Betsy. She also has a virtual shop on Lov.li, a cross between MySpace and Etsy designed by Portland programmer Patrick Sullivan and launched in January.

In 2005, together with her partners at PDX Super Crafty, Beal published a book featuring 75 how-to projects, with instructions on how to create everything from the (always handy) ladybug bike-helmet covers to homemade Shrinky Dinks (yes, they still exist). More recently, Beal was interviewed for the not-yet-released documentary film Handmade Nation , which may eventually do for crafting in 2008 what the book Fast Food Nation did for small farms and local food. This summer, Beal also traveled with other Portlanders to Chicago for the Renegade Craft Fair, the "alt-design equivalent of the Venice Biennale," where "cross-stitch is cool," according to The New York Times (and irony is alive and well). The popular hipster fair, which also puts on a show at McCarren Park Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is now considering expanding its craft circuit out West—possibly to Portland.

But there's more. A monthly craft fair at the Doug Fir Lounge supports a total of 400 individual vendors. Since 1999, the number of yarn stores in Portland has grown from one to nine. In that time, the Yarn Garden on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard has itself grown from 950 to 3,500 square feet, owner Linda Carter says. Today, customers regularly throw down $60 for a single skein of yarn, just enough to make a small hat. "I was afraid the fire marshal would shut us down," Carter says of her crowds, pre-expansion.

Portland is also home to the only private accredited art school in the country that retains "craft" in its title, the Oregon College of Art&Craft (which just received a $1.5 million gift, the second-largest in the college's 100-year history). The city has its own craft museum, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and, of course, Saturday Market, an early incubator for crafty Portlanders. Type "Portland" into knitmap.com and 19 stores in the immediate metropolitan area pop up, three times the number of stores in Austin, Texas, according to the same database.

But it's not just knitting or fabric arts like sewing that are popular now.

Wool is a gateway drug to harder endeavors. Just walk through a store like Redux on East Burnside Street, and it's clear Portlanders are working with a much wider variety of materials—everything from skateboard parts to bike chains—to make crafts as diverse as the people creating them. (It's not just women.)

Portland even has a branch of the international Church of Craft, a nondenominational group led by an ordained minister from the Universal Life Church. It meets at the Central Library and is the largest of 11 congregations in the United States, Canada and the U.K., with 1,000 members, according to its minister, "Sister" Diane Gilleland.

"It's a renaissance of crafting," says Gilleland, whose craft blog, craftypod.com, has 1,000 unique visitors a day. "Twenty years ago, no one wanted to admit to being a crafter."

Andi Zeisler is a feminist, a crafter and a standard-bearer for the notion that the two identities are compatible—but not always overlapping.

"Just because I'm a feminist doesn't mean that everything I do is a feminist act," Zeisler says. "To be somewhat of a hardass about it, I would say you're not living a feminist life simply by virtue of reclaiming a feminine art or something that has been, in the past, denigrated as just women's work."

Zeisler, 34, is the co-founder of Bitch magazine, a Portland-based quarterly devoted to the intersection of feminism and pop culture. As the current creative director, Zeisler has published stories like "Knot in Our Name: Activism Beyond the Knitting Circle," "Green and Not Heard: Al, Rachel, and the Feminizing of Eco-Activism," and "When Tyra Met Naomi: Race, Fashion and Rivalry." That's her job. Her hobby? Puttering around her Northeast Portland home embroidering portraits of dogs and people that are as intricate and colorful as the fanciful Amy Cutler illustrations that hang in New York City galleries.

The increasing popularity of crafts has presented a new dilemma for feminists like Zeisler, but not for the reasons one would assume. Zeisler doesn't see anything troubling about women crafting for fun. They're pastimes. She does see a problem when the boundaries between housework and craft are blurred in the public's mind, because, from her perspective, they're not connected. Vacuuming (a chore) and cross-stitching (a hobby) are hardly the same thing just because Martha Stewart talks about them in the same magazine.

"I have to separate the resurgence of crafts from the resurgence of domesticity," Zeisler says over coffee on Northeast Alberta Street, the location for Bitch 's new office since moving to Portland from Oakland last spring. "I don't necessarily think those are the same things, and unfortunately they often get conflated."

So, cross-stitching and crocheting are different from washing dishes and changing diapers. But is the former a sign of liberation and the latter a sign of subjugation at the hands of men? Yes and no.

Zeisler says no. "I have gotten a little annoyed in the past when I've seen newspaper articles or other media things on this new trend of craft, positing it as feminist," she adds. "Unless you're doing crafts that are specifically political, it's really an apolitical act."

Other women in Portland disagree. They see potential for using their crafts in the service of other goals, and in that way what they're doing is political, even if it's not purely feminist. Beal, for example, donates earnings from various sales to groups such as United for Peace and Justice. She gives her utterly pink hobby a green edge by recycling materials.

Jessica Neuman Beck, 33, makes handmade plush toys from home. "The fact that you can stay home with your kids and still have a fulfilling life outside of that and still find creative outlets, I think that's starting to redefine feminism," she says. "It's a new feminist."

