I recently met with Will Lisak from Etwas Bags, and liked what he had to say a lot.
This from the blog:
…we see the same in the leavings of our skivers and edgers. What is left behind should be beautiful and graceful, the sign of a confident and competent hand.
I think this kind of language in the leavings it an important thing to consider in broader life as well, you can tell a great deal about people and organizations from the forms of their excess, what is left as a result of their functioning.
It seems worth reflecting, as well, on what the leavings of education might look like. Not to mention what an education would look like that engaged in these deeper understandings of work and craft.
Read more from Etwas, and see their gorgeous work here:
using leavings has a long tradition in craft work- quilts made from used shirts for instance. And knitters are always grateful for a project that allows them to use scraps from past projects. We tell stories about the lineage of our projects- this color came from the leavings of that other project and this color was bought with Ruth that weekend when we did x or y or z.
and as for education, aren’t we ourselves the leavings of that process? the ones who don’t fit, whose path is crooked and off kilter?
Yes, it’s interesting to reflect on the difference between “product” and “leavings”. The line gets blurry. Which can be sad, but it also can be productive, which speaks to your point about knitters. And I think Etwas is also looking at these things as significant, in the broad sense of the word. We can learn something from them.
I’m actually in the process of thinking through the interesting dynamics involved in printing and in walking. Plato talks about following the tracks or footprints of an argument. The philosopher is a tracker.
Shoes, have their leavings, both in production and in the marks they make. But in many ways we could think of the shoes themselves as the leaving that mark the loss of a richer sensory relationship to our contact with the ground. They are a byproduct of the creation of a particular relationship to movement and knowledge, among other things.
As always, the question is what do we do with these leavings…