Extreme refashioning
In other news, the Craft Cartel has been a bit blimmin busy.
Last weekend kicked off the Anti-Gentrification Festy Fest in Fitzroy. We got together with Earthsharing Australia and started talking about the crazy state of our economy and what impact it’s having on creative peoples, and young people. And we thought it was a bit mad that this boom bust system which seems to be all about property speculators totally cashing in everytime a community starts making things a bit more blimmin interesting. It seems to us that the world would be a much radder place if we could all afford to make and grow things and hang out in our communities. looking after each other more. Instead we’re all stuck working stupid hours in boring ass jobs trying to pay the rent which never seems to stop going up. And don’t even think about buying a house ’cause the baby boomers have got all the land locked up and are quite content charging younger generations whatever they can to fund their retirement.
SO
Rather than sit around bitching and moaning about it or throwing our arms up in dispair that we can’t do anything about it we thought let’s get some creative people with creative brains together to try come up with some SOLUTIONS.
The festival has started brilliantly with a giant gory craft session with the old Tote hotel carpet as our chief material. Casey donned a ballgown made out of the stuff by the stupidly talented Kathryn Jamieson and thanks to some hardcore stinky branding, festivalgoers got to take home their own Tote souvenier doormat. Also on hand was a mad fun Lagerphone making workshop.
Best of all the bar was aflush with wonderful conversations about potential models for change and plenty of stories were told about histories of creative resistance against the landed gentry.
The festival continues with an exhibition in the windows of the Workers Club with the Ballgown and other crafty carpety stinky artifacts. And finishes off on the 27th at the Workers Club with the DIE YUPPY, DIE! concert and festy fashion jam.
We’re also putting together a zine of IDEAS and THINGS YOU CAN DO to smash the property monopoly that has our beautiful creative selves captive. If you missed out submitting your idea at the Festival in the weekend, you can submit an idea via our website. And we’ll pop it in.
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Also,
Craft Cartel presents:
Vogue – Bike Fashion Jam
DIY BICYCLE GEAR WORKSHOP TO KEEP THE COPS & THE FASHION POLICE HAPPY
11:00 – 13:00
Saturday 19 June 2010
Coburg Library
Cnr Victoria & Louisa Streets, Coburg
Craft Cartel, alarmed by sights of fluoro lycra clad cyclists and equally aghast at the thought of coming a cropper while partaking in our favourite form of transport, are proud to present a solution: High Viz Vogue, a DIY bike fashion workshop.
The event, which is part of the Moreland City Council Coburg Carnivale, invites members of the public to adapt helmets and other clothing bits they’d like to make roadway and catwalk friendly, or to start from scratch using supplied materials. Local designers Miss Viz will be on hand to provide guidance and there will be displays of innovative bike fashion solutions such as designer Ann Maher’s ‘biker bustle’.
The event will culminate in a fashion parade with prizes supplied by Crumpler and will be followed by a celebratory ride through Moreland to parade the new hip gear led by Sugar Spokes all female bike crew.
“We don’t think riders should have to choose between having a sore body and being an eyesore,” says Cartel co-founder Casey Jenkins, “You can look hot while you’re cycling and still keep yourself safe, we’re going to show you how.”
Free! No experience necessary! All materials supplied. Ace prizes from Crumpler to be won.
A bit of this, a bit of that
Hi folks
I’m not doing terribly well at the blogging these days since I rarely have two hands free. And try as I might, I just can’t stand the tedium of trying to write with one hand. So I have been keeping my updates in Twitter land and my new Tumblr.
Are you on Tumblr? It is FUN! It’s kind of like blogging but more asthetic. It’s almost like mini curating. There seems to be two types of Tumblrs. There’s people Tumblrs, where people just post and reblog all the stuff they like and then there’s theme based Tumblrs which anyone can submit to so long as it fits the theme criteria.
I started a Tumblr account for Radical Cross Stitch and already have a bunch of followers and have found a whole bunch of interesting people to follow. I’m especially enjoying finding all the activisty, vegany, crafty, feministy womyn out there. Tumblr sure seems to be a great way to surround yourself in like minded awesome people.
I’ve also started another couple of accounts (because I got carried away!) and these are theme based ones. Inspired by great accounts like Fuck Yeah, Owls! and Fuck Yeah, Cultural Appropriation!! I started Fuck Yeah, Granny Square.
