Oct 1st Entrance Slip

I have always found any discussion of ethical consumerism and when to buy items vs. when to make them and, what the benefits of each of these options are to be incredibly complicated. There are so many variables to consider. If you are trying to decide if it is ethical to buy an item, you need to think about where each material came from how it was made and, how the whole piece was made. For a toque you would need to think about where the dye for the yarn came from, if the labour practices for making it were acceptable, if the environmental practices were acceptable. Then you would need to look at what material made the yarn, look at the labour and environmental practices for that. Then look at labour and environmental practices for how the yarn was spun. Look at how the yarn was dyed. Look at how the toque was knitted. Then look at the ethics of the store selling the toque. All of this does not even consider that many of these processes likely happened in different places and there may be ethical issues with the way the materials were transported. This is a drawn-out way of saying that it is challenging to get a truly ethical consumer item. So, it seems that what this article is advocating for: attempting to make or grow at least some of your own items is a good idea. It’s not applicable to everything though. There are times when I need to buy something because I do not have the specialized skill to make it myself (i.e. I could make my own rope to wrap a gift, but I would not use a rope I had made myself to go climbing). There is also the consideration that sometimes the convenience of modern consumerism are a necessity. This reality seems particularly relevant to me right now given the speed of this program and the number of classes we are currently taking.

So, often when I think about the issues discussed in this article I can quickly jump between many different facets of the issue all of which seem deeply challenging to solve and not actually come to any conclusions. I think the thing to do is to choose one thing to focus on. I am guessing for the author of this article that focus would be making or growing things when she can. My mother grows food during the summer and then cans much of it in the fall. Many people are attempting to buy more Canadian made products right now. I think focusing on one thing, and then perhaps if you get really good at that thing adding a second thing, is more sustainable than trying to solve everything at once. To me it seems much better to spend a lifetime being more sustainable and ethically conscious in a few ways rather than spending a few weeks or a month trying to do it in every way and inevitably giving up.

The craft technique I tried was the 7-strand braid. I realized that I (somehow) don’t have any string in my house so (after a brief attempt to braid my hair that failed when I realized I didn’t have enough fingers to keep 7 sections of my hair separate and to braid at the same time) I decided to cut a wide piece of ribbon into 7 sections. I was surprised by how well the actual braiding went for me. At the after-school program I worked for during my first degree we would sometimes do bracelet making crafts that remind me of this. I often found this type of craft challenging. It sometimes would seem like knots were magically appearing where I didn’t want them to be without me knowing how they got there. I also did not do a great job of cutting my ribbon into sections of equal widths which I was worried would make the braiding challenging. So, I was pleasantly surprised that this went smoothly for me.