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!

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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

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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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