RADICALCROSSSTITCH

Help Uncle Kev

Ok folks. Put your hands in your pockets. Uncle Kevin Buzzacott (Aboriginal Elder/Activist) needs money for a big operation soon. You can donate by buying his track “Rok Hop”. He needs your money quick, so dig deep folks and follow the link. You can donate as much as you want.

You can also buy one of my cross stitch patterns from the Radical Rags shop.  100% of proceeds between now and the end of Jan straight to Uncle Kev.

Uncle Kev is one of the most inspiring, endearing, radical and deadly funny elders in the movement to protect country.  The irony that a man who’s spent so many decades fighting uranium mining is now needing treatment for cancer is not lost on any of us.  Please give back to a man who has given so much.

Fence Stitch Tutorial

THE RADICAL CROSS STITCH GUIDE TO FENCE STITCHING

In collaboration with the realestate4ransom prankster campaign against the rampant land speculation plaguing Melbourne’s suburbs, Radical Cross Stitch and the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle invite you to engage in a small piece of community beautification. This post is all about the how – make sure you read all about the why before you begin.

The following document contains full instructions on how to cross stitch a dollar sign on your favourite local block of vacant land.

Materials:

x Red wool – can be obtained from your local op shop, your own craft stash or raid someone else’s
x Time
x A fence with either diamond or square grid on a block of vacant land
x A friend or two – ‘cause these things are always more fun with mates

Part A: Finger Knitting

Step 1: Tie your wool in a loose loop around your index finger

Step 2: Swing knot around to the back of your index finger then loosely loop wool round your middle finger.

Step 3: Bring wool round the back of your hand and from left to right, wrap over the front of your fingers above the existing loops.

Step 4: Take hold of original loop on your index finger and pull it over the second loop and over your finger and release.  You’ll need to bend your finger down to get it over easily.  The first one might be a bit tight if your original loop wasn’t loose enough.  Don’t worry this is normal and won’t happen on the rest of them.

Step 5: Repeat step 4 for the loop on your middle finger.  Will look like this when finished.

Step 6: Take hold of loose wool and wrap around your hand counter clockwise, ensuring the new wool sits above the old wool looped on your fingers.

Step 7: Repeat steps 4-6

Step 8: After about 7-10 rounds a ‘snake’ of knitted wool will be forming behind your hand.  Pull on this snake to lengthen and tighten it.

And that’s it!

Now time to keep knitting.  You’ll need about 10 metres for this project.  Once you have about 5 metres of knitted wool, cut the wool and tie it round your finger knitting to knot it.  Don’t worry about this looking too attractive; it’ll get chopped off during the fence stitching process.

Part B: Fence Stitching

Now these photos aren’t as sexy due to the whole night time installation aspect of this kind of thing.  Turns out my camera doesn’t like taking close shots of bright red wool at night with a flash… But you’ll get the drift.

This tutorial is based on a stitch done on a diamond shaped chain link fence.  If you’ve struck gold and found a square grid fence, the directions will be slightly different.  I’ve italicised the extra bits.

Step 1: Figure out where you’re going to start.  You want your stitching to be nicely centred.  Don’t rush this process!  Count it a couple of times if you need to.  Make sure your design has enough room without running into the edge of the fence, or into a broken bit of fence.

Step 2: Tie the end of your wool onto the fence onto the left corner of the diamond or bottom left corner of the square. Don’t worry about the hanging end bit of wool, you can tidy these all off at the end.  But ensure it’s tightly secured so it doesn’t come off!

Step 3: pull your wool straight across the diamond and through the next diamond.  Pass the wool behind and down to the diamond below. Gee that’s kinda hard to explain – look at the picture! For square grids you’ll go diagonally up and then down.

Step 4: pull the wool vertically (or diagonally) up, through and behind to the next diamond.  In the picture my next diamond was the one up and to the left from my first.

There’s your first cross!

Now a brief pause to talk about tension.  It’s really important to keep all your stitches tight!  Firstly because it looks better, secondly because it lasts longer and finally and most importantly because it uses less wool!  All that time finger knitting – best to use it efficiently!  I usually stop every couple of stitches and give everything another tug to make sure it’s nice and tight.

