Knitlandia

by Clara Parkes

  My new class, which I’d privately nicknamed “Hoarders: The Knitting Edition,” would be called “Stashbusting.” In seven fifteen-minute video lessons filmed over the course of three days, I would gently hold people’s hands as they faced their excesses and let go. We would get organized, tackle unfinished projects, identify oddballs, and use up precious leftovers in several stash-busting projects before putting everything away for safekeeping.

  It was midday when my plane landed in a bleak Siberian landscape of drifting snow, Denver having just gotten its first dusting of the season. Luckily, Craftsy sends a driver to meet you at the airport and get you safely to your hotel. My driver was John, a man who wore a leather bomber jacket, had a rattling smoker’s cough, and enjoyed talking about weather patterns.

  Accustomed to shuffling Craftsy teachers back and forth each week, John asked what I was teaching. I explained the concept of my class to him, and he nodded sagely. “Inventory management,” he said.

  A flashy new hotel had been built since my last visit, and Craftsy had booked it for my stay. The lobby looked like the set of a 1960s game show, with brightly colored swiveling pod chairs and glowing orbs suspended from the ceiling. Behind the front desk, someone was playing with a yo-yo. Each floor had been given its own theme (One-Hit Wonders, Big Hair, Mad About Music, etc.) complete with a jingle that played when you got off the elevator. I was on the Dance Floor. My room had a massive print of a woman wearing an ice-cream cone on her head.

  Next door, the Nutcracker matinee was just getting out at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Families were streaming by in their holiday finest, girls with ribbons in their hair, little boys in suits. The sun was setting as I slurped my requisite bowl of pho at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, washing it down with a cherry lollipop on my way back to the hotel. By 9:00 PM, downtown Denver was a ghost town.

  The next morning at 7:30 AM sharp, moderately rested and fully breakfasted, I met two other women in the lobby. We were all strangers to one another, but they were here to teach fabric-related classes. We were retrieved by a tiny, sweet-voiced makeup artist named Danica, whose claim to fame is that her brushes have touched both President Obama and Tyra Banks. Her car would carry us to the Craftsy studio.

  It’s hard to believe that this vaunted hub for online craft learning was founded by four guys who’ve never knit or sewn a stitch. John Levisay and Josh Scott met at eBay, where they worked together managing the resale of cars and industrial equipment. In 2010, along with buddies Todd Tobin and Bret Hanna, both ServiceMagic alums, they raised around $6 million in venture capital to launch a new e-school platform called Sympoz, Inc. Their idea was to offer online classes on “serious” subjects like finance, wine appreciation, and preparing for fatherhood. They added a beginner quilting class and were surprised when it sold three times faster than the others. Smart enough to perceive a trend, they promptly nabbed an additional $15 million in venture capital and spun off a vertical unit, called Craftsy, that would focus on providing high-quality classes on “crafty” topics like quilting, knitting, and cake decorating. By 2013, Craftsy was bringing in $23 million in revenue. It’s easy to make sweeping gender generalizations about the target audience, and even harder to refute them: The majority of Craftsy students are women.

  Since my first visit, the company had swelled to 200 employees. News was buzzing about a fresh $50 million they were getting from a new investor. It meant they would soon be hiring seventy more people. Knitting, quilting, and cake decorating remained the core subjects, with a recent management directive to launch one new class per week in each of those subjects. Meanwhile, they were also feeding a healthy base of classes on other subjects, from cooking and photography to woodworking, gardening, and jewelry-making.

  Such growth meant I wasn’t the only one filming a workshop that week. As Danica drove, I learned more about my fellow teachers. Riding shotgun with Danica was the self-titled minister of corrections at the Chicago School of Fusing, here to teach a class on something she called “fusible collage.” Sitting in back with me was a widowed and soon-to-be-grandmother quilter from Utah, here to present a class based on one of her popular quilted pillow patterns. A busy staff of Craftsy acquisitions editors constantly seeks out new talent to bring into town and capture on screen.