Firstly I started FYGS because it was such a brilliantly lovely rhyme and I couldn’t believe no one had already done it. Also Granny Squares are FREAKIN AWESOME and absolutely deserve a tribute site (or ten). The FYGS blog has been set up as a community one so anyone can submit so you should totally go and submit your favourite pics.
If you need some extra inspiration, there’s a couple of cool projects online that you can check out. Firstly Little Miss Apocolypse got inspired to do a call out for radical squares to make a collective afghan. This is such a cool idea and I reckon the aim will be to auction off a final piece to fund raise for some cool revolutionary organisation. Maybe RAWA? Dunno, anyone got any ideas? In the meantime, jump aboard and crack out your crochet hook.
And if you need incentive to actually finish one, check out the Meet Me at Mikes Granny Square a Day 2010 challenge (yeah I know it’s June, but it’s never too late to start something fun!).
The irony of all this granny square enthusiasm is that I don’t actually know how to make them myself (sigh). BUT I want to! So hopefully all this excitement will lead to me getting off my bum and DOING it. I am enlisting help and the lovely and awesomely clever at doing granny square, Gemma Jones is coming over for a solstice feast and I’m going to bat my eyelashes until she sits down and shows me. Promise I’ll share my results. You should join in too! If I can, anyone can!
Since Tumblrs are so much fun I got carried away and set up Fuck Yeah, Vintage Craft (I know, I’m hours away from rehab). I’ve always wanted a space to put all the beautiful/hilarious photos in all my vintage craft books. And there’s so many clever people out there photographing vintage craft supplies and finished pieces. So I set up FYVC to celebrate the beauty in vintage craft. This is also a public blog so if you’ve got stuff to submit, please do!
Finally, there’s been a bit of fun and games going on at our Facebook Page. If you don’t like us yet, please do! We’re almost at 1000! The best bit about the Page is seeing the Fan pics that people add of their latest projects. There’s been some brilliantly inspiring stuff. Would love to see yours!
Stay tuned for some Craft Cartel newsy writeup!
xox
Don’t Hate the Media, Be the Media
As readers of Radical Cross Stitch will know I am a big time fan of Melbourne community radio station 3CR. There is nothing like turning on the ol’ wireless to hear people from my own communities talking about news and issues that are relevant to me and the lives of the people around me. And it’s even better that I never hear any loud voices screaming at me to quickly empty my pockets into the hands of giant corporate consumerist empires!
So I didn’t hesitate for a second last year when the fine folk there asked me to contribute to the 2010 Seeds of Dissent Calendar. I still consider that piece to be my greatest stitching achievement so far and I was super happy over the weekend to finally pick it up from the framers after a 12 month hunt for the PERFECT vintage frame.
Well I promised that I’d make the pattern available and at long last it’s now in store. And if you hurry and grab it over the next couple of days it’s half price (sale ends Friday). Proceeds go straight to 3CR! If you don’t already know the 3CR Radiothon is on NOW! So you should pop over to their website and become a subscriber. The theme for radiothon this year is Handmade Radio and subscribers get a copy of CRAM which contains a fab pattern to make your own radio! Including some wee cross stitch embellishment patterns from me.
Need more reasons to love 3CR? Check the spunks in this wee clip
3CR Radiothon TVC 2010 from 3cr on Vimeo.
A new Kiva loan
At long last I got around to making a new Kiva loan! (check out my other loans here). And I’m pretty excited about this one! It had been getting hard to find actual makers to lend to, but recently there seems to have been an influx so this time it was pretty easy. But I was extra happy to find a maker who is making traditional craft for local use.
Señora Teresa is dedicated to the sale of jewelry on credit in the zone of Pampahasi. She has performed this activity for three years. She is very well known in the area and the orders that she fills are for craft jewelry for ladies who wear the traditional clothing, since they use large jewels for their hats, the fastening on their cloaks, rings and large earrings. She has some complete sets of jewels that are very pretty and expensive, all bathed in gold. She buys the jewels and later sells them in her jewelry shop.
