RADICALCROSSSTITCH

Radical Craft Intervenes

Sorry for the lack of updates round here. I’ve been busy preparing for an upcoming artist residency! Rest assured there will be regular updates once I get going. In the meantime, I was a featured artist in the latest Creative Spaces enews.

Check it out:

Rayna Fahey took up craft to ease the boredom of being confined to the house during a difficult pregnancy five years ago. Cross stitch was the most tedious activity she could think of to get her through nine long months. A political activist, Rayna had recently finished three years working for the New Zealand Parliament, which meant “it was never going to be long before the stitches got radical.”  Using her existing website Rayna added a page for her radical cross stitch work, and very soon visits to the page sky-rocketed, demonstrating “there was clearly an audience for craft with a message.”

Rayna saw an opportunity to inject some radicalism into crafting circles, as well as to communicate revolutionary ideas to new audiences, and Radical Cross Stitch was born. Defined as radical due to the materials used or the message conveyed, traditional perceptions of craft are challenged, and many contemporary artists are now pushing the boundaries using the varied form.

Rayna’s craft mainly takes two forms: Traditional framed cross stitch embroidery with a radical political message, or outdoor pieces which make use of the environment such as weaving cross stitch into chain link fences. These outdoor pieces make “political statements specifically about the space they’re in.” As an elder once said to Rayna “if you’re going to talk about the environment talk about it IN the environment.”

In 2008 Rayna coordinated a “loose-knit band of revolutionaries” known as the ‘Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle’ to create a piece on a fence around a vacant corner block in Footscray. “I WANNA LIVE HERE” was cross-stitched into the fence as a response to the issue of housing affordability and lack of land supply when here was an example of the under-utilised land around the city. This work was made into a short film and featured in a full length documentary as well as appearing in various publications around the world.

In the coming weeks Rayna will commence a three-month artist residency at the Imaroo Community Centre in Wyndham Vale. Working with the various groups that use the centre to create local outdoor installations, Rayna will also be creating a major new piece of her own. Excited to get started, Rayna is the first artist in residence at the centre, which is located in an area “not normally associated with a thriving arts scene”. Her main mission will be to take her radical craft to the streets, and also to produce some ‘how-to’ guides whilst in residency, so others can get radical with their craft long after she has left her mark.

“My work really tries to get people thinking about the issues of land rights, homelessness, urban planning, sustainability and public/private divides…I try to use my outdoor craft to stimulate debate and thought.” Rayna explains. “What’s been most inspiring for me is discovering after an installation how many people in the community are passionate about similar issues…Who needs the press when you’ve got radical craft?”

Pretty girl or riot nerd?

About a year ago I worked for one of the biggest sites on the interwebz which targets a demographic group of kids between nine and seventeen years, handling their costumer support for a couple of weeks. What I thought would be a mind numbing 9-5 job to pay the rent between semesters at Uni, turned out to be a really thrilling and interesting insight into youth culture today. After a year spent writing academic essays on cultural studies, mostly about subculture and its connection to feminism and DIY, I realised that this was a gold mine for anyone interested in girl culture.

The site caters to the idolising, fame seeking, and brand loving youngster and most of the users are girls, from all over the world. It is a mix between a game based around paper dolls and a social community where the users can chat, communicate in groups and discuss their favourite clothing brands, pop icons or basically anything. The paper doll part consists of, on the one hand, pre-made dolls and clothes based on real celebrities ranging from Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears to Kurt Cobain and Joan of Arc, and on the other your own “Me doll”, your alter ego or avatar on the site which you can make up to look exactly as you want when it comes so size, skin colour, eyes, clothes, make up, hair style and so on (as long as you keep within the socially acceptable frames that limits your choices – for example when it comes to body shape/size). It is free to sign up for an ordinary account, but to get the good stuff – buying the nicest outfits, participate in the best competitions or getting your little paws on the coolest eyeliner – you have to pay for a monthly membership and also use your parents Visa card to buy the artificial currency that is used on the site. It is basically the girl version of World of Warcraft, but instead of pretending to be a druid that uses magical positions to kill monsters you buy cute tops, shiny handbags and pretty scarves from Donna Karen.