  Just a minute or two beyond downtown in an otherwise flat, industrial area, we crossed over a river packed with geese. Like sailboats, they all pointed upwind against the current. A few seconds later we pulled into the parking lot.

  Craftsy films its workshops at Taxi, a 25,000 square-foot cinderblock building that used to house Yellow Cab. From the outside, it still looks like the kind of place where you’d see a Danny DeVito type yelling orders from his dispatcher’s cage. Inside, the cars have been replaced by offices, of which Craftsy rents a corner for its studio. Everything is filmed here, but the remaining work—turning videos into classes, then selling and supporting them—takes place at corporate headquarters downtown.

  I was pointed to an empty dressing room with a slate star on the door, on which my name had been written. Beyond my dressing room, an art studio stood empty, its cloudy faux-garret windows evoking a gritty urban artist’s space. The last time I was here, a man from Philadelphia was filming a drawing class in that studio. I remember getting out of my shoot just in time to catch his crew presenting him with a big chocolate birthday cake, candles and all.

  In the hallway, prop shelves held Styrofoam heads and posable mannequins, cans of fixative and spray starch, and endless plastic boxes of fabric and yarns and gadgets that’d come in handy for one of the 600-plus classes filmed here since the beginning. The cinderblock hallway was lined in eggshell foam to cushion ambient noise.

  The studio where I would film my class was still quiet, just a jumble of lights, cameras, and assorted props. Perched on a director’s chair with her tea and her iPhone was my producer, Cara. She’d recently left Craftsy to follow her ceramics-professor boyfriend to Nebraska and work on her real passion, which was writing screenplays. But every few weeks, she’d make the eight-hour drive back to Denver to produce classes as a freelancer. People kept coming in and giving her hugs.

  The studio is set up so that you stand at a table with a camera directly in front of you, a second camera to the side (for swoop-ins and “Oh, I didn’t see you there!” greetings to your imaginary students), and a third camera overhead to capture your hands working stitches or pointing, oh so elegantly, at something on the table. A microphone is pinned somewhere on your front, with a cord discretely running down your back to a transmitter clipped to your waist or tucked into a pocket.

  Your producer sits behind the main camera, observing everything as it happens. Her job is to keep you on track, making sure you follow the course outline and touch on all the previously agreed-upon points—without saying or doing anything wrong.

  Seated at a table behind the producer is the switcher. This person is tasked with watching the feeds from each camera and seamlessly switching from feed to feed, angle to angle, as the class unfolds. Doing this now helps speed up the after-shoot production work, which, in turn, helps Craftsy achieve that ambitious weekly class launch schedule. My switcher, Andrew, wandered in. This bearded musician and composer had shot my last class and, in his spare time, performs in a band called Skein.

  At last, a tall, smiling scarecrow of a man came in and introduced himself as Rob. Our cameraman, he had moved here from California with his wife and occasionally played what he called “heavy cello” for Skein. They were all friends, and they all had interesting hobbies. In fact, spend any time at the Craftsy studios and you’ll quickly see that everyone here has another passion, be it writing or acting, storytelling or stand-up comedy. For me, it was like a reunion with people I loved in high school drama club. “So this is where they all ended up!” I thought.

  After a quick visit to Danica’s room to have years of fatigue and exasperation wiped from my face, it was time to set up the studio and lay down o
ur first class. Only it’s not a class, it’s a lesson. Craftsy has its own jargon that corresponds to an underlying technology platform that is powerful but inflexible.

  The Craftsy format keeps shifting, but as of this writing, one class is composed of seven lessons, each approximately fifteen to twenty minutes long. While the class can theoretically be played like a movie, chapter by chapter, from start to finish, students often pop in and out of lessons in random order. Because of this, you’re discouraged from making any linear references, like “coming up!” or “in our last lesson,” when you speak. You’ll get a raised hand from your producer, which is Craftsy talk for “CUT!”

  Cara and I went over the premise for the first lesson, the key points I was to convey. Normally, you begin with the second lesson and only film the first when you’ve found your pace, but we decided to be bold and start at the beginning. I pointed myself to one camera, then another. I posed my hands in front of me to make sure they were framed properly by the camera above my head. We repeated this until all the important shots were framed just right.

