I told myself after the write up about my Life Is Unfair sweater that I’d start writing a Substack for all of my drops. That was honestly a really lofty pursuit that just straight up wasn’t going to happen. I spent 4 or 5 consecutive days writing that first article and I’m super proud of it. I feel like I knocked it out of the park if I’m being so for real, but it set a precedent (in my head) that a post on here needed to be really grand and researched and conclusive and a bunch of other things that are great excuses to not share information about the things that I make and the things that I love, and where they intersect with each other.
When I think about it for too long, I get really in my head about the merit of explaining the things I make and love. It’s like putting out a reason for their existence opens up the possibility of breaking apart the specialness within the thing. It’s especially funny to me that I’m saying that about a sweater that is literally a company’s logo, but that’s sort of where the point, contradicting of itself, comes from. Without my intense love and history with this company I wouldn’t have bothered making the sweater. I’m only describing the platform itself when I say this and not the management and choices of its operating officers. The people in charge have made some utterly insane and lowkey evil choices before. This wiki article covers their most insane choice, to run a campaign to stalk and harass a husband and wife who were critical of the company on their blog. I actually don’t even know how to tie this together with my point, but felt like it needed to be mentioned. If making a sweater with their logo wasn’t taunting them enough, being critical of them on top of it is surely playing with fire. Anyways.
My History With eBay
For the past few years I’ve been saying my longest lasting relationships are with both eBay and YouTube. Since my discovery of them I have never in my life gone without them. I owe huge swaths of who I am today to both of them, but for the sake of brevity and continuity for the point of all this (selling eBay sweaters) we’re just going to talk about eBay in this.
My two earliest memories of eBay are tied together in my mind and I’m really not certain which came first or which years they actually happened.
The first memory is somewhere around my 9th or 10th birthday. It’s the earliest birthday I can distinctly remember what my gift was. I had begged my parents for a cellphone, as if I had anywhere to be or anyone to call/text, but the people on YouTube had Sidekicks and my brother had a Blackberry (which I only recently learned he bought himself on eBay with money earned shoveling horse poop at our neighbor’s ranch) so I had to have one too. On my birthday my dad handed me a thick stack of paper stapled together in the top corner. It was a print out of all of the eBay listings for cellphones within whatever price range he’d decided was acceptable for a 10 year old’s first phone. I don’t even remember what the phone I chose was, but that print out packet has stuck with me my whole life.
The second memory is being in the front seat of my dads car while he was driving the two of us home. It was dark out and I think we were in one of the canyons surrounding the LA area. His Blackberry got a notification and he grabbed it and started hitting buttons. At that age my little sisters and I would all make a really big fuss when he’d 1) use his phone while driving or 2) not wear his seatbelt, so I remember bugging him about it and asking what he was doing. “Sniping an eBay auction” was his reply. I obviously asked what sniping meant, and he explained that he waits to bid on auctions until there’s only a few seconds left. At that point, he throws in a bid of slightly higher increment than everyone else to make sure he is the last and highest bidder. If the print out packet has stuck with me my whole life, this moment is straight up engraved in my brain. To this day I’ve only ever put non sniping bids on things I figure no one else will want that I also would forget about if I don’t lock it in right at that moment.
eBay homepage as it was 3 days before my 9th birthday in 2008
After these two experiences I started spending a lot of time on eBay. I had no money to buy anything, but there was something about that site that constantly brought me back in. I think it might have been because everything was attainable there. Not to purchase (my mom would have taken away my computer if I asked her to buy any of the things I was searching for: airsoft guns, lighters, pocket knives, to name a few. Real 10 year old boyslop items) but to view all in one place.
Looking back on it, I find my early years on the internet to be so funny. I loved so many things that would have been so easy to research and read about if I had only possessed the knowledge and tact to google them and read peoples blogs. (I undoubtably was googling them, but I have very little recognition of taking those google searches anywhere. eBay stands out so much more to me, but maybe thats confirmation bias). Instead, I for some reason defaulted to searching those things up on eBay and using the listings as my sources of information. I would make up what I thought everything I was seeing meant. A listing of a lighter I hadn’t seen on the first page of my search for the word “lighter”? It’s super rare of course. Maybe its because I was old enough to have my own computer, but young enough to not understand that there was endless information held on other sites.
I used my dads account for all of my eBay needs through my early teen years. I would send him a listing, ask him to lowball, and give him cash if he won. It was mostly stuff like film cameras and vintage Tommy Hilfiger shirts, never more than $10 a piece.
The First Purchases of my OWN
When I was 17 I opened a bank account and the first things I did with it was join PayPal and make my own eBay account. When I started writing this I looked backed at my purchase history year by year in the app and saw my first three personal eBay purchases. They’re honestly pretty goated and still on brand for who I am today, but more so they are a reminder that I’ve always used eBay the same way. When I found something interesting and wanted to explore it myself, I would search it on eBay, the same as when I was a little kid. Now at this older age, it became a jumping off point to finding the things I’d love.
I wish the images of the listings were still there. I almost photoshopped in similar images, but that felt wrong.
Canon PowerShot SD 1000 Digital ELPH, purchased April 1st 2017
My best friend had started shooting photos on the first model of digital Ricoh GR from 2005 and his images were blowing my mind. I had already become sick of paying for film and was ready to jump ship to an old digital camera too. I remember thinking since I couldn’t afford the $100 that the Ricoh went for (RIP those prices), something from another brand of similar release year with comparable sensor specs would probably be fine. I ended up finding THE GEM of the Canon Powershot line up by searching “canon powershot” on eBay and scrolling until one looked cool. They’ve come heavily into trend in the past few years and for good reason. The body is fully metal and beautifully squared off, it’s absolutely tiny, has a built in optical viewfinder, and a 7.1mp CCD sensor that looks so creamy and dreamy at low ISO’s and really gritty and noisy at high ISO’s. These were so unbelievably under the radar at the time. I learned a lot about capturing interesting images from this camera and don’t think I would shoot my work the way I do today without the years I spent with it in my pocket.
