The Power of DIY

There is a lot of power in DIY. 

One of the essential tenets of marxism is that workers are alienated from their labor. I think an essential part of our current crisis with capitalism is that this alienation goes beyond jobs. It extends to all facets of our lives. 

We are alienated from our food. Intentionally so. In many places across the US, it is illegal to grow vegetables in your front yard or to raise chickens anywhere on your property. The ability to grow your own rather than rely on a handful of megacorporations that control what food reaches your table and for how much is powerful. 

Having the space, the land, to be able to grow and control some or all of your food is a privilege. Most Americans are alienated from the land. We were not raised with respect for soil. And many of us live in apartment complexes with no place to grow our own food or flowers, let alone take off our shoes and feel the earth between our toes. When supply chain or political issues disrupt our ability to access food, where will we grow our victory gardens?

A staggering amount of Americans do not know that flour is made from wheat. Let alone how to grow, harvest, and process that wheat into flour. We have been alienated not just from controlling the basic necessities of life, but from the generational knowledge of how to live healthy lives.

This alienation extends to all facets of our lives under capitalism, including housing, medicine, clothing, basic necessities, and more. 

A powerful way to push back against capitalism and to viscerally understand the worth of goods is to make them yourself. 

The Power of Sewing

Before I became sick and could not sit upright long enough to sew, I made all of my own clothing except for sports bras, which necessitate specialized equipment. I had even started to make my own shoes. 

Being so detached from the clothing market was freeing. Clothing fit me. I didn’t have to settle for whichever poorly made garment fit the least worst. And I largely uncoupled from vanity sizing. When I enrolled in grad school, I started buying jeans again because all my me-made jeans had worn out after years of use, and I no longer had the time to make new ones. 

My first time back in a dressing room was surreal and dehumanizing. I had no idea what my size was. The fluorescent lighting was garish and seemed designed to make me feel vulnerable while tapping into the internalized fatphobia I’ve been trying to overcome. 

While doing the awkward dressing room dance of hopping on one foot as you try to put on a pair of too tight jeans in a too small space, I wondered about the workers who made them. Were they treated well and paid a living wage? What was my convenience worth? But with winter approaching, I needed jeans that weren’t worn out with holes, so I spent my money. And when I wore them for the first time? I found out that the front pockets weren’t even real. 

Sewing your own clothing can free you from the global fast fashion markets, but that doesn’t make it solely virtuous. Where did the fabric you bought come from? Was it made sustainably, in safe factories, and were the workers paid a fair wage? 

A trend among home sewers (including my past self) is to buy cheap fabric on sale and fill an entire closet or room with it as you sew more new garments than you actually need. So much waste. So much uncontrolled spending. And unfair wages being paid to the people along the supply chain who make all that $1/yd fabric. 

The other side of this is that often some of the best fabric deals are on dead stock, which is fabric that major design houses ordered too much of and would otherwise throw away. You can pick up high quality fabric from brands that fill the New York fashion week runways, saving it from landfills. Fabric that, when properly cared for, will help you make a garment that lasts years instead of the days that some fast fashion garments last before falling apart. 

Like with most DIY, sewing your own can involve a complicated set of relationships between yourself, your ideals, and global supply chains. It does not fully uncouple you from the ills of capitalism, but it can help reduce the negative impact you have on the world, especially when you choose to sew only what you need and practice more responsible buying habits like reducing the number of plastic-based fabrics you buy, shopping for dead stock, buying supplies from artisans when possible, and reducing your overall consumption.

All of these consequences of learning how to sew, understanding the process, moving away from vanity sizing, creating a better relationship with my body as I came to understand that my perceived flaws were often the result of poorly made and poorly fitting garments, all of this helped me deprogram bit by bit from capitalist and colonial ways of seeing myself and the world around me. It’s not a cureall, but it can be a powerful step along the path of liberation.