  “Just try not to flail your hands,” were the instructions. “We’re getting a glare from your glasses, could you tuck your head down just a little?” “Can you move an inch to the right?” “Your hair is touching the microphone, can you keep it off your shoulder?” “Make sure the yarn doesn’t go beyond this mark or else it’ll be out of the frame.” And, of course, “Smile! Relax!” I could feel a trickle of sweat run down my back.

  With those instructions and a dozen more, and with a brain full of words I needed to convey in precise order, we gave it a try.

  In addition to standing one inch to the right of the transparent piece of tape on the table, while keeping my head tucked down just a little and not moving my hands in any flail-like manner, I also had to say, in an impromptu-styled conversational tone, three precise takeaways that people would learn from that workshop, only it wasn’t called a workshop, it was called a class, and each class had lessons, and I found it all impossible to keep straight. “In this workshop,” I began my introduction, “I’m going to teach you how to sort, weed, and prune your stash until only—”

  My producer raised her hand. “I’m sorry but you said ‘in this workshop’ when it’s really ‘in this class,’ can we try again?” I tried again, but this time I got the raised hand for saying “Coming up next” instead of “In Lesson Two.”

  During a brief break, I was asked a question that would be repeated at least every hour during my stay: “Are you drinking enough water?”

  That is the most important question for anyone visiting Denver, whether you’re there to shoot a Craftsy class or just twiddle your thumbs in a hotel room. Here in the mile-high city, altitude is your invisible foe. The air is so much thinner and drier that visitors are instructed to drink twice as much water as they would back home.

  With its weekly influx of teachers flying in from elsewhere, Craftsy takes the water prescription very seriously. I was told of a teacher who forgot to drink for a day and ended up in the hospital. And so, between takes, I pulled out a water bottle and sipped from a straw so as not to mar the thick paste of pink lipstick on my mouth.

  Lunches are a communal affair at Craftsy. Each day, food is trucked in from an area restaurant—and each day, the restaurant changes. One day it might be a selection of funky salads, the next day, a pasta bar, or thick sandwiches with layers of strange and delicious ingredients. Meals are set out on a table in the Craftsy kitchen and everyone gets to pick what they want.

  The Craftsy kitchen is stocked as if by a nine-year-old given a credit card and set free in Whole Foods. I found chocolate-covered bananas, peanuts, apricots, and raisins; bags of plain and peanut M&Ms; every kind of granola bar and chewy chocolate-caramel bar; tidy wrapped squares of Ghirardelli chocolate; snack bags of gourmet chips and popcorn; and a drink machine that spat out bottles for free. You just pushed a button for whatever you wanted and it came tumbling out. The drinks were mostly naturally sweetened, vitamin-infused pink or yellow “health waters,” but garbage could still be found. When we came up one lunch short, Andrew insisted on foraging. “I’ll just put together a little charcuterie plate,” he said. It was, on closer examination, two packages of string cheese, a handful of pretzels, a few stubby Slim Jims, and a side bowl of popcorn.

  We carried our food out to the communal dining area in the open corridor running the length of the building. Everyone at the Craftsy studios eats together at a big colorful table here. More tables are claimed by tenants from other offices. We sat down with my Utah quilter, her producer, and her crew and compared notes on our morning shoots. Occasionally, we’d laugh too loud and someone would tiptoe out of a nearby Craftsy studio to shush us.

  We made it through four lessons that day, which was a record both for me and the crew. The next day was a repeat of the previous one, the 7:30 AM wake-up call, Danica and the others in the lobby, light chatter in the car. This time my crew and I hit our pace and managed to end early in the afternoon, which—despite the increasingly sped-up pace of things at Craftsy—was still uncommon. I overheard Cara telling this to others (coming in to give her more hugs) and there was always a pause then a “Really?”

  I worried that our speedy shoot was actually a bad sign, that I’d been too sloppy or skipped essential points, but Cara’s outline was covered with checkmarks, so I had to trust.

