Applebaum has also started to drift from knit pieces like this one, which she makes on a machine in her studio. “Living in San Francisco, there are lots of anchors as monuments to something down by the water," she says. "I made this right when the economy tanked, when we saw that cultural shift away from bling bling and Paris Hilton, and people were realizing they couldn’t aspire to that lifestyle anymore. For me it was like, instead of striving to be at the top, what if you got comfortable being at the bottom? The anchor represents something that’s always at the bottom.”