…
The loan will be invested in the purchase of rings and earrings, since she has orders for a festival that is held each year in the zone of Pampahasi. The jewels are used traditionally for the dances of the Morenada or Dances of the Dark, which is a folkloric Bolivian dance where the dancers disguise themselves in black adorned with prominent characteristics and the celebrants use these jewels for adorning their hats and to fasten their cloaks. Señora Teresa this very grateful to Emprender and Kiva for the confidence shown her in granting the loan.
Sounds like an amazing festival, I’d love to go check it out sometime!
My loan was counted towards the Etsy.com Handmade lending team, which is starting to make a bit of impression in the Kiva community. We now have 94 members and over $6000 in loans. Still a way to go to catch up to the Athiest Team that has over $2million in loans! Any Etsy peeps out there wanna join us and help top the 100 member mark?
Dear Stephen Conroy…
See I think internet censorship is silly, rather pointless, and inevitably ineffective. I would even go so far as to say that it is a policy equivalent of fucking for virginity.
Our political leaders are supposed to introduce policies that REDUCE the problems in the most cost effective way. Not flick rubber bands at problems in a way that not only makes them harder to solve but creates a whole new raft of problems in the process, not to mention costing a big bundle of dollars.
If the government really wants to deal with the problems of sexual exploitation in our society perhaps they might want to start by looking at their own policies that treat women and children like tradeable commodities. Perhaps if the exploitation of women and children wasn’t so wholeheartedly endorsed by business, media, police, our governments etc etc then people wouldn’t find the sexual exploitation of women and children so enticing.
But big picture issues and solutions don’t fit so neatly into electoral terms do they?
What gets me the most about this whole internet censorship thing is the AUDACITY of the Minister to say that it’s to help parents protect their children.
Excuse me? If I needed help protecting my kid, I’m afraid the government is probably the last place I’d look. I would much prefer tax payer dollars were spent educating parents, teachers and anyone else who has interaction with kids and computers on the issues surrounding net safety, respect for women and how to empower kids to protect themselves.
Do we seriously think rape and sexual assault would be such big problems if our kids were empowered to respect all genders. I know thinking back to my teenage years there were far too many guys who thought it was ok to treat girls like objects and even more girls who just did not have the skills to stand up to it.
At some point we, as a society, have to do something real about this issue. And sadly, despite the rhetoric of ‘Australia Says No’ I doubt it’s gonna come from the government. So it has to be up to us as parents, aunties, uncles, grandparents, siblings and friends. Anyone wanting to read more on feminist parenting might want to start with ‘Raise Some Hell’. And if anyone reading this post knows of any good resources it would be awesome if you could share them in the comments.
Finally, I urge you all to drop a line to Stephen Conroy. He really is being quite a fool about all this malarky. And the more people who tell him the better.
http://nocleanfeed.com/
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This cross stitch was hand stitched on antique linen. In between breast feeding, changing and entertaining twins and feeding and hanging out with a three year old, it took me about 3 weeks to complete. It has been framed in an antique brass frame with the original mounting board to complete the aged feel of this piece.
This piece is for sale and proceeds will go to the campaign to stop internet censorship. Maybe someone out there wants to buy it for Stephen Conroy?
You can never kill an idea
I’ve been promising new patterns for a while and here’s the first of a new bunch.
This design is getting back to some old school roots with a lovely redwork antique border. And a quote from one f my favourite films of all time, The Edukators. This quote was sprayed on a wall in the film and I love it!
And I have a guest stitcher for this pattern, the adorably ace Curegreed who you may also know from her guest blogging at Mr X Stitch about her studies at the Royal School of Needlework (for which I am INSANELY jealous). We met last year at a Craft Cartel crafternoon when she was visiting these fair shores for a wedding. And I’m so excited to be doing more work together.
You can buy it in the Radical Rags store for a special intro price of only $5, score!
Gocco!
If you’re a twitter follower you might have picked up a while back that I scored a new Gocco set for super cheap and it was PRETTY BLIMMIN EXCITING!
It took me quite a while to gather up the confidence to have a go. It’s all new and scary, you see. But I finally had a project I really wanted to do so I hitched up my pants and leapt in.
I was armed with the awesome tutorial by Pip which I wholeheartedly recommend checking out. Even if you’re not planning on doing the fabric thing and printing on paper with actual gocco paint, this tutorial is super helpful. I definitely used Pip’s tutorial alongside the official instructions and it made heaps more sense with both.