  Our early dismissal gave Andrew plenty of time to get to his young daughter’s trombone recital, while Rob could clean his cameras and dismantle the equipment in preparation for his next shoot. The crew never rests. Tomorrow, they would be shaking hands with a new teacher. As for me, I repacked my samples, folded up all my clothes, and gave a parting glance to my perfect, painted face in the mirror. I would scrub it off later that night.

  It’s hard not to be swept up into a sense of stardom when you’re at Craftsy, with that limo at the airport, the star on your dressing-room door, being tended to by a makeup artist, having someone fuss over your lighting and microphone. It’s very, very easy to forget why you’re there: to teach.

  You want to be engaging and entertaining while you do it, but you’re there to convey carefully organized facts about which you are a presumed expert. As much as it’s helpful to smile as you deliver a flub-free speech, what you say must follow a very specific predetermined outline and deliver key promised learning objectives.

  For weeks leading up to the shoot, teachers work with a producer to fine-tune their workshops (dammit, not workshops, classes) until they fit the organizational constraints of the Craftsy platform hand in glove. Your subject needs to fit into a predetermined number of lessons, each lesson needing to fill a specific number of minutes, and each lesson needs to satisfy three specific learning objectives. Once you’re in the studio and the cameras are rolling, you have to follow that outline, point by point, without running over or under. The clock is ticking, and when your time is up, your crew is immediately due elsewhere.

  Producers are not—and cannot possibly be expected to be—experts in every subject they oversee. And here’s where the Craftsy method may have one flaw. As a teacher, without students to nod or shake their heads and ask questions, and with the added pressure of bright lights and keeping your head down and not flubbing your so-called lines, it’s a challenge to stay focused and feel confident you’re doing a good job. And when a producer says, “That looked good to me,” they may be talking about certain mechanics and not about what the class itself really needs.

  The first time I was at Craftsy, I was lucky to be paired with a producer who was a knitter. This time, help came in the form of my switcher Andrew. If you hadn’t guessed from the name of his band, Andrew is an avid knitter. Between shots, he’d come over with a skein and ask me questions about it. After a tricky shot, where I tried to explain how to work a triangle-shaped stashbuster shawl from the top down, he shook his head at the producer’s thumbs-up, and we reshot, several times, until it made sense to him. Which definitely
made the class better. (As a thank-you, I left him with a skein of Artyarns silk and mohair so he could make a similar shawl for his mother-in-law.)

  Maybe I’m overthinking things. For the thousands of students who may register for a single class, only a small percentage actually completes them. Like cookbooks and gym memberships, class purchases tend to be aspirational. A class can have six or seven thousand registered students and only a few dozen actively posting in the discussion area or leaving questions for the teacher.

  Having finished a whole day early, I thought it only fair to visit Craftsy headquarters, especially since they were just a few blocks from my hotel. The corporate offices occupied most of the second floor of a shiny skyscraper connected by covered walkway to the Ritz-Carlton. If the studio was filled with the drama-club people, the offices were where everyone else in high school had ended up—jocks and geeks and cheerleaders alike.

  It was like a film set for an Internet start-up. The open space had acres of long white tables divided by low frosted-glass panels to give a vague illusion of privacy. People sprawled on plush Scandinavian-style chairs and couches in a dimly lit “Relaxation Lounge,” each face illuminated by the glowing screen of a MacBook. Meeting rooms had glass walls. The only privacy was in little phone closets tucked around the floor, but even those had large windows and dubious soundproofing. As if following my thoughts, many people sported some form of noise-cancelling earphones. With few exceptions, they all seemed to be millennials.

  I passed a woman, seated with her back to me, who was staring at two screens where the “me” from yesterday was talking. She was editing my class. I tapped her on the shoulder. “Boo!” After filming is complete, they move through production quickly, finishing the bulk of it by the end of the week. Next comes graphics and illustrations, the opening music and voiceover introduction. While the marketing and publicity departments begin their work, other staff goes in, watches the class, and populates the platform with “seed questions,” designed to make it feel active. I, in turn, go in and answer the questions to encourage discussion among students.