Radical Cross Stitch

A little while ago I mentioned a new project that was about to begin at Radical Cross Stitch and now it’s time to share it with you all.

The Fabric of Resistance project has been started as a way of recording, archiving and celebrating the awesome herstory of craft based resistance. Originally I was just planning on running a series of profiles of activists, activist groups and campaigns but the more I thought about it the more it make sense to set it up as a wiki.

So http://radicalcrossstitch.com/wiki is the new home of the Fabric of Resistance project. There is only the bare bones of the project up at the moment but I figured now was a good a time as any to bring others on board if they were keen to help out.

I’m about to start building a task list in the community portal so if you’re keen to help, that’s probably a good place to start looking.

But the major piece of help I need is getting the word out there, which is where you come in!

We need this message to go out far and wide to uncover and collect our radical craft past and present. Please write about this on your blogs and tell your friends, activist groups, craft groups, women’s studies departments, grandmothers, customers, anyone you can think of. I’ve drafted a general email below, but feel free to add your own bits.

And have a look around! There’s not much there yet but I’ll be adding a lot more content over the next couple of weeks. And of course, you should too!

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Please help spread the word

The Radical Cross Stitch Posse are proud to announce the arrival of their new baby. Out of the clicks of the needles and the desire to celebrate our wonderful creative communities and internet archive of the herstory of radical craft has been born.

The Fabric of Resistance is a non-heirarchical community created archive and celebration of radical craft action and organisation, past and present. The wiki style archive has been established as a resource for radical craft practitioners, historians, students. Fabric of Resistance is a tribute to the creative resistance which is often marginalised by both crafters and activists, yet has provided the visionary spark for great uprisings, revolutions and major social change

So we have started this wiki as a public archive of profiles of activists who use(d) craft as a way of communicating their ideas, resistance and vision. And at some point in the future, all these stories will be collated into a book.

This wiki is a constant work in progress. So this is a call out is for the stories of women and men you know in your community who use craft as a form of resistance.

Please add your stories, preferably with images. We want to know names, dates and issues. But we’re especially interested in the stories behind the work. Tell us about the design processes as well as the creation process. If you want help with questions to ask people let us 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, add it in because it might be a good lead for some else to follow up on.

Finally, please pass this information on to people you know who might want to help collect these stories. We need this call out to go as far and wide as possible.

Love and rage and solidarity

http://radicalcrossstitch.com/wiki