My well worn Canon Powershot SD1000
The only images I have from this camera in it’s stock state on my hard drive.
In 2018, after getting a Ricoh GR of my own, I converted the Canon to only shoot photos in the infrared color spectrum. I’ve come to regret that. I love the infrared images I made at the time, but both street photography and infrared photography feel like a fad that I’m far over now and I just miss the creamy low ISO images I used to get. Maybe I’ll buy another, but at 10x the price I paid less than 10 years ago I’d be bitter about it.
Select images from after I converted the camera to infrared
APC Petit Standard Raw Denim, purchased April 25th 2017
This was my first time sniping on my own. I remember distinctly that as soon as I sent the bid my heart started racing and my face went flush as I waited to see if I was the highest bidder. I was. What arrived was not what I wanted. No one told me (I didn’t pay attention or even check measurements) that APC as a whole, let alone, the Petit models were slim fitting AND low rise. I had been seeing raw denim on Reddit and Heddels and took that interest straight to eBay without looking into fit/materials/brands elsewhere.
I tried them on once or twice and eventually gave them to my mom. It took me trying 5 pairs from all the usual suspects: APC, Uniqlo, Naked and Famous, Japan Blue, Levi’s (with only the Uniqlos not coming from eBay) to finally land on what I would consider my perfect denim.
All the jeans I’ve bought from eBay. The 501 Shrink to Fit are probably the only pair I’d consider good in this lineup
I had no idea at the time, but all of these purchases were an attempt to solve a problem I had with the previous pair. The APC pants were tiny, the Naked and Famous were straight leg but too light weight, the Japan Blue were heavy enough in weight but too slim, the Student Levi’s were actually just an epic fail and didn’t fit, the Levi’s 501 Shrink to fit were perfect (at the time).
Without those 3 years of denim purchases, I never would have landed on what became my truly unbelievably perfect in every single way Lyle McGraw jeans that I wear everyday without fail.
Lyle McGraw Jeans. March 29th 2024 vs February 26th 2026
TEFLON LOW SHANK FOOT FOR LEATHER VINYL PLASTIC GOODS, purchased July 25th 2017
This was my first introduction into using specialized tools for specific jobs. I had wanted to make handbags from marine vinyl after watching hours upon hours of upholstery videos on YouTube. I learned that the proper foot on a sewing machine could make the difference between usable stitches and total hogwash. The teflon foot makes it so that the surface making contact with your project is slick enough that the sturdy and sticky materials can move through without getting caught up by friction.
The exact Teflon foot I bought in that screenshot.
Me in 2017 wearing a marine vinyl bag I sewed with the teflon foot.
From then on I knew any tool I needed for my current obsessive hobbies could be found on eBay. I’m at a point now where I’ve mostly amassed the tools I use on a daily basis and haven’t had to buy anything in a while. I compiled a handful of important tool purchases in the image below. These serve as almost direct markers of my path from some kid messing around to the adult I am making the things I make today.
Tools that changed my life. I still use the label printer every week.
Those same tools today
There’s a longer story here about how falling in love with sewing brought me to New York, falling out of love with sewing brought me to making rugs, and finally falling out of love with making rugs brought me to knitting. I reckon that at this point I’ll never fall out of love with knitting, thankfully (if anyone is interested I am willing to write out my whole career timeline, but I mostly cover it in this hypebeast article).
I think the point I’m trying to get at here is that while these first 3 purchases aren’t anything insane, they do serve as a time capsule of who I was and what I was into during those formative years that have become a foundation for who I am today. At 17 I was already approaching all my hobbies and interests in what is now at 26 my baseline for everything. So much of my direction in life has come from my eBay searches.
To this day I gain more insight and direction about knitwear from having “handmade knit sweater” saved as a search term than I do from reading my knitting books (that I’ve mostly collected from eBay, of course).
If you can’t get the inspiration to make an amazing garment from something in these listings, then you’re just not even trying
This is for real what scrolling eBay feels like
Anyways, this feels like its lacking the conciseness and heavy hit I really thought it would have. I don’t think I’ve even come close to summing up what eBay means to me, but thats ok. Maybe that whole thing I said in the beginning about losing the specialness of something by explaining it is true here. If I could boil down my feelings about eBay to just a few sentences then maybe it isn’t that special to me. Or, I’m just not a great writer and am having trouble forcing myself to sit and write this instead of knitting.
If I don’t finish this and send it out right now, I probably never will and that’s honestly LAME of me. It’s a fucking Substack, not a publishing house funded memoir, and the only person who actually gives a hoot is me. To that end, I’m finishing this off with the two most ridiculous purchases on my whole account.
Questionable Purchases
DO NOT ORDER THE EBAY KRATOM. I REPEAT, DO NOT ORDER THE EBAY KRATOM. DO NOT TOUCH THE KRATOM AT ALL.
I have to say from the bottom of my heart that I have never bought followers for my own Instagram account, but I must admit that I did buy my girlfriends little sister followers for her slime account. I also bought followers for the most lowkey friend in our friend group, and told them it must be because they were on the Brazilian explore page (they quickly privated their account and individually blocked each follower I gave them).
everyone else shut up! a real thinker is typing
Those early days of eBay were wonderful. Family story about the menu from a Cape Cod restaurant and a sniping failure is told every year.