shibui

A Craftivist's Manifesto

:: link to Craftivist Collective

Practicing

Practicing a little cross stitch