Creativity 350
Oh I’ve been meaning to post this for ages but I’ve been too busy finished a Free Tibet X Stitch (and just wait til you see this entry I got yesterday!). So now that competition is drawing to a close, here’s a new one for you to enter!
The clever crew at Craftster have teamed up with 350.org to run a craft competition AND a tshirt design competition to help build awareness about the global environmental crisis that we seem to be doing our best to avoid dealing with.
Entries all need to be based around the magic number 350. Do you know what that mean? If not, get informed quick!
And they’ve got a ton of ace prizes that you can win.
So get on over and check it all out. Entries need to be completed and submitted by the 15th of August.
For the geek in me
Lately I haven’t been doing so much politically inclined crafting. Instead I’ve entertained my inner geek with an enormous cross stitch I’ve been wanting to make for a couple of years. The thought of the amount of time it would take to finish has put me off, but finally it’s done!
A cross stitch of an entire map from Super Mario Bros 3!
And a few close-ups:
It took about three months to finish, and since I was in between jobs for most of those months I had lots and lots of spare time to work on it. Finished size 28 x 34 cm (with about 50 000 stitches…).
Now I want to make the “Zelda – a link to the past” world map! But maybe that would be taking on too much?
New Patterns!
It’s been a wee while, so here comes some patterns!
One is free and one is for sale and they’re both quite different.
This first one I designed with my little girls bedroom wall in mind and it’s for all of you out there with a bit of anarchist in you.
You can purchase this pattern in the Radical Rags Etsy Store here.
The second one I made while playing with ideas for the Free Tibet XStitch Competition. I decided to do something different, and I doubt I’ll ever get around to stitching this. But I’d love it if someone else did!
Unfortunately I neglected to keep a shot of it in its entirety so you will have to download the pdf to see the actual pattern. But it’s the following quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama from the 1989 Nobel Lecture:
Because we all share this small planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. That is not just a dream, but a necessity.
Pattern download here
5 Days To Go!
Yes everyone, 5 days until the end of the Free Tibet X Stitch Competition!
I’m furiously stitching trying to finish my design (which is obviously not eligible for prizes..) so I hope everyone else’s designs are going well!
I’ve been coming up with some plans on what to do with entries too. You’ll have to wait though..
Yay looking forward to seeing your entries!
Rebirth Tribute Craft
Mate, you should’ve seen my inbox this morning. It was an insane burst of creative inspiration. Quite phenomenal.
One of the emails was from George saying ‘woah check this out’
Believe it or not this is a bike taxi. It’s the creation of the super super genius goddess Mimosa Palen of Finland and it’s called the “Mobile Female Monument”.
I don’t think I have enough superlatives to describe how amazing I think this is!
It was created as a graphic demonstration against the phallocentricity of our world. And I think that riding it around an urban environment is a perfect way to demonstrate. I want one.
But this isn’t the only giant vulva art floating around the interwebby at the moment. The Ninja drew this one to my attention the other day.
It’s the genius work of the mum of craftster user cardigan. Her mum is an art student and made it for class. Sounds like everyone had an awesome time being ‘born’ into their class room!
I’ve always wanted to make something like this but I’ve never managed to have the skills or time. He he, now I don’t have to, I can just look at other peoples!
People like you just fuel my fire
Okay, so I know I shouldn’t let jerks like Steven Wells (that Kakariki mentioned in her latest post) piss me off as much as they do, but I just couldn’t help myself. It is probably stupid to give him the attention he so obviously craves, by letting his sexist punk scene rambles annoy me. But since I am one of those humorless feminist crafters that he’s so intimidated by, and I had some time to spend stitching yesterday, I decided to make him a little present. Think I’m gonna send it to him together with a copy of the SCUM manifesto.
The Fabric of Resistance
This is the 500th post for Radical Cross Stitch!*
So to celebrate, I want to announce a new project that I need your help on.
One of the things that has become very clear to me in doing and talking to other people about radical craft is that political and radical craft is far from a new idea. What is also clear to me is that this amazing herstory is way too absent from history books. It seems that even feminist political action herstory books marginalise the art and creative responses to political issues.
Which means we get bullshit stories like this one from Steven Wells at The Guardian. Sorry, Steven, if you think punk invented diy and grassroots resistance and defiance, then you are sadly, sadly mistaken.
So I’m going to start a series of profiles of women activists who use craft as a way of communicating their ideas, resistance and vision. And hopefully at some point in the future, I’ll be able to collate these stories into a book.
This first post I want to start as a tribute not to any woman in particular, but a large group of women. In the 80s and 90s thousands of women participated in one of the largest and longest events of creative resistance in history. The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp ran for 19 years as a creative opposition to the military industrial complex.
The Greenham women danced, sang, shouted, cried, dressed up, knitted, painted, had babies, got arrested (many, many times), cut fences, wove webs, breastfed, wrote stories and provoked debate. And more than anything, they gave us a vision of a world of peace.
I urge you to check out this absolutely fantastic website that has been put together to archive and commemorate the 19 years of creative resistance. There is a wealth of information on that site and you could spend hours looking at it all. I will recommend if there’s only one thing you look at, make it the Fabric of Greenham video. Such a beautiful video, it brought tears to my eyes.
So my call out is for the stories of women you know in your community who use craft as a form of resistance. I’m planning on using this site as a searchable archive, but I also want to put as much information as I can into public repositories of knowledge, such as archive.org and wikipedia.org If you would like to help with this aspect of the project please get in touch.
Please email me your stories, preferably with images. I want to know names, dates and issues. But I’m especially interested in the stories behind the work. I want to know about the design processes as well as the creation process. If you want help with questions to ask people let me know.
And please don’t hold back because you think some information you have is not significant enough. Even if you just remember someone’s name from some protest back in the day, let me know because it might be a good lead for me to follow up on.
Finally, please pass this information on to people you know who might want to help collect these stories. I want this call out to go as far and wide as possible.
Love and rage
kakariki at radicalcrossstitch dot com
*Some of those posts are from the previous manifestations of this site. But those were culled quite significantly when I moved it all over.
Happy Solstice
The only way is up! baby!
Spread the [Love] Money pt 2
A year ago I took some of the profits earned by selling my recycled clothing crafts and made a Kiva microcredit loan. I figured I should put my money where my mouth is and support someone doing ace crafty stuff and trying to make a money out of it, in another part of the world. Obviously it’s a bit hard for me to cruise down to a market in Mexico, so instead, I made a microcredit loan to a woman called Maria.
Maria is an amazing embroiderer and needed some start up capital to buy some supplies so she could make some of her amazing clothes to sell to tourists. This photo shows Maria and some of her amazing work.
So 12 months down the track, Maria has paid back her loan and I’m reinvesting the money.
This time I decided to go a bit closer to home and find someone I could support in the Pacific Islands. I found a woman called Janet who is from Samoa. Janet is a printmaker and uses the traditional elei style printing. Janet wants to turn what has been a hobby into a business. And she had such a cool tshirt, I had to pick her!
So hopefully my loan will help her. At the time of posting, Janet needs another US$250 for her loan. So please consider supporting her.
This is called Mutual Aid. Not Colonial Aid. Not Corrupt Government Aid. Not Missionary Aid. Not Celebrity Ego Enhancing Aid. Rather, Actual Aid.
So 12 months ago I said I’d find another Maria. This time I’ll say that in 12 months time, I’ll find another Janet.