What I find interesting about this is the subject position these girls claim for themselves in a milieu that is so connected to the female stereotype of body managing, appearance, keeping busy with making yourself up as a woman/girl, instead of using your energy to fight these stereotypes and demands. Stuff that little girls like – ponies, glitter make up, pretty dresses, boy bands, and playing dress up – are seen as cute, unimportant, commercialised and utterly harmless to society. Or as Polly Styrene, the grandmother of punk, puts it; “some people think little girls should be seen, not heard”. Being a girl is not something to be really proud of; the negative connotations of running, screaming or crying like a girl is not just expressions without meaning, they actually say something about the way we regard girls. Also, girl culture is often looked upon from a sort of “non-culture” angle; that it is just looks, an image or fad that young girls adopt one week and discard the next in favour of something new and hip. This in contrast to boy culture, or proper subculture, who is seen as lived culture where age, gender and staying true to the scene are important factors that make up cool.

I myself had (and still have) my doubts and critical thoughts about this kind of gendered, commercial marketing, targeting kids and dragging them into the consumer culture lifestyle. But spending my days answering questions from the sites users and dealing with abuse reports from its community, I discovered something that I hadn’t thought of earlier. It was what I like to call the seedy underbelly of girls, the scheming, lying, bribing, name calling, stealing, hoaxing and cheating that is raging on the site. All the things that good girls don’t do. And all this in a hyper commercialised environment, centred around looks, clothes, accessories, fame, pop culture and branding.

There are young girls coming together, creating a space and culture of their own within a pre-packaged environment, turning it into a arena of pre-teen queens forming secret gangs and cliques, using their html skills to set up mirror sites for stealing passwords, making up new personas, lying, cheating and essentially not being nice. In an odd sort of way, I found this very liberating and, well… fun. Of course I realise that little girls calling each other stuff like “you stupid crack whore” and stealing money from others isn’t a good thing. But I like the fact that this shows that they are agents in their own life, they’re not pretty dolls that just play dress up and sit quiet in a corner. Coming from a teen hood where I myself found feminism through the angry screams of the riot grrrls, a punk phenomena reclaiming the girl as something powerful, good, subversive and bursting with rage, I wish that a society that’s started to regard boy nerd culture (like WoW) as proof of creative modern youth culture, could do the same here. I think that’s what I’m trying to mirror in this cross stitch – the mash up of cuteness, cuddly cats and pastel colours together with a “I don’t owe you anything” attitude that creates its own rules and at the same time, on some level, re-thinks the whole concept of being girly.

Of course I got the quote from a Bikini Kill song.

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.

Craft Cartel Podcast Episode 10: Creative Commons for Crafters

It’s been a YEAR in the making (and I’m not exaggerating..) but finally folks, it’s Episode 10 of the Craft Cartel podcast.

This episode, we do something quite different and check out some of the best the world of Creative Commons music has to offer.  So grab your latest craft project, kick back and enjoy the show.

I decided to let the music speak for itself and leave the ranting to the writing, so what follows is the ideas behind this podcast.  I’m very much interested to hear what others think on these issues.

xox
Rayna

And as always we’d love to hear from you, comment below or drop us a line. And don’t forget to check out the archive if you’re new round here.

The best way to listen to the podcast is to subscribe and download today!

If that doesn’t work you can download the file directly from here.

We really don’t like advertising very much round these parts, so if you like what you hear, please make a donation to help support future episodes. It’s what an ad-free world sounds like.

OK here’s the spiel!

The idea behind Creative Commons or as it is otherwise known as ‘copyleft’ was about trying to find a way for creators of content to protect their work that wasn’t as rigid as the copyright system.  The copyright system is very much geared around stopping people from using your ideas.  Yet there were tons of creative people out there who did want people to use their ideas, they just wanted to be able to put some conditions on the use.  CC is based on the understanding that knowledge isn’t created in a vacuum.  As artists, creators, designers, engineers etc, our knowledge is built on and informed by centuries of knowledge.  The CC movement uses the slogan “standing on the shoulders of giants” which acknowledges that all the creativity, intelligence, technology and risk taking that exists in our world wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for sharing and collaboration.

The notion of copyright, or to claim an idea as something which is exclusively owned, is a very modern phenomenon and for many creators is simply incompatible with the idea that creativity is a community based activity.

The copyleft movement arose out of the free software movement as a response to the hyper patenting that was happening by certain sectors of the software industry (yes, looking at you Mr Gates).  A lot of the stuff that was being patented was not being patented by the person who invented the software.  As most of the ideas were generated by communities of engineers and mathematicians.  The patents were often being granted to the person who applied first.