The Power of Making Cosmetics

These issues and opportunities apply to all categories of goods. A year ago, I learned how to make soap and lotion, which has further opened my eyes to the power of DIY. I now understand what exactly goes into these products and why. I no longer look down on preservatives as inherently bad. I also have a greater understanding of how different oils can help with skin conditions such as eczema. This allows me to care for my body and my loved one’s bodies better. And at a fraction of the cost of store bought goods, I can make my own higher quality versions. 

Learning how to make my own has removed the mystique from these basic necessities. I now know that soap is made through the saponification of oil with lye. That its very basic pH is an important part of what makes it antibacterial, so all the times I dumped vinegar into my laundry and onto especially greasy dishes to boost cleaning power likely had the opposite effect. This education is helping me waste fewer resources. 

For example, I used to solely use body oil rather than lotion because I was trying to avoid using multiple scary chemicals that I thought were harmful and unnecessary. This was expensive and didn’t hydrate my skin the way I was hoping. Emulsifying water and oil to create lotion creates a skincare product that is better at locking in moisture while using far less oil. The water hydrates our skin while the oil helps lock in that water. The much smaller amounts of oil in lotions can be more effective at helping skin stay hydrated than a larger amount of body oil.

Back then, I also used to look at lotion labels and scoff at how their main ingredient was water. What was I paying so much money for if the manufacturer was just going to dilute their product? But by design, everyday lotions should contain seven to nine times as much water as oil. Water as a main ingredient isn’t necessarily indicative of cheap manufacturing and swindling customers. And preservatives are very necessary because all that water is an ideal breeding ground for bacteria. Otherwise, we’d have to buy new lotion every week and store it in our refrigerators. 

Now that I know how soap and lotion are made, I use fewer resources and save money, all while decoupling from wellness industry scare tactics. 

The Power of Autonomy 

Another aspect of DIY that I appreciate is the independence it gives me during these times of political unrest and supply chain instability. At the beginning of the pandemic, while stores were sold out of hand sanitizer, they were also sold out of a lot of soaps. As long as I have some basic materials on hand, I can make my own. And since goods like lotion and liquid soap are mostly made up of water, storing enough ingredients to make a year’s supply of both soap and lotion only takes up one shelf in my supply closet. That includes a dozen bottles of various oils like macadamia nut and jojoba oil that I keep on hand to make my skincare goods more luxurious. If I pared down my supplies to just a couple of oils, a year’s supply of ingredients would take up less than one shelf. 

Am I still at the whim of supply chains and manufacturers for basic ingredients like lye, oil, and emulsifying wax? Of course. But I am vulnerable to a different part of the supply chain. Far fewer people buy lye and emulsifying wax than buy premade soap and lotion. So in a time of crisis, far fewer people will be competing for those ingredients- factories often buy their supplies from different companies than most people who make cosmetics at home, so while DIYers are not fully insulated from supply chain issues, they often do not have to directly compete with large corporations. An added bonus is that by keeping a stock of ingredients on hand, I can easily make enough to share with family and neighbors, helping to reduce multiple people’s reliance on insecure supply chains. 

DIY is far more than the gender binary stereotype of (predominantly White) women making cutesy little tchotchkes to fill their time. It empowers people with knowledge, can at times help reduce waste, and offers opportunities for community care. 

Much of modern life is shrouded in mystery. How many of us truly understand how electricity, motors, and the internet work? How many of us don’t understand how clothing, lotion, and other daily goods are made? We take these things for granted. Learning through making lets us peel back the curtain to understand and appreciate the work that goes into making our modern lives. And it can lead us to form relationships between ourselves and the components that make up our built environments. 

One of my goals is to one day make my own lye by boiling hardwood ash. How much more can I learn from that process? How much more free could I be from reliance on exploitive supply chains if I can make my own base ingredients? How much more respect will that give me for the materials involved so that I can move further away from seeing materials as soulless resources to seeing them as parts of living systems? 

DIY has the power to free us from our alienation from the world around us, as long as we’re willing to be introspective about our actions and materials.