So I’ve now made TWO different screens and made a heap of patches.
The first lot were made as some pretty banners for vacant blocks of land. We’ve attached ribbons on the corners so they can be tied on to fences. I thought this was a good first project since the prints don’t need to be perfect and we can’t be too attached to them since they’ll probably get taken down.
Here’s a bunch drying.
And here’s a couple in action! The first one was in St Kilda and the second was on Malvern Road somewhere
FUN! Part of my little creative contributions to the realestate4ransom.com campaign highlighting the stupid waste of land we’ve got going on round the place.
The next project I did was in honour of Buy Nothing Day 09 and also as my wee action towards Copenhagen. Being seven and a half months pregnant does preclude a fair amount of activism so I took the creative option!
I got the idea after a cool chat with an awesome Friends of the Earth volunteer at the Green New Deal conference. Sorry I can’t remember your name! Hope you see these and like 
When I get around to sewing up some more I’ll send some to the FoE shop. I decided to border some of them with small black satin ribbon, just to make them a bit glam. I also decided I very much like printing on calico. It seems to pick up the ink best and it looks nice too.
Printing on fabric with Gocco is a little bit hard and takes a bit of perseverance. I’d very much like to try it with someone else doing some of them!
What is really easy though is printing on paper!
Last weekend I went to the open studio for the super cool Gemma Jones. The open studios were part of the Big West Festival – which was also super cool! Can’t wait til the next one! (I should also write about that – especially the knitted bridge installation – but I reckon it won’t happen so go check out the other cool crafty stuff on their website).
Gemma gave a couple of demos on how to use a Gocco and we all got to have a go. It was MOST FUN. I picked up some new prints for my wee girls new room so the walls are quickly filling up with rad art.
Those prints were done on an old sex guide book. Some of the pages were hilarious! My favourite was ‘what to say in bed – and when not to laugh’. Genius.
So now I’ve gotten over ‘the fear’ I’m psyched to do more!
Radelaide
Further to the rad things in the last post is this awesome new group that’s just popped out of Adelaide. So if you live in the crazy hot city – check out Radical Craft Adelaide.
They’ve been holding some crafternoons. Next one is on Dec 12 for those who want to stitch and bitch radically. It’s gold coin and funds go to ActNow Theatre for Social Change. Bring along your current project or they’ve got cross stitch kits on hand for a few dollars. RSVP and check out all the details on Facebook.
A bunch of Rad things
Apologies for the lack of blogging. I’m in full on pregnancy countdown mode at the mo, and it’s not being the easiest one. So I’m thinking things will be pretty sporadic for a while. But there’s some stuff I just HAVE to share with you all!
I’m sure most of you have checked out the handmade internet sensation regretsy.com – it’s a hilarious site and has quite the cult following these days. I was very proud to have not one, but TWO products featured on there! First off (and not that surprisingly) was the embroidery porn piece I did for the Craft Cartel Trashbag Rehab workshop earlier in the year. It sold within hours of being posted on regretsy and I’ve had tons of custom orders. It’s been quite surreal.
What was then even more surreal was the email I got from Regretsy asking if I’d be keen to be part of a card series they were planning. Yeah why the hell not?
So you too can own your own piece of embroidered gay anime porn, and even better – share the love with your friends and family!
That’s mine discretely being censored by the others.. You can buy 8 of one design or a set of two of each. And at $10 a set, that’s quite the bargain.
And in other regretsy news, they’ve managed to sign a book deal with Random House. I’m thinking the porn might not pass their censorship standards. But luckily I have another product on regretsy’s site – the legendary Plug Rugs! Which have, of course, now sold out. These also popped up on the salon.com story about regretsy. So hopefully they get in the book.
The other rad thing I’ve been meaning to post for ages is the pdf of the Interventionist Guide zine! If you go to the website and click on Guides, mine is about halfway down. The zine features a whole lot of my thoughts about urban spaces and how we relate to them as humans. As well as the tutorial on how to cross stitch a heart on a bicycle basket.
Finally, have you checked out the London-based Craftivist Collective yet? They’re getting up to some seriously ace stuff. This latest pic popped up on Facebook and I reckon it’s a big bucket of brilliant. They’ve got tons of things going on so if you want to join in go join them on FB.
xox
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