Zeisler acknowledges not everyone sees the link between crafting and newer expressions of feminism her way. She's not convinced those women are wrong.

"Is it as groundbreaking as agitating for sexual harassment law in the workplace? No, I'm not going to say that those two things are equal. But I think people who are really living their feminism, I'm not going to argue with that. I'm not going to take that away from them. It's less political than a lot of people would like, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value," Zeisler says.

But, she adds, "there has to be more to a feminist life than just that sort of thing."

"Don't call quilting 'craft' because they'll execute you," says Geri Grasvik, the 58-year-old co-director of the Northwest Quilting Expo. "This is art."

Grasvik is standing inside the cavernous Portland Metropolitan Exposition Center for a recent quilting expo, and surrounding her, sprinkled across 60,000 square feet of space, 400 quilts represent tens of thousands of hours of women's labor. Grasvik, who looks a bit like Goldie Hawn, is championing the accomplishments on display, but not before accidentally dropping the C-bomb herself. "This is not your grandmother's craft anymore," she says. "I mean art." (One hundred feet from her, a sign pitching ergonomic bags for carrying quilting notions reads: "Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, Osteoporosis?")

Zeisler, the co-founder of Bitch , says the value of "hipster" craft relies on maintaining a distance from crafts typically done by older women. Scrapbooking is the quintessential bottom rung, but some forms of quilting would also be considered gauche, old-fashioned or "old lady" in the eyes of some younger crafters. Zeisler finds that thinking troublesome. "Can you really embrace one realm of crafts and deny your connection to the other just because it's not hip?" she asks. "Where I find this kind of hipster craft a little disturbing is where it really depends on what I see as a class division. People who would think it would be incredibly tacky to put a wooden duck in their front yard might still knit their friend a vibrator cozy or make a shirt with a little pot-leaf-shaped pocket."

Faythe Levine, the Wisconsin crafter who directed the upcoming documentary Handmade Nation , spent several months interviewing crafters who sit on that hip end of the craft spectrum. Her interest in creating the documentary sprung, at least in part, from a desire not just to record the aesthetics of the movement but to explore the social implications. Many crafters across the country, including in Portland, are motivated to craft by a desire to reduce their dependence on sweatshop labor and reuse existing materials. Levine is a true believer.

"I don't know if I know what the limit is on what crafts can do," Levine, 29, says. "I wouldn't necessarily say crafts couldn't stop the war."

So what do the older women—the ones with wooden ducks supposedly in their yards—have to say about that?

Marge Redbird, a 77-year-old employee of the Fabric Depot in outer Southeast Portland (whose grandmother used to make quilts out of feedbags to keep warm during South Dakota winters), is one of the hundreds of people working at the quilting expo Sept. 28. While demonstrating the construction of a "jo-jo" (what looks like a miniature shower cap made out of fabric that's used as a decorative element in sewing projects), she pauses to consider Levine's words, then laughs. "That's like saying, 'If we had all women in politics there wouldn't be any war,'" Redbird says.

Grasvik, who owns the Pine Needle quilting store in Lake Oswego, has her own theories about the younger crafters. "Women never change," Grasvik, a self-declared feminist, says. "I don't care if you're a hipster or this woman [she turns and points to a middle-aged woman], you have the same needs."

Robin Carlisle, a 27-year-old first-time mom, discovered she needed to maintain her creative outlets after giving birth to her son, Reese, a year ago.

In her 500-square-foot Southeast Portland home, the evidence of her craftiness hangs on the walls and rests on the shelves. A sewing machine sits on a cluttered kitchen counter. "I haven't surrendered my whole life to being a mom," Carlisle says. "I still have a strong need to nurture my creative self."

In April, Carlisle created MotherMade (mothermade.org), an at-home business that hasn't turned a significant profit yet. Her two products are baby bibs, one of which sells at New Seasons. The materials are inexpensive, and the construction uncomplicated. And the packaging—a label with Reese cheekily posed as the Virgin of Guadalupe—is decidedly hip. The whole idea is that other mothers can join her in the business, make her products in their homes to earn money, and also raise their children.

A former hairdresser, Carlisle shares much in common with Yount, the potter, and Neuman Beck, a graphic designer who also makes plush toys on the side. To varying degrees, they all identify as feminist. The idea that they are "crocheting their own nooses" is very far from their reality.

"I think that the fact that moms are getting out and really promoting themselves in a way they haven't been able to do before, with their kids, is kind of forming a new mom," Neuman Beck says. "Middle-class moms who vote, they're no longer necessarily concerned just with what's best for the school district or what's best for their kids."

Are they the new Portland version of the mythical soccer mom?

"These moms are financial contributors," Carlisle says. "It's a new soccer mom. But I'd call it a 'sock-puppet' mom."

Catch My Wave?  

Feminists under 40 are typically considered third-wave feminists. What’s that? First things first.

First-wave feminism evolved in the 1800s. During this period, until about the 1950s, feminists fought for basic rights and protections under the law. Think suffrage and Susan B. Anthony.

