Hannah Locher and Olivia Rowland
This is a question with which many crafters are familiar. As crafters—of all kinds—create, they encounter tensions between finding joy in the practice of creating and the obligation to find a home for these creations. While producing crafted gifts for friends and family is a great strategy, they, too, have limited physical space. Crafters often commiserate about a constraint that accompanies overloading family and close friends with crafts: nothing is worse than repeatedly gifting homemade items to someone who, while close to you in proximity, may not truly appreciate the time, care, and energy embroidered into each piece.
Methods of offloading finished handmade products to make room for more creating vary from person to person. Some people choose to commodify their crafting by selling at makers markets. Others pursue large projects, so there is less buildup of finished ones. To create physical space for more crafts—so we can continue enjoying the practice without worrying about running out of places to put finished items—Conference Creatures aims to benefit scholars through craft distribution that operates outside the confines of neoliberal hierarchies and commodification.
In this text, you'll find a variety of content and modes designed to immerse you in the weaving and winding of our craft. We have included pages you may expect to see in an academic journal article, including
Our text also features more interactive and experimental elements designed to encourage you to engage with Conference Creatures beyond simply reading. We have intertwined photos, videos, and clickable elements throughout. These representations allow us to better portray the physical mode of Conference Creatures by imitating the embodied nature of the creature creation process.
In the pages nested under Get Involved, you'll find multiple opportunities for interacting with our project. If you'd like to connect with us on social media, Engaging provides information for doing so. Or, if you'd like to take up a crochet hook and make a creature yourself, you will find instructions and a video tutorial in Creating.
This text is designed so that—like crochet—you may stop and start at your leisure. We intend for users to navigate the Conference Creatures webtext in small swatches or in its entirety, and to follow whatever threads pique your interest. To wander through our project in this exploratory fashion, you can start by scrolling down on this page until you reach the photo of materials on a wooden table. Selecting different objects here and on the section landing pages will bring you to individual content. Additionally, following hyperlinks included on each page will bring you to relevent areas of our webtext.
If, however, you prefer to approach the text in a more linear fashion, we recommend progressing through the text by clicking on the blue ball of yarn on the bottom right of each page. You can also access the full webtext by clicking on the creature at the bottom of this page.
Before you immerse yourself in the text, a few tips regarding navigation:
