The New Handmade

I’ve always preferred handmade gifts. Like the matching blue velvet dresses my aunt made for me and my doll when I was ten. The hand-hewn child’s rocker that’s been passed down for generations in my family. The lovely felted purses my daughter makes. And the individually-printed cards my printmaker friends send during the holidays, which I save and admire.

This week a co-worker mentioned that she’d just bought a book of updated vintage knitting patterns for making baby clothes. She was excited by the possible gifts the book suggested – timeless pastel hats and sweaters lovingly made to be kept long after the recipients were too big to wear them, bridging time with needles and durable yarns. I understand her excitement, but not everyone can knit, whittle, throw a pot or make functional things that will be worn, sat upon, played with, slept beneath.

For the rest of us, technology has come to the rescue. The slow, pure process of fashioning a thing with our hands has been adulterated by the seductive ease of creating personalized media. Technology allows us to produce a satisfying – if less tactile – “handmade” gift. From the mix-tape you made for your girlfriend in college to the pre-loaded iPod you gave your grandma, you’ve probably had the sense of having made something unique. And even though you didn’t use your hands to stitch or polish the made thing, there was some personal investment and effort, if only through a keyboard and monitor.

In the past year, I stumbled upon and became a fan of a cyber-medium that results in an outcome which feels hand-crafted, even though unseen and unknown hands assemble the final material product. I am now a Blurbist.

Blurb is an on-demand publishing venue that allows you to download its free and flexible layout software, upload text and photos, order (and even sell) your finished book. Thanks to Blurb, I’ve produced two picture books as gifts for a special toddler: Frances Meets a Hat and When Frances is Fancy.

By joining the democratic and world-wide Blurb Community, I’ve become one of the thousands of people making books – from professional photographic portfolios to amateurish collections of family recipes. Books that arrive shrink-wrapped and well done, as if we’d followed a knitting pattern perfectly. And although our creative process – the concepts, words, graphics we upload – employs ephemeral artifacts, electronic wisps that travel to other people who turn them into something you can hold, books are made. Without our being present throughout the whole process, all the love that goes into a handmade gift gets given.

Our mental handiwork is all over them, and they end up in someone’s hands. 

Teddy, Teddy: Love Language Lost

While I was offline, Philadelphians were mourning the loss of Teddy Pendergrass.  On Friday, January 22, the day of the public viewing, I avoided the section of Cheltenham Avenue that passes by Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church, where thousands of friends, fans and the curious were expected to gather.

Enon, a mega church, is part of my community, a feature of my daily work commute. It’s what traffic engineers would call a significant destination. And although I later learned that peak hour traffic in that area had been manageable, not something to avoid, I had imagined a very different scenario.

I saw him perform in August, 1981. He’d stepped out on the stage at Chicagofest in his pink shirt and pale slacks – maybe the fog machine had kicked in, I can’t recall – but he’d stretched out his arms in openness and the audience had swooned, audibly, for that gesture and every one that followed.

And that’s what I imagined would happen on Cheltenham Avenue: thousands and thousands of swooning women from Philadelphia and Chicago and the rest of the country would converge upon Enon, and there would be no way to press through that crowd.

The power of eroticism, as I remembered it from almost 30 years ago, had perhaps waned. Or maybe the huge parking lot at Enon had been generous enough to absorb it all. But at any rate, the passing of Teddy Pendergrass came and went, over the course of slightly more than one cold week in the new year.

It plunged me into an unsettling nostalgia. TP – which features my favorite Teddy Pendergrass tune, Love TKO -- was the first CD recording I purchased. Listen to this, my friend Karen said, filling her East Side Milwaukee apartment with auditory velvet, a depth of sound I’d never heard, convincing me that my cassettes were one-dimensional in comparison. I was newly single and somehow imagined that the right music would seal the deal: put on Teddy’s Feel the Fire and a stranger would become the perfect life partner.

The week of his funeral, I pulled out my R&B and island cassettes, listened to some as I drove to work (amazingly, my 4-year old car has both a CD and cassette player) then left them on the Free Table at the office, where everything from stacks of Wired to partial skeins of yarn are recycled. I left behind Teddy and Billy Ocean and Eddie Grant, Bobby McFerrin, Michael McDonald, Aretha, Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker. (Somewhere along the way, I’d lost Luther Vandross, thin, in his white suit, singing Give me the reason to want you back).

At lunch, I watched my young co-workers stop at the table, pick up the tapes recorded before some of them were born, then set them down again. But by the end of the week, they’d all disappeared.

I don’t know who took them. Maybe people who believe that music sets the mood. People who believe that music is the mood. People who remember slow dancing to Turn out the lights with someone they had just met. Women who remember the electric charge when he walked on stage, the fog rising from the footlights, how it felt to call out Teddy, Teddy, as if something like love was just about to begin.