Software is effectively a pile of equations.  Technically, you’re not supposed to be able to patent a mathematical equation (or nature for that matter, but that’s not stopped Monsanto who want to ‘own’ the food we eat).  But somehow certain people were able to convince the American Patent Office that they should grant patents to software.  And as anyone in the Open Source movement will tell you, this is why proprietary software is so expensive and often inferior to the community created software alternatives eg Firefox (pattern here!).

The same problem applies to the music industry.  While people have been making music and sharing that music for millennia, it has only been recently that the concept of ownership has been applied to music.  The justification for this is of course to ensure that musicians can make an income out of their creativity. But we all know this is rarely the case.  Because the musicians themselves rarely own the copyrights over their music.  It is the recording companies, or as is often the case with very popular songs, private individuals.  Music is not seen as a part of our living culture, rather a commodity that can be bought and sold.  This approach to music creation means it’s about ‘investing’ in the music that will create the most profit for the holder of the rights, not creating awesome music.  This is the main reason there is so much crap music on our airways.

With the introduction of the internet and all the wonderful tools modern technology has to offer it is now totally possible for a musician to make, produce and distribute their own music. It’s still hard work and the profits are still hard to come by, but if we as consumers make an effort to be more conscious about how we buy our music, we could make this chart look a lot nicer for musicians.

(via information is beautiful)

And of course this line of thinking brings me to talk about craft.

While I think it is wonderful that there are so many people out there making, buying and selling craft, I don’t think it’s so wonderful that so many people are adding copyright licenses to their work.  Sadly, I think too many people are doing this because it’s what everyone else does, not because they’ve really thought about it.

Copyright as a way of protecting your work is a very rigid system, and doesn’t allow much flexibility for other people to share, and build upon, your ideas.  And arguably copyright is not that useful a tool if someone does rip off your ideas.

The list of examples of big companies ripping off indie designers is probably 10 times longer than both of my arms combined.  And most of those designers would have a copyright on their work.  But did it do any good stopping them being ripped off?  Clearly not.  So why is it useful?  Well, if you do decide to take someone to court over a copyright violation it is of course helpful to have copyright in the first place.  But you also need to have the legal funds and sadly not many of us have massive bank balances.

What has been more effective recently is the use of the internet in the naming and shaming of copyright violations.  Being named and shamed by big name websites can be enough for violators to pull the offending products.  But of course this doesn’t cover lost income.  But certainly if enough of us decide to boycott companies that rip off indie designers, they’ll certainly lose some.

But back to Creative Commons, if we, as indie designers and makers use Creative Commons licenses we still retain the ability to legally protect our work.  CC licenses are based on copyright, the difference is

“Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise your copyright rights—such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your work. They do not give you the ability to restrict anything that is otherwise permitted by exceptions or limitations to copyright—including, importantly, fair use or fair dealing—nor do they give you the ability to control anything that is not protected by copyright law, such as facts and ideas.” (source)

This means if someone uses some of your work to inspire some of theirs they have to source you as opposed to a copyright license where they’d have to pretend they’d never heard of you.  Which is a bit sad really.  Because wouldn’t you rather hear about the work you’re inspiring? And more importantly, wouldn’t you like your customers to hear about it too?

So, as a cross stitch pattern designer, I put a Creative Commons license on all of my work.  My license says you can’t re-sell my ideas but you can change them so long as you share them with the public under a similar license.  This means you can buy my pattern and share it with your stitching group (something most cross stitch designers HATE).  I also allow people to sell finished pieces that result from the sale of my patterns so long as they’re hand stitched and they acknowledge me as the designer.  If I had a simple copyright on my patterns, people wouldn’t technically be able to do that.

On a philosophical level, CC licenses allow me to proudly put my work into a community based sphere while still enabling myself to earn a (very) small income from my work.  I get the best of both worlds because I can design, make and sell like any other crafter but I also get to develop creative relationships with my customers – whom I can now treat as friends and colleagues.

As you can see CC enables non-heirarchical relationships.  And I reckon that’s what craft is all about, don’t you?

Copyright is something worth paying attention to if you like to stitch and sell things out of books (or write books for that matter).  I’ve seen tons of people that sell stitched pieces from a popular pattern books.  I’m pretty sure in most cases the author doesn’t mind but if one day their publisher decided they did mind (since it’s usually the publisher that holds the copyright), it would be within their legal rights to sue all of those makers for damages.  That would be both sad for the makers and the authors.

The other big issue that copyright and craft raises of course is if we have the right to copyright craft.