Step 5: repeat steps 3 & 4 for the rest of your pattern.  Once you get the hang of it you can start to get a bit clever about using the ‘thread’ to secure the behind work a bit neater as you go along.  You want to keep the behind work as close to the stitches or the wire as possible so it keeps it neater and makes your finished design really clear.  There’s no clear way to explain how to do this because it all depends on what direction you’re going in.  It’s something you pick up with practice.  So the more fence stitching you do the better!

Step 6: When you’ve finished the pattern, tie your wool off as tight as you can.  As with your original knot, make sure it’s super secure.

Step 7: Cut off the extra wool.  Make sure you leave a couple of centimetres spare just so the wool has a little bit to move before coming undone.  Remember your stitching has to brave the elements so it will all move a bit over time.

Step 8: Step back and admire!!

Congratulations you just made one ugly mofo fence, heaps less ugly.  And if you’ve used this pattern – you’ve also helped educate your community that this wasted block of land that appears to be just collecting weeds and rubbish is also helping line the pockets of some fat cat speculator.  These blocks don’t just sit there doing nothing – they sit there making money!

The Pattern!

While of course you can use this tutorial to make whatever pattern you want – there’s no such thing as a bad fence stitch! – this tutorial has been put together to encourage to get on board with our campaign to highlight the vacant land in our suburbs.  Land that is sitting there being ugly when it could be a lovely home – or a nice local business.

Here’s the two dollar sign patterns.  One for a square grid (these are the easiest to do – but the fences are rarer) and one for the diamond grid.

They’re not the best quality image for the diagonal fence sorry…  Will work on getting a better one, but it should do the trick for now.

And that’s it!

I’ve also made a pretty pdf version (8MB) of this doc which is easiest for printing if you prefer.

Very much looking forward to seeing what people can do with this tutorial.  As a special treat, if you send me pics of your finished dollar sign and let me know your postal address I’ll send you one of our limited edition gocco printed speculator cum rags!

So get out there kids.  There are literally hundreds of canvases across our suburbs to decorate!  If you need help finding one maybe check out the invest page on the realestate4ransom.com site for some ideas.

xox

stitching a new economics

Those of you who’ve been following this site for a while will know that one of the biggest issues that concerns me is the stifling effects of land speculation on our communities and our creativity.  While many of us crafty types would love to make stuff full time, it’s just not possible when we need to work so many hours a week to pay the rent/mortgage.  It’s bloody frustrating that our economic system rewards those that just buy and sell for a living yet punishes those of us who actually create.

One of big current issues in the craft world has been the ripping off of the ideas and designs of independent crafters/illustrators etc.  It seems like a weekly occurrence that some big company has found the work of a designer online and stolen it for their own products.  And who has the legal budget to fight that kind of crap?

Whilst this might seem like a new phenomenon, the practise of capitalising off the creative talents of artistic communities has been around for a long time.  And the most damaging application of this practise occurs in the land markets.  While we’re out busting our bums creating vibrant awesome and sustainable communities, behind the scenes is a secret, shady bunch of land sharks circling.

It’s called gentrification – and there’s a really good explanation of how it works on the I Want To Live Here film comp site.

It sucks that we bust our asses creating great places to live only to get priced out of the area by lazy land hoarders cashing in on the value our hard work creates.

I think it’s super important for creative people to understand because it’s pretty common to see creative responses to the aesthetic issues of land banking – but rare to see these responses address the real drivers behind the issues.  I’ve been  seeing more and more projects emerging that are designed to make boarded up buildings attractive or to ‘help’ landlords find creative people to move in.  But while the intentions behind these projects are very positive and genuine, they do all have the long term effect of making the land more valuable, thus compounding the problem.  What’s needed are creative ideas to try and break the cycles and systems that create the problem of high rents and vacant buildings in the first place.

But of course the first step is understanding.

I always say that an important role of the artist in society is to act as a mirror of society – so we can see what we’re really up to, and to help create the visions of the way things could be.  Inspiring and creating change is something artists and crafters are really good at – and have been doing for centuries.

So I was super proud to be asked to be part of a team of local creatives keen to get together and create a visual campaign around the effects of rampant land speculation in Melbourne.  It currently takes 9.5 years of full time average wage to buy an average house in Melbourne (it was 4 years when the subprime crisis hit the US).  This is absolutely insane!  Yet still our media and politicians continue to perpetuate the myth that forever rising property prices are a good thing.

