After producing tens of thousands of French knots over several years, many of my friends began to take notice. Rather than questioning my sanity for this undertaking, some of them began requesting French knots—stitched by me—to call their own. One friend in particular absolutely begged for just one perfect French knot that she could hang in her sewing nook to gaze at every day as inspiration. I was happy to oblige, but am incapable of stopping stitching with just a single knot, so instead made 250 knots—about an hour of work—in her favorite colors. I shipped the knots to her and she—in gratitude—sent me four quarts of homemade pickles. She is to pickles as I am to French knots: she makes way more of them than any one person really should, and they are as close to perfect as they can be.
That pickles-for-knots trade was a EUREKA!! moment for me. Embodied in that one trade was everything I had been trying to say with my knots: that they are valid and valuable; that the product of the hand has worth; and that the product of my hands has an equivalent product value produced by another’s hand. Essentially, my French knots became a basic trade commodity. Every accumulation of knots I produced could be assigned a trade value as an alternative to the standard pricing scheme of US currency.
Jeana Eve Klein 