Quickie Question: Worst Misrepresentation of a Craft You’ve Seen
By Twistie
This gentleman is known as Greasy V. The picture of him is from the fabulous Carrieoke’s Knitting Blog. She stopped posting in May, but her archives are still around, featuring a lot of great projects and fun commentary on her life.
Anyway, as you can plainly see, Greasy V is not really well-versed in the art of knitting. I mean, we can see that, because we know what knitting actually looks like. There are a lot of people who would never see what was wrong with that picture.
Which reminds me of my bookselling days. Ah yes, once upon a time I worked in book stores. In one of them, I ran the fiction section. In that section resided a novel entitled The Lacemaker. I have long since forgotten who wrote it, and I never actually read it. I do recall that it was the harrowing tale of a French lacemaker who got caught up in the horror following the revolution. In point of fact, a surprising number of lacemakers, silversmiths, pastry chefs, silk weavers, and other crafts people did wind up facing the guillotine during the Reign of Terror for their part in supplying the crass material desires of the nobles who had already died.
But I digress.
What I remember most about that book is the cover. On it, a lovely young woman sits at her lace pillow before an open window, allowing plenty of light and fresh air into the room. She’s making an elaborate border… with just three bobbins on her pillow, one of which she’s holding roughly two feet in the air!
Anyone who has ever seen bobbin lace made knows you don’t haul your bobbins randomly into the stratosphere, and you can’t make a pattern with just three bobbins. And anyone who knows how lace was typically made for commercial purposes in eighteenth-century Europe is well aware that the workers rarely sat alone in well-lit rooms. More often they were clustered in groups around a single candle in a room with no open windows and no fire, for fear that dirt or smoke might discolor the lace.
And so it was that every time I shelved a copy of that novel, I giggled a little.
What about you? Have you seen someone illustrate or attempt to explain your craft and get it completely wrong?
December 13th, 2011 at 7:45 am
Not so much wrong as “preachy”. A pretty bad novel that I don’t even remember the plot of, let alone the name or who wrote it. It had a bit about the woman cutting out a dress – must have been a designer or something. *In pinning a pattern to fabric, she used a pin cushion rather than putting the pins in her mouth like others do – not so much in fear of swallowing the pins, but to avoid transferring her lipstick to the pins and thus to the fabric.* OK. Got it. No more lipstick while I’m cutting out!
December 13th, 2011 at 11:24 am
Anyone else remember the Quilted Northern toilet paper commercial that showed the little cartoon ladies “quilting” the paper….with…knitting needles??? LOL!
The commercial was quickly redone and now they quilt with sewing needles and thread, as one actually DOES. Hee!
December 14th, 2011 at 4:18 am
There was a book I bought for a friend about the representation of crafts in works of art. It wasn’t very informative, more or less describing the pictures shown. But I did splutter a bit when it was clear that the “young girl holding her crochet work” was actually knitting!
December 15th, 2011 at 2:09 am
How do I count the ways…
1. that Quilted Northern commercial
2. one of the first episodes of CSI:NY where the perp had been “knitting” a granny square blanket
3. a fantasy series (The Sharing Knife – Mercedes Lackey, I think) where the heroine spins cotton on a drop spindle, and then knits socks from it, which was annoying because a) a drop spindle isn’t really suited to spinning short fine fibers like cotton and she should’ve used a supported spindle instead, and b) cotton makes CRAPPY socks.
and there are more…
December 16th, 2011 at 2:04 pm
Jennifer Weiner’s “Good In Bed”, in which a character makes mittens–on her loom.