But who are they good for?  Not young people, that’s for sure.  How many of you young renters out there could ever imagine having the half a million bucks it takes to enter the market in Melbourne today?  How many of us continue to buy the story that the First Home Owners Grant is about supporting young people.  When in reality all the policy has done has further inflated prices above and beyond the original grants.  First Home Owners Grant? Baby Boomers Bailout more like.

This stuff is so important for creative people to understand for two reasons.  Firstly because it directly impacts on our lives in regards to the hours of our lives we waste working to pay for the roofs over our heads.  And secondly because our own communities are guilty of perpetuating the same behaviour.  I can’t count the number of craft and indie design markets I have seen this year alone with insanely high stall fees.  There was one in particular I saw where the stall fees for a ‘fringe’ event alongside a major design event were higher than for the design event itself.  And this is becoming more common.

We need to call bullshit on it.

The fact that there is a massive shift in awareness towards the important economic and environmental benefits of handmade stuff is freakin awesome.  There are wonderful communities everywhere making and buying the things they need in life without destroying an ecosystem or exploiting another community in the process.  We need to do what we can to support these systems and a big part of that is keeping a close eye on the marketplaces that support the trade in these products.

I have personal experience in running a market so I have an idea about how much these things cost – in both time and money.  Our markets were run for the love of craft so we didn’t ever break even on costs but we really didn’t charge much for stalls.  What was important for us was that our sellers had the freedom to make really out there stuff.  Charging a high rent – which is what a stall fee is – would impact on that freedom, so we kept the fees low.

I know we could’ve charged a bit more.  I’m sure our sellers would’ve forgiven us for wanting to at least cover costs.  But if we had of charged that, and if we’d have hired a flasher venue and spent more on advertising etc there is NO WAY we would’ve been charging some of the stall fee levels I’ve seen recently.

I think it’s essential that if the craft movement in particular is going to have an analysis on issues of environmental impacts, multinational retail and workers rights we must also have a solid analysis of the politics of property – both physical and intellectual – since these areas have such massive impacts on our practice as crafters.

Enough ranting.

For this campaign we decided the main objective was to try and get young people to pay attention to the way land was being used in our suburbs.   And to try and draw attention to who really drives the debates around these issues.

So presenting Melbourne’s latest real estate company: realestate4ransom.com Check the website and Facebook for more info on what it’s about and to see some of the images of the street part of the campaign.  I’ll try and update some major bits here too.

But the main reason for this post is to get some of you undercover operatives in the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle fired up to get out and do some craft!  I’ve put together a tutorial on how to do a dollar sign on a fence.  This post was supposed to be that tutorial but given the length of this post already I think I’ll do it separate..

So check out the website, fan us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Youtube (stay tuned for mad clip) and help us spread the word about what’s really going on.

Tutorial next!

xox

3..2..1.. Launch!

3CR’s Seeds of Dissent Calendar Launch

Everyone is welcome to come to the Calendar Launch on Friday, November 13 at Readings Bookshop in Carlton at 6pm for free wine and talk! [Readings is located at 309 Lygon St, Carlton, Victoria: Phone (03) 9347 6633.]

Face Up To The Future! with 3CR’s fifth Seeds Of Dissent Calendar. 3CR asked 12 artists who are part of Australian activist culture to contribute an artwork that reflects their idea of the future.

In 2006, 3CR created a Seeds of Dissent! Calendar to celebrate 3CR’s 30th birthday. The full colour, nationally distributed calendar teemed with radical dates, ideas and inspiration for social change. The calendar sold out of its 2000 copies. Since then 3CR’s Promotions Sub Committee’s Calendar Team has produced a yearly calendar, each with a fresh theme.

Face Up ToThe Future! — 3CR’s fifth Seeds Of Dissent Calendar — looks ahead to imagine a future we want to live in, while also celebrating Australia’s radical history. We asked 12 artists who are part of Australian activist culture to contribute an artwork that reflects their idea of the future. Some artists have created images that imagine the ideal future and some have chosen to depict issues we need to address today in order to achieve it.

