Acquiring a skill > acquiring a thing
Fall knits, indie designer index, it's time to get C.R.A.F.T.M.A.T.I.C. & more
Welcome to Concorde, the Blackbird Spyplane “women’s vertical,” except it’s for everyone who is cool. Every edition is archived here.
Check Blackbird Spyplane’s list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.
The Coolest Museum Shops are here.
Erin here. Before we jump into today’s sletter, a momentous development:
The Concorde & BBSP indexes have gotten ~99.87% easier to use!
The Concorde CSI (Cute Swag Index) lists the best independent designers around, and archives everything else I’ve covered here, handily broken down by category. Same for the Blackbird Spyplane Master Jawn Index, which we created in BBSP Year One (2020). These pages are a recon-rich resource for Classified Subscribers — and they’re beasts to make and update, because it’s hard to contain the whole damn Spyplane universe.
But they just got a lot easier to navigate, thanks to a new Table of Contents feature that takes all the categories we’ve created and arranges them on the left side of the screen, so you can jump right to whatever category you’re looking for:
As seen above, if you go to either Index and click on the ruler-like markings far left, a Table of Contents box will MANIFEST with all the intel-packed sections cleanly laid out for you. 🪄
The BBSP Index includes “natural-dye slappers,” “vegan joints,” “Exquisite Gorps” and “SpyCulture”— all here.
The Concorde Cute Swag Index includes a ton of handmade accessories, footwear in every category, and a list of 60+ of the best independent designers working today, plus many others sprinkled through the other categories:
Just one of many perks behind the recon curtain.
Today we’ve got —
How going “C.R.A.F.T.M.A.T.I.C.” can help curb impulsive copping and help us understand what something’s really worth
A small made-in-NYC jewelry line that looks like alien tears on your knuckles?
Two under-the-radar unisex knitwear lines whose woolen work you should check out — including vests and a very Fall 2024-style hat that has been fire since literally the Bronze Age
We’ve written about H.O.P.E. (Hot Old-School Poet Energy) before, and it is alive this fall — in a different form. I’ve rounded up a bunch of new & vintage options.
& more !
Let’s get to it…
Since Jonah and I are Mach 3+ dope clothes appreciators constantly tempted by encounters with beautiful garments, we think a lot about Anti-Copping strategies. We’ve already devised several beautiful methods for getting out of acquisition mode and into enjoyment mode, including one in this past Tuesday’s Spyplane about trading clothes with someone for a month.
Today I’m sharing a new technique that combines the mental and the manual: C.R.A.F.T.M.A.T.I.C. (Curb Rank Acquisitive Feelings Through Making A Thing Instead of Copping).
As a lifelong crafter — one who often gets as much, if not more, pleasure from the process of crafting than from the creations that result — I find that learning how to make something can be like general anesthesia for these intrusive, consumption-driven thoughts. On some “teach a man to fish” sh*t, acquiring a new skill fills me up longer than simply copping a new thing ever will.
How far you want to take this is up to you. I’m more of a leisure-time crafter, but I respect my type As who from-scratch, e.g., their own Birkin bags and artisan Coca-Cola. And of course I salute the sewers in SpyNation who know the joy of choosing fabrics and adapting patterns to suit their tastes and fit their bodies just so. (Fashion journalist Charlie Porter recently wrote about how he makes his own custom “Chanel” jackets based on a pattern he spied in a museum.)
Recently, a friend asked me if I wanted to join her in taking a metal-casting class, and her timing was perfect. I’d been coveting a certain type of jewelry — blobby stacking rings — and the notion of making them myself hadn’t even crossed my mind.
I signed up posthaste! Which is how I found myself in a one-week intensive class, held in a community arts center in Golden Gate Park, learning how to make jewelry using the technique known as lost-wax casting. Safety goggles were involved, as was an amazing polishing gadget, below right, which shakes at different magnitudes, hence its unimprovable name: “ADJUSTA-VIBE.”
I didn’t expect mastery in one week, and indeed, one big takeaway was how much I have left to learn. I couldn’t get my wax models as thin as I wanted — they kept breaking on me — and my finished pieces (the sterling-silver rings above left) did not quite live up to the pillowy curves I had in my head, even after I spent hours hand-filing and -finishing them. This, my friends, is another reason to try and make something you’ve been tempted to buy: Shelling out for materials and then laboring over them can make you intimately familiar with why something costs what it costs.
Would I buy these exact rings in a store? Maybe not… But knowing what went into their making — 15 hours of wax-carving, metal-filing and hand-polishing, plus a few millimeters of skin from my left index finger — gave me a newfound appreciation for what it takes to make something beautiful, and for that reason alone I cherish them. Not to mention I now own two new rings that would not have existed without me. I’ve incorporated them into my daily stack, and I am not buying new jewelry anytime soon...
DESPITE the fact that I came across a small line just last week which makes a couple rings that nail the exact ovoid look I was after. And knowing what I now know firsthand about making them, mamma mia their $150 pricetag feels low!