Dirt cheap crafty bitch

Autumn-and-broke-Berlin, like, AGAIN. I spent a bit of time being down on myself about it, feeling shit about it, wondering how it was that I came to be in the same city in the same dire financial situation a whole year later, after being in so many other cities and so many other financial situations in between. Wondering where I went wrong, why every single one of my 'get a life & a job & some cash' plans sank with the summer sun, again. Watching the cold-and-rain set in with leaking boots and not enough warm clothes, again. But as much as it's doubly depressing to be here (AGAIN) it's twice as easy to yank myself out of the depression (again) because I know I got past it last time, and I'll get past it again.

And meanwhile, the cold sets in and the craft-urge twitches itself awake, but whoa, wait a second, crafting is expensive! Yarn costs a shitload of money! What's a flat-broke crafter to do?

Recycle yarn, of course! The freeboxes* of this city are brim-full of gigantic, heinous, lumpy wool sweaters and scarves made from a fuck-ton of lovely, salvageable yarn. The bigger & lumpier the original garment, the better- the more likely you are to be able to harvest satisfyingly huge skeins of unbroken wool from them. The other day I pulled apart a 3 meter pink scarf into a ball of unbroken wool the size of a soccer-ball.

I use the recycled wool to make hats (with button-on beards, and ears, and ear-flaps, and sometimes with the faces of brain-eating monsters), and sometimes I even manage to sell those hats, which improves my financial situation in tiny increments. I don't recommend crafting to anybody as a primary way to support yourself, unless you're for some reason happy to value your labour at a couple of euros an hour, but as a way to edge through the tight bits (one hat sold= the groceries, in some hungry weeks), it doesn't suck too bad.

Mostly though it thrills me that I don't need to give up crafting just cos I run out of cash. Where there is a willingness and the patience to unpick, there is always a way to craft.

*Freebox: the shelf, messy corner, or literal box in a squat, housing project or WG where people dump their no-longer-loved clothes, shoes etc to be picked over by other people who may love them. Or destroy them and make hats out of them. Like a charity shop, but free-er and a fuckload less jesus-y.