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Culture Watch
Knit Local, Act Global - Stitching for Social (and personal) change.
by Molly Marsh
Knitting is hip. Subversive, even.
Take knitting and crocheting, crafts previously assigned to grannies and church
ladies, combine them with the punk-inspired Do-It-Yourself movement and the
connecting possibilities of the Internet, and you get a large-scale revival. And
like any revival worth its salt, it has transformative effects—personally,
socially, and spiritually.
The last few years have seen record-breaking yarn sales, a burst of
knitting-inspired blogs and Web sites, a TV show called Knitty Gritty, and
several new fiction books (“knit lit”) that have as their premise the
friendships formed in knitting circles. One, titled The Friday Night Knitting
Club, by Kate Jacobs, will hit the big screen next year starring Julia Roberts,
rumored to be a knitter herself. Nonfiction fans can find more socially minded
fare, such as Knitting for Peace: Make the World a Better Place One Stitch at a
Time or Knitting Heaven and Earth: Healing the Heart with Craft.
The revival carries a new attitude, even a political edge, brought by a wave of
women in their 20s and 30s who approach stitching with a hipster sass and
sensibility. Although people of all ages are gravitating toward knitting, these
“chicks with sticks” have accounted for a 150 percent increase in knitting and
crocheting since 2002, according to a study by the Craft Yarn Council of
America.
Debbie Stoller, co-founder of a magazine for young feminists called Bust, has
helped refashion the knitter-as-dowdy image into one that’s plucky and cool. She
grew up knitting and crocheting in a household that considered them respectable
forms of art, but as she got older, she realized they carried a huge stigma. “As
far as I could tell, the only reason they had this bad image was because it was
something that had traditionally been done by women,” Stoller told a National
Public Radio reporter. “As a feminist I wanted to change that.”
Stoller started running craft ideas and projects in Bust magazine in 1999, and
has since published several books on knitting and crocheting that carry
instructions for iPod covers, yoga mat bags, even bikinis; there’s not a single
toilet paper roll cover in the mix. For women worried that knitting or
crocheting marked them as oddball or old-fashioned, Stoller and others showed
them knitting and feminism could co-exist, that anything traditionally
considered “women’s work” could be re-evaluated and reclaimed. Purl Grrrl has,
to use Stoller’s rallying cry, “taken back the knit.”
Knitting and crocheting—clothing, especially—can also be a form of resistance,
an alternative to consumerism and capitalism. The time and expense knitting or
crocheting can require is considerable; as anyone who has ever knit a sweater
can tell you, we don’t pay enough for the human labor invested in most of what
we buy. Making things by hand helps us value their true worth; it also assures
us that, at least in some cases, our socks and mittens aren’t made in
sweatshops.
“There used to be a stigma attached to making something yourself, but that’s
gone,” said Mary Colucci, executive director of the Craft Yarn Council. “We’ve
become so mass-produced that people have a new attitude about handmade things.
It’s refreshing.”
In some cases, those handmade items, and the act of creating them, are
political—call it “craftivism.” Cast Off, a London knitting group, holds
“knit-ins” in parks, subway cars, and other public places around the city, both
to introduce newcomers to the craft but also to raise the ideals of both
self-sufficiency and community. These “guerrilla knitters,” as they’ve been
called, have also marched in anti-war demonstrations with the slogan “Drop
Stitches, Not Bombs.” Among the items for sale on their Web site is a hand-knit
hand grenade—a far superior alternative to the real thing.
The Calgary-based Revolutionary Knitting Circle, which describes itself as a
“loosely knit circle of revolutionaries,” operates similarly. Their aim is to
resist corporate globalization and promote local independence by staging
“knit-ins” at places of power. Usually that’s banks and government buildings,
but in 2002 they turned up at the G8 Summit in Calgary for a “Global Knit-In.”
Some protesters knit blankets to give to the homeless, others knit peace
armbands and squares that, when stitched together, were supposed to represent
the social safety net. “Knitting is symbolic of ‘community independence,’” group
founder Grant Neufeld told a reporter. “We need as communities to be able to
take care of ourselves because when we are not able to take care of ourselves,
we end up dependent on others—in this case the corporation—to survive.”
THE MEDITATIVE AND spiritual qualities of knitting can also yield inward
revolutions. It can be healing to stitch in a corner by yourself or in a group,
working with your hands to create something beautiful out of a ball of string.
For one thing, you can’t rush. You have to slow down and focus on what’s
directly in front of you—a salve for the overprocessed, overanalytical mind.
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits comes in stitching with others. Knitting
circles (aka “Stitch ’n’ Bitch” groups) are places for connection, for sharing
the good, the bad, and the ugly. After all, most of us don’t knit because we
need to make our own clothes (buying the sweater is actually cheaper); we knit
because we need each other.
That’s the case for the “Knit-Wits,” who have met every Monday morning at
Barbara Berger’s home in Sacramento, California, for 10 years. The group is
comprised of former co-workers and church friends who have stitched their way
through the deaths of spouses and other painful challenges. “Some people call us
the ‘Knit-Nots’—there are days when we do very little knitting and a lot of
talking,” Berger says. “It’s a support group; it’s not just the knitting. It’s
just really important to maintain these relationships.”
And while personal friendships are strengthened, knitting circles such as
Berger’s are also reknitting the social fabric of their communities. Whether
it’s creating caps for newborns and chemo patients, afghans for Afghans, prayer
shawls, or socks for homeless men in their towns, it’s a chance to offer
tangible and spiritual support, to do something enriching and meaningful.
Janet Bristow and Vicky Galo started the Prayer Shawl Ministry after their
experience in a program of applied feminist spirituality at the Women’s
Leadership Institute at Hartford Seminary. The ministry invites stitchers to
create prayer shawls for people in need—a neighbor with cancer, a stranger who’s
down on his or her luck, children in developing countries. Knitters pray over
the shawls before, during, and after their creation—the prayer shawl Web site
contains prayers, blessings, and liturgies for doing so. Many church services
incorporate a time for blessing the shawls before they’re distributed.
“A prayer shawl is prayer for the shawl maker. It’s a spiritual practice. The
shawls are made in prayer, given as prayer, received as a prayer, and hopefully
worn in that spirit,” said Bristow from her home in Farmington, Connecticut.
While it’s hard to quantify the ministry’s growth, its impact is evident in the
increasing number of workshops and seminars Bristow and Galo are asked to give.
Their Web site also contains many testimonials from creators and recipients of
the shawls. “The shawl prayed for me. It gave me strength,” one woman wrote. “It
thought and spoke for me when I could not, and it brought comfort at a time of
agony.” For a Fort Collins, Colorado, woman grieving the suicide of her
16-year-old son, the three shawls she received were concrete evidence of
consolation. Wrapped within one, she writes, “I know the broad, deep mystery of
God’s presence in new ways.”
Bristow and Galo had no idea what the ministry would become. “We never meant for
this to happen!” Bristow said. “We were just reaching out to the people in our
lives. Obviously we were in the right place at the right time. We were ready for
it, and I think the world was ready for it.”
Whether it’s for fun, fellowship, or “craftivism,” the world seems to have
renewed its passion for knitting. When we hold needles and a ball of yarn, we
also hold possibility; we can knit ourselves to each other and our wider
communities in large and small ways. What could be more revolutionary than that?
Molly Marsh is an associate editor at Sojourners
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0702&article=070238