So to celebrate, I want to announce a new project that I need your help on.

One of the things that has become very clear to me in doing and talking to other people about radical craft is that political and radical craft is far from a new idea. What is also clear to me is that this amazing herstory is way too absent from history books. It seems that even feminist political action herstory books marginalise the art and creative responses to political issues.

Which means we get bullshit stories like this one from Steven Wells at The Guardian. Sorry, Steven, if you think punk invented diy and grassroots resistance and defiance, then you are sadly, sadly mistaken.

So I’m going to start a series of profiles of women activists who use craft as a way of communicating their ideas, resistance and vision. And hopefully at some point in the future, I’ll be able to collate these stories into a book.

This first post I want to start as a tribute not to any woman in particular, but a large group of women. In the 80s and 90s thousands of women participated in one of the largest and longest events of creative resistance in history. The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp ran for 19 years as a creative opposition to the military industrial complex.

The Greenham women danced, sang, shouted, cried, dressed up, knitted, painted, had babies, got arrested (many, many times), cut fences, wove webs, breastfed, wrote stories and provoked debate. And more than anything, they gave us a vision of a world of peace.

I urge you to check out this absolutely fantastic website that has been put together to archive and commemorate the 19 years of creative resistance. There is a wealth of information on that site and you could spend hours looking at it all. I will recommend if there’s only one thing you look at, make it the Fabric of Greenham video. Such a beautiful video, it brought tears to my eyes.

So my call out is for the stories of women you know in your community who use craft as a form of resistance. I’m planning on using this site as a searchable archive, but I also want to put as much information as I can into public repositories of knowledge, such as archive.org and wikipedia.org If you would like to help with this aspect of the project please get in touch.

Please email me your stories, preferably with images. I want to know names, dates and issues. But I’m especially interested in the stories behind the work. I want to know about the design processes as well as the creation process. If you want help with questions to ask people let me know.

And please don’t hold back because you think some information you have is not significant enough. Even if you just remember someone’s name from some protest back in the day, let me know because it might be a good lead for me to follow up on.

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

Love and rage
kakariki at radicalcrossstitch dot com

*Some of those posts are from the previous manifestations of this site. But those were culled quite significantly when I moved it all over.

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