Second-wave feminists fought political inequality, too, but they were also concerned with private matters like the unfair division of labor at home. The central debate of this time was whether men and women should strive to be the same or embrace their differences. This period roughly covers the 1960s through the 1980s. Later, second-wave feminists would be criticized for working on behalf of mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class women. Think Gloria Steinem.

Third-wave feminism is a grab bag of ideas and people who grapple not just with issues of gender but race and class, too. It includes the women who might be described as "the same as men and different, too." They're the ones who knit and play rugby, watch Gossip Girls , read Bitch —and study computer science. Think Hillary Clinton and Hilary Duff. 

Tools of the Trade

1. Serger Similar to a sewing machine, a serger finishes off some garments' seams.

2. Sewing machine Like a carpenter's hammer, a basic that runs as low as $100.

3. Denyse Schmidt fabric Less expensive than other designer options, Denyse Schmidt fabric is a favorite for its vintage vibe.

4. Amy Butler fabric A younger, Midwestern Martha Stewart, Amy Butler designs bold, modern fabrics and patterns that even beginning sewers can follow.

5. Needle-nose pliers Multiple pairs in varying sizes will help crafty bitches in their jewelry-making journeys.

6. Sharp scissors Even more important than a working sewing machine, sharp scissors keep sewing projects looking sharp, too. A dedicated pair should never be used to cut paper. Believe it or not, paper dulls scissors—even though scissors beat paper.

7. Gocco print maker Want to create an image similar to a silk screen? The Japanese technique known as Gocco is an easy alternative.

8. Portland author Amy Karol's Bend-the-Rules Sewing Karol, nominated for a Bloggy award for her craft blog, Angry Chicken, published Bend-the-Rules Sewing in June. The must-have guide offers handy tips for easy sewing.

9. Your own label Many crafty bitches have names for the products they sell—not to mention their blogs. Beal has Susan Stars jewelry and her blog, West Coast Crafty.

10. Mountains of yarn A crafty bitch worth her salt will have a pile of yarn that reaches higher than the laundry inside the Trail Blazers' locker room

11. A button maker. Or 1-inch buttons. Irony is key. "I'd rather be smooching my nerdy husband," or "I'd rather be smooching my crafty wife," are crafty bitches' answers to Abercombie&Fitch T-shirts like, "It's all Relative in West Virginia" or Urban Outfitters' "Voting Is for Old People." 

She’s Crafty—And Here’s Where To Find Her

Treat yourself to something beady at Improvisational Beadwork. 

Learn new skills and get inspired at this weekly bead-for-all. Work in different stitches, such as peyote, herringbone and open weaves. Beginners welcome to attend.

Tuesdays and Thursdays each month, 3-5 pm and 7-9 pm.

Knittn' Kitten, 7530 NE Glisan St.

$25. 

Forget Victoria’s Secret—make your own lingerie 

Tired of the old flannel pajamas? Wow your lover this winter with a sexy, slightly lacy cardigan sweater for bedtime wear at this sensual event.

6-8 pm Thursday, Oct. 4.

Twisted, 2310 NE Broadway.

$60 and knitting supplies. 

Swap your yarn away at the Art and Craft Supply Swap 

Step up your creativity and discover crafty knickknacks you never knew you wanted! Anyone in need of yarns, beads, stamps, and anything else craft-related encouraged to attend.

Noon-4 pm Sunday, Oct. 7.

The 100th Monkey Studio, 110 SE 16th Ave.

$5 donation and any craft supplies you want to swap. 

Indulge your soul at the art and soul retreat

Gather your paper, fabric, jewelry and fiber arts and attend this all-day retreat. Workshops taught by internationally recognized instructors.

10 am–4 pm Monday, Oct. 8.

Embassy Suites, Portland International Airport, 7900 NE 82nd Ave.

: $45 registration fee, workshop registration additional cost. 

Kids’ witch-craft, without the spells

Kids love crafts, too! Let the little ones make their very own handmade Halloween cards and let somebody else clean up their mess for once.

3–4:30 pm Saturday, Oct. 13.

DIY Lounge at Collage, 1639 NE Alberta St.

$10. 

Experience the hip sew-culture of P-Town

Crafty Wonderland's monthly sale. Discover unusual Portland crafts in this trendy showcase of sewing, beading and printing, and be inspired. Dubbed "Best Place to Be Sew Cool" in

s Best of Portland 2007.

11 am– 4 pm Sunday, Oct. 14.

Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St.

Free. 

Worship at the altar of the cuddly glove monster 

Join the Church of Craft for a monthly art project and conversation. No talent required.

12:30–3:30 pm Sunday, Oct. 14.

U.S. Bank Room, Central Library, 801 SW 10th Ave.

Free, but bring your own supplies. 

Stop your kvetching and start stretching—your wallet

magazine's annual fundraiser, "Sm[art]," an art show and silent auction.

7-11 pm Saturday, Oct. 20.

Ace Hotel, 1022 SW Stark St.

$15-$45. Tickets through brownpapertickets.com.

—Krista Stryker

turn this issue of Ww into a fashion accessory, and send a picture to made@wweek.com; we'll post the winners online. for more crafty ideas, see "made" on page 78.

WWeek 2015