Craft is part of our culture.  And the massive body of ideas, skills, designs and techniques that make up what we call ‘craft’ is the product of millennia of practitioners sharing their work.  It is in fact, our cultural commons.  We all own it, so who says some of us have the right do draw a fence around some of it and call it ours and then charge others for the right to use it?

I would argue we most certainy don’t.  But it is happening, and it’s not just techniques, styles and designs that are being copyrighted, patented and trademarked, but even very common terms and sayings within craft practise including this most famous example.

I hope the craft community can have more discussions around these issues so we can educate ourselves about what this all means.  And more importantly, make some decision about how we, as a community, want to treat and protect the knowledge that we, as a community, hold and own.

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More resources:

creativecommons.org
archive.org
freemusicarchive.org
Phlow Magazine
aaahh records
Beep! Beep! Back up the truck

Track listing:

1. Princess Melodiae – Aleksi Virta (…Meets Torsi)
2. The Confrontation – Crookram (Through Windows)
3. Bag of Nothingness – Comfort Fit (Bag of Nothingness)
4. Les Mains Sales – Dustmotes (Beats for the Subverted)
5. Grizzly – The Banjo Consortium (Fall Is For Lovers)
6. Bracken Bed – Malty Media (Nivel Del Mar – Sounds for Soulsurfers)
7. A Heart That Beats No More – Ryan Harvey (Rise Like Lions)
8. Rise Like Lions – Brenna Sahatjian (Rise Like Lions)
9. Pirates – Entertainment For The Braindead (Roadkill)
10. Treehouse Lullaby – The Wind Whistles (Animals Are People Too)
11. Making Your Own Stuff – The Wind Whistles (Animals Are People Too)
12. Resolutions – Entertainment For The Braindead (Hydrophobia)
13. Nightlighter – Big Blood (Big Blood & the Bleeding Hearts)
14. Childhood Friend – Emilie Lund (Emilie Lund EP)
15. That I Love You – Het Gloren (Acrobaat)
16. Barefoot Girl - Twizzle ((Nivel Del Mar – Sounds for Soulsurfers)
17. Satisfied Mind – My Bubba & Mi (How It’s Done In Italy)
18. Through Windows – Crookram (Through Windows)

Enjoy
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

An Old Skool Sampler

If you got your hands on a copy of the 2010 3CR Seeds of Dissent Calendar and flicked it open to everyone’s favourite consumerist month: December, this is what you’ll find:

Each of the contributing artists was asked to chose a theme and using our creative tools, discuss that issue in relation to the future.  I chose an anti-consumerist/waste theme (obviously).  And decided this was an opportunity to finally get around to stitching my sampler.

A sampler is something a learner stitcher is supposed to do.  But it’s more than just about learning, it’s a kind of right of passage.  And having now seen samplers from my own family, I have been keen to get into doing my own for a while.

This particular sampler is loosely based off the design of the sampler by Margaret Harper (1782) so it really is pretty old skool.  But following on with an old tradition of subverting the ‘feminine arts’ the quote is not biblical, yet still rather moralistic and prescriptive.

We were also asked to provide a few words about what our piece was about.  Here’s mine:

A Sampler For Our Times

In this time of global environmental and economic crisis the looming challenges can sometimes seem insurmountable, especially considering that Australia is the biggest carbon consuming country on our lovely planet.

While the challenge to turn this around may seem enormous it is not impossible to meet.  One of the most important and effective changes we need to take on is our relationship with stuff.  Indeed, it is our obsession with material things that is such a massive contributor to our environmental excesses.

There is an age-old saying, commonly heard during the last global depression, ‘Use it up, Wear it out, Make do, or Do without’.  It sounds a bit dreary.  But people who are relearning the skill of making things themselves can testify that when you MAKE culture rather than simply consuming it, life all of a sudden becomes a hell of a lot more interesting, revolutionary even.

This cross-stitched piece is a traditional sampler but with a modern twist.  A sampler was a coming-of-age process for a young woman, especially during the 1800s.  Samplers were employed not only to teach basic stitches for decoration and mending but also to learn basic literacy and numeracy skills, as well as a bit of healthy moralistic indoctrination.  The quotes included were often biblical and always included some guiding doctrine to live by.  Sometimes they were cheekily subversive.  This piece hopes to continue that tradition.

You really need a copy of this Calendar on your wall next year! So get onto the website and grab a copy.  Or even better, come to the launch at Readings Carlton on Friday the 13th of November at 6pm and pick up a copy and a nice glass of wine.  And say hi to the artists and the great team that made this awesome calendar happen.

