Osborn Fiber Studio

It’s thanksgiving morning at the Osborn household, and my sister in law is doing witchcraft over the stove. Can it possibly be legal to produce something that is a cinnamon roll and a pancake at the same time without arcane magicks?! I think not.

You have a mental list when you travel, right? The last-minute checklist that you go over as you get in the car, because you’ve forgotten those particular things one too many times, and you won’t be caught without your phone charger/deoderant/toothbrush/measuring tape again. I’ve gotten quite good at always remembering those difficult, peripheral things.

So imagine my surprise when I got up to take a shower yesterday morning and found that I’d forgotten to pack underwear and socks. Underwear and socks?! That’s like forgetting oxygen and water. What the heck, man.

So we had to brave the pre-Thanksgiving traffic in the retail wasteland that is Rockville and Montgomery County to find a Target. Once there, I found the cheapo underwear I always get (I’m lucky if my pants are clean, let alone coordinated with anything, so I am not one of those people whose underwear matches their outfit) but when I got to the socks, I stopped.

I haven’t bought socks in years. Since the last time I bought socks, I’ve gotten married, moved three times, changed professions twice, and most importantly, gained a very extreme investment in interesting socks. So I wasn’t going to go to the twelve-pack of boring black footwear, like I did last time. I meandered instead over to the extensive display of fancy expensive socks, where 2 pairs for 5$ seemed quite reasonable to a person who usually spends 20$ per pair on materials.

But what shocked me, what really floored me, were a few pairs of socks with a very odd design. Check these out: they’re pooling. Like, as if they were hand-knit from hand-dyed yarn. These socks were knit on faceless machines, probably involving near-slave labor, using technology that could easily replicate very complex and precise patterning. But instead, they were designed to replicate the randomizing effect of yarn hand-dyed in a hank.

You know what this means. This means that handknitting has a way bigger impact on actual mainstream fashion than I could have imagined. Because the inspiration for this design sure didn’t go the other way.

I bought myself a pair of purple knee-highs, and some crazy pink and orange argyles. They’re not as warm as my hand-knit creations, but they do the job, and sadly I can’t knit a pair of socks before I next need to wear shoes.

I hope you are having a warm and woolly holiday, with family and/or friends. Celebrate your craft, peoples… we are making waves.