Snobby, Snobbier, Snobbiest

In my work as a life coach, I rarely come across people call themselves snobs.
I bet my fifth grade social studies teacher would say that true Americans are not snobbish, because after all, it's right in the Declaration of Independence that all men (sic!!) are created equal. And then there was the "melting pot" in the Land of Opportunity. I even remember her trying to convince us that the concept of "class" didn't apply to the United States. That I did not believe. Even back then. If snobs know anything, it is that not everyone or everything is created equal.

As a knitter, I bet you've run into a Yarn Snob or two. You know there's bulky yarn and lace weight yarn. There's acrylic, eyelash, wool and alpaca. There's hand spun, hand dyed and hand plied. There's cheap and there's outrageous. They just aren't equal. Some people discriminate to such extremes that they refuse to work with whole categories of fiber.


It's my view that there's no BAD yarn. O, there's wrong yarn, to be sure. The wrong yarn for the project, for the knitter, for the season, for the needles or for the wallet. Whether my yarn is better than yours, is only a matter of my (extremely) subjective criteria and judgment. It might not even have any basis in experience.

I've knit my share of acrylic baby items. I like that they are soft, washable and virtually indestructible. I know a Red-heart baby-blanket that had a very happy 25 year life!

I've knit with Debbie Bliss's CashmerinoAran, too. The finished sweater is soft, handwashable, and cost me so much that I think I scared the recipient out of ever wearing it.



One of my nearest and dearest recently confessed to being a "craft snob." She was sucked into a rather powerful vortex of scrapbookers who were en masse at a Convention. It may even have been a trade show. In my experience, scrapbookers tend to be suburban moms, and they tend to like things that are "cute." People at tradeshows can be pretty intense, too. Focused or manic? You decide. Ms. Near and Dear is an independent urbanite with no kids. She ditched "cute" about the same time she realized that neither Barbie nor any of the American Girls had 401K's.



One of the problems with "crafts" is that they are sometimes mixed up with "art." That stuff you did at summer camp was "arts and crafts," right? And some of us gained a reputation for being "artsy crafts" or if we were really into it we were "artsy fartsy." Guilty on all counts. Without doing lots of research, I think "art" is about expressing an individual's unique experience of the world in a creative way. Sometimes our life is our art. Othertimes our art is poetry, or painting, or parenting. Craft or crafts is about doing something useful in an elegant or beautiful way. There can definitely be creativity and expression, but crafts should evidence craftsmanship. I am not a snob when it comes to well-crafted crafts, whether it be a quilt, a birdhouse, a mosaic coaster, or a scrapbook. Whether it is snobbishness or thrift or preference, I don't have much use for projects of any kind that were done sloppily, or unconsciously. But when art or craft comes from the heart, snobbishness is best set aside. How snobby are you?