As for the original piece, I’m looking for somewhere to put it on display with the view to sell it to raise even more funds for 3CR.  I’ve got a couple of options but I’m open to hearing other ideas.  So if you have a brilliant wall in a shop, gallery, museum or whatever that you think would be just perfect to have this hanging on, get in touch.

Finally, and before you all ask, yes the pattern will be available for sale very soon.  And of course, all proceeds go straight to 3CR – to keep Melbourne’s most radical radio, rad!

MRCC gets more press!

The latest Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle action already got in the local paper. And to add to that I did an interview on 3CR’s fabulously awesome DIY Arts Show – which you can listen to online now.

AND today a story has appeared in The Vine about it.

Yay!

RCS in the paper

After the latest action by the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle in Footscray, one of the local papers, The Star, wrote a story about it. Including a lovely bad ass guerilla crafter pic!

Radical craft in Get Creative

Do you read Get Creative? It’s the craft mag from Spotlight and it’s got some pretty cool stuff in it.  While the magazine is very much targetted around promoting Spotlight products it does have a fantastic local focus and it’s a great way to learn about some of the incredible designers and artists working in Australia and elsewhere.

Each month Get Creative has a special theme and last month the theme was Yarn.  And in a moment of awesomeness, they decided to do an article on political craft!  You can download a copy of the article here, which includes Lisa Anne Auerbach, me!, Betsy Greer, Cat Mazza and Magda Sayeg.

I also contributed a review of Betsy’s book, ‘Knitting for Good’.  The final copy they printed was a bit cut down, but here’s the original review:

Knitting for Good!
By Betsy Greer
Reviewed by Rayna Fahey

One of the wonderful consequences of the resurgence of craft, particularly amongst young people is the rapidly expanding craft sections in our local bookshops.  What’s particularly refreshing is the wide range of contemporary pattern books; utilising interesting new materials and genuinely innovative spins on traditional techniques.  But while there is plenty of discussion in our craft groups about the benefits of craft, there hasn’t been too many books written on the subject.

Until now.

Knitting for Good is a beautifully written tale of the personal, local an global benefits of craft.  While this book still contains patterns, the focus is definitely on the story. And as a non-knitter I can definitely say this book is for anyone who crafts, not just the fans of the clicking needles..

Divided into three sections: “Knitting for Yourself” “Knitting for Your Community” and “Knitting for The World”, Greer takes the reader on a personal journey as a knitter and as an activist.  Starting from her own background in the Riot Grrl DiY scene we read how a staunch young feminist embraces a traditional domestic craft in a way that doesn’t betray her political beliefs but rather, enhances it.

A major highlight of the book is the sidebar sections written  by various people who have inspired Betsy’s book.  The sidebars compliment the text beautifully and truly demonstrate the importance of community within the craft movement.  As a last minute addition to the book, the sidebars definitely complete the story.

Next time someone scoffs your crafting, you can proudly raise your chin and declare “I’m saving the world”.

Finally one of the best aspects of the book is the production.  With a gorgeous handmade cover the book is filled with lovely illustrations and a nice cottage feel.  This book is a perfect read for an overcast Sunday afternoon, with a lovely cup of tea and your latest craft project within arms reach.

G’arn, go buy a copy!

More media!

Welcome to all our visitors from The Age! Please come on in, grab a cup of tea and make yourself at home.  It is lovely to meet you

For you other visitors who rambled in from elsewhere, welcome too!  And you might wanna look at the article ’cause it’s got lots of great people in it.  Even better, go check out a paper copy of M (that comes with the Sunday Age) and see the super stunning picture of Pip on the cover and the spunky Gemma on the inside.

It’s a good read too.  It was nice to see what other people round the traps are thinking about it all.  I recommend checking out all the people in the story cause they’re all doing great stuff!

Isn’t it nice to see the media finally sitting up and taking notice to all this cool crafty stuff going on.  Much more interesting than nudey photos if you ask me.

Those of you who came visiting looking for something a bit crafty, possibly a bit smutty and definitely a bit boozy to come along to, check out the next Craft Cartel gig on April 5th at Bebida.  Yes, Trash Bag Rehab is here for anyone who’s overdosed on cutesy craft crap.

Read all about it here. It’s gonna be a regular thing and it’s gonna be dirty, dirty fun.  See you there!