On the question of "How long did that take to make?"
There is so much more behind a crafted garment than the amount of time it took to make.
One of the most common questions I get as someone who makes a lot of textile-related things is, “how long did that take to make?”
It’s almost always the first question people ask, and the reason they ask it is because when we are faced with something that’s been created by human hands with techniques and methods that we’re unfamiliar with, the unit of measurement that feels meaningful to our brains is how much time it took to create it. It stands to reason that a thing that took, say, three hours to make is somehow intrinsically more valuable than a thing that took one hour to make. A thing that looks complicated to our untrained eyes — in knitting this can mean, for instance, an Aran sweater with its traditional all-over cabling — will naturally correlate to us as needing more time to make than something that looks visually less complicated. (This isn’t always true, but that’s a different topic.)
I get why we all reach for that question when someone shows us something that they made and we can’t really conceive of how they made it or what went into it, so we reduce it to a time sheet. How long does it take to make a sweater? How long does it take to make a pair of socks? How about other disciplines: how long does it take to make a painting? A drawing? A sculpture?
I want to talk about why that question isn’t really applicable to textile craftsmanship, or indeed a lot of things made by human hands. And just to be clear, I’m not blaming people for asking it. But if you’re someone who asks this question, I’m hoping you’ll want to learn a little bit more about why time is a poor unit of measurement for many things made by human hands.
And that’s what it comes down to: craftsmanship. The first thing that this question misses is that the amount of time spent on making something is only the tip of the iceberg of properties that make up this thing you’re looking at.
Let’s take my own journey through textile craftsmanship as an example.
I first learned to knit as a teenager, having learned to sew and design my own clothing before that. Once I learned to knit, I developed an interest in spinning the yarn that I was knitting with, so I took up learning how to spin a few years after that. I started by buying clean and prepared fleece, but pretty soon I was interested in the next step up that ladder — I started buying raw fleeces from ranchers and cleaning them myself, learning to understand what bits of the fleece to discard and what parts of the fleece were going to work best for different outcomes. As you might guess, this progressed to the highest rung on that ladder: raising the animals myself that would provide the fiber I’d need, and learning how to care for them to produce the kind of fleece I wanted to use.
Each rung up this ladder and up into the earlier stages of crafting something was a leg on the journey of craftsmanship: each stage gained me the ability to control more of the outcome of the final product, to learn what choices I could make at every step of the process to control everything about what would come out at the end.
That is craftsmanship: involving yourself deeply at every stage of the process of making something.
I’m in my early 50s now and I started that journey in my teens, so I’ve been knitting for nearly 40 years, spinning my own yarn for nearly 30 years, and raising my own fiber animals for nearly 20 years. I’ve spent decades now learning each part of the process and using it to refine my knowledge of how to get exactly the outcome that I want when I make something.
So when someone asks me, “how long did it take to make that sweater?” There are really two answers: “many hours” and “forty years.”
For example, my most recent sweater is one that I designed myself. It comes from knowledge I’ve carefully been accumulating since I learned to sew and design clothing in my early teen years, knowledge about how clothing shapes and silhouettes will look on my body and how fabric needs to be constructed to achieve those shapes.
But I then needed to knit many kinds of sweaters to understand how knitted fabric works on the human body in a way that is different from woven fabric. This allowed me to create a design for the sweater from the knowledge I'd accumulated.
And once I designed the sweater, I designed the yarn that I would need to make that sweater, with the exact properties that I wanted: loft, lightness, warmth, and an easy-fitted silhouette that would be easy to accomplish in the knitting process.
I couldn’t just use any yarn — the yarn itself had to be crafted to have specific properties that I wanted in the sweater: airiness and loft instead of sheen and drape, for example. I had to prepare the raw fleeces -- a Corriedale sheep fleece from a ram named Clancy and alpaca fleece from my own herd member, Benz -- a certain way in order to best spin it to achieve those properties.
And then once I spun the yarn, I had to know the techniques to knit it to my design, and which techniques to choose and which not to choose. Techniques that have taken me years to learn to do well and understand.
The knowledge to do all of that and get the outcome I was looking for took decades to learn and started long, long before I ever even conceived of this sweater.
So you can see how asking how long my sweater took to make is a question that doesn’t really tell you the information that you’re looking for. It's actually quite difficult to give an accurate answer to.
And sure, there's a danger that the real answer will sound pretentious. There’s the famous story of Picasso fulfilling someone’s request for a drawing by sketching on a nearby napkin, and when his friend asked how much the drawing would cost Picasso gave him some number that sounded outrageous to his friend. His friend balked and asked how it could possibly cost that much since it only took Picasso a few minutes to do the drawing, and on a nearby cafe napkin. Picasso explained that it may have only taken a few minutes to do the drawing, but it took him a lifetime to learn how to do it.
It’s true, though. Real craftsmanship takes years — decades — to achieve, and asking how long just one piece took to make kind of sideswipes all of that.
This concept of craftsmanship and the work that goes into acquiring the skills necessary to execute something with a specific outcome and purpose is something we’re used to thinking about when it comes to other disciplines like woodworking or painting or sculpting, but knitting and crochet is not always given this level of respect, at least not in the culture I’ve grown up in here in the United States; it’s different in many other places.
What are some questions we can ask instead of, "how long did that take to make?" Here are some that I think will give you far more satisfying and accurate answers:
When did you first learn to do that?
What are the different skills you had to learn to make this?
Did you learn anything new while you were making this?
And of course, one of the best things you can say to recognize the years of skill someone might have developed to make the thing you're looking at? "It's wonderful. I bet a lot of work went into that."