Australian history re-envisioned with a cheeky female bushranger, uranium mining and the need to recognise the interdependence of ecology, the tyrannical expectations of female beauty, the return of tumbling as a form of transportation (!), Indigenous people at the heart of popular culture… these are the some of the issues explored by artists such as Arlene Texta Queen, Deborah Kelly, Bindi Cole, Adam Hill, Tom O’Hern, Mitch [? sorry Mitch], Jo Waite, Rayna Fahey (that would be me), Tom Civil, Mickie Quick, Lachlan Conn and Paul J Kalemba.

Cross-stitched samplers, stencils, felt pen drawings, collages, cartoons, illustration, computer art… these are the media the artists use to take us into the future of the 2010 Seeds of Dissent Calendar.

Also!

How to Make Trouble and Influence People

is a wonderful new book by some trouble-making bloke called Iain McIntyre, and is published by the redoubtable and not-at-all nervous Breakdown Press.

Launched in Newcastle at TINA it will be launched again, kicking and screaming, in Melbourne on THURSDAY the 5th NOVEMBER (remember, remember..) at the BELLA UNION BAR (Victorian Trades Hall, cnr Victoria and Lygon Streets) between the hours of 6 and 8pm.

The book compiles tales of unconventional political dissent included in three previously-published pamphlets — How To Make Trouble And Influence People (1996), How to Stop Whining and Start Living (1998) and Revenge Of The Troublemaker (2003) — and, as an EXTRA! ADDED! BONUS!, interviews with a number of pranksters, photos galore, and er, other stuff.

Thanks @ndy for the blog post which I just nicked and reposted here.  There’s plenty of Radical Cross Stitch in BOTH these publications so make sure you get along to at least one of these great nights. And make sure you get your copy of the calendar! It does look fantastic. It’s a must have for your wall in 2010.

Oh OK then

I didn’t post a picture of the piece going into the Explosive Expression show ’cause it’s not framed yet and photographing two different shiny materials is really freakin hard.  But I just pulled these off the camera and they’re not too bad.

It was stitched with silver metallic embroidery thread on black satin and is very shiny!

I really don’t think I was able to capture the true look of it with these shots but you do get the idea.  Hopefully once it’s framed and up nice on a wall there’ll be better ones to share with you all.

This was definitely a patience tester to stitch up as metallic thread is SUPER fragile.  I think I threw away as much as I used due to all the broken bits.  But the overall effect is very much worth the effort.  I hope they can show the piece under lots of bright lights so it’s extra super duper shiny!

Extra special thanks to Groundswell Collective for providing the original image and the inspiration!

Badgeriffic

I’m getting super excited counting down to this years’ Melbourne Social Forum, which is on in just TWO WEEKS!  If you’re never been to a social forum before, it’s kind of like a global economic summit but without the white guys in suits, massive military presence and counter-productive outcomes.  The social forum movement arose as an alternative to the globalisation wave that was sweeping the planet at the end of the last millennium, based around the idea that ‘another world is possible’.

At social forums, grassroots activists who work in the fields of social, economic and environmental justice get together and update each other on campaigns, talk about their work and share skills and resources.

This Melbourne Social Forum there’s gonna be a pretty decent craft presence as the movement is really coming to grips with the idea that a big part of sustainability is making more of the things we use in our lives.  The Craft Cartel is doing a workshop (details to come) about craftivism and some of the issues around the consumerisation of craft.

And of course, there’s gonna be a market at the social forum!  There’s going to be heaps of different organisations with stalls so you can learn about all the campaigns going on and find out what you can do to support them.  And there’s going to be a heap of local, handmade stuff on stalls.  I borrowed a badge maker to make some more stuff to go on my stall and spent yesterday happily making mixed media badges.  There’s some at the top of the post.  Like?  You better come to the Melbourne Social Forum!

Homes for all

Seriously inspirational art

Photographic artist JR has produced these giant photographic portraits of Kenyan women and used the images to create water resistant roofing materials for Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa.

Now THIS is good art.  Not only does it provide a useful visual function by literally putting a face to the sprawling slums.  But it provides a useful function by improving the structure of the buildings themselves.

It must be far too easy for the wealthy to avoid the reality of slums.  If you’re not poor you just don’t go anywhere near them.  This installation brings the lives of the poor to the lives of the wealthy in a very clever way, by air.  Of course planes must fly over these areas!

And what’s most effective is the images themselves.  It’s not your stereotypical victimising wide eyed stare.  These are images of vibrant, awesome and empowered women.  It gives lie to the common perception (mostly perpetuated by neocolonial ‘aid’ agencies) that women living in poverty in Africa are passively accepting of the impacts of colonial economics on their lives.  These images (well, to me anyway) show that these women are not only very aware of the causes of the poverty they experience but are also active participants in the saying ‘the whole world’s watching’.  Pertinent given our current economic climate.

I really hope this work gets the attention it truly deserves.

props: Wooster Collective

Another piece of public art that I adored recently, in fact, had me in stitches, pissing my pants maybe?

Sick of men (mostly) pissing in public at night (do you guys know how much your piss stinks come day time? have you heard of disease?) Questionmarc installed these brilliant signs in Nottingham

Needless to say the local council has strenuously denied that it is acceptable to urinate in public.

Genius.

Privilege

I’ve been having a few conversations recently with people about privilege. Mostly about how people in our communities benefit from privilege yet refuse to acknowledge this or don’t know how. It’s not an easy thing to recognise that there’s stuff you don’t have to deal with if you’re non-Indigenous or male or able bodied or whatever. But when it really comes down to it we need to recognise and challenge this privilege if we want to make some decent changes within our communities.

And as often seems to happen when I have an issue popping up in conversation a lot, a really good article on the topic pops up in my RSS feeds!

I highly recommend you take five minutes and read this article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh. It is superbly written and is a real make you think-er.

I think it’s a really interesting exercise to go through for anyone wanting to question privilege and how it works on their own life. Especially for those of you out there wondering why we’ve managed to remove most of the overt legal forms of discrimination yet the statistics still show a massive bias towards the able bodied straight white guy. Our behaviours as humans are so habitual and discrimination and privilege are definitely creatures of habit!

I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks about this article.

Incidentally, I found this article on the Women’s Creative Collective blog which I recently came across and it’s fecking excellent, you should read it too!

Supply Side Solutions – My Ass

I bet you been hearing a whole lotta talk from the housing/building/development industry recently about how the reason housing is so expensive is ’cause there’s not enough houses.  And – my favourite excuse – that the industry hasn’t got enough land to build on.

The politicians, of course lap this up.  Given that the majority of them aren’t actually trained classical economists, and a fair amount of them get some pretty nifty donations from the industry and a decent percentage probably make a reasonable income from property investment.  It all makes sense to them.

And land rezoning is about the easiest thing a politician can do.  It doesn’t require any legislation and they get a cool photo op with a spade and a pretty yellow sun hat.

UNFORTUNATELY this is all a bunch of bollocks.

Thanks to Tohm Curtis and his recently released report commissioned by Earthsharing Australia, we can now quite conclusively demonstrate that the issue isn’t supply it’s speculation.

Any idiot can tell you that if you have a resource and you want to make it more valuable, you don’t sell it all at once, you drip feed it into the market.  That is exactly the issue facing our housing market.  Far from the real estate industry’s advertised vacancy rate of 0.7% in inner Melbourne, the actual vacancy rate is 7%.  To put that in real terms that’s 2,317 properties empty in central Melbourne during Australia’s worst ever housing crisis.

This speculative vacancy is what’s really driving the housing crisis.

So while there’s over 200 Melbourne University students without a home, there is enough housing vacant in Carlton alone to house every single one of them.  And it’s their parents’ generation that is doing it to them.

At the start of last year there were 38,000 existing residentially zoned blocks of land vacant in Melbourne being help by the six big developers.  This year Brumby gave a massive handout to the development industry and rezoned another 90,000 blocks of land for residential purposes.

NINETY THOUSAND

So has anyone noticed the price of land drop this year? Didn’t think so.

Of course the majority of that land was already owned by the developers so the rezoning made them overnight bajillionaires.  And no, they won’t be building affordable housing, they’re building more suburban mcmansion ghettos which will be drip fed into the market to ensure they can charge the maximum amount for each and every one of those houses.

Our generation has come aboard the space ship of planet earth but all the seats are taken and we are left squeezing in the aisles.

The time has come to get real angry about this.  Not angry and irrational, but angry and organised.  Anyone keen to help out with creative action on this issue (and there are so many fun, beautiful things we can do!) should get in touch.  We’ll be getting together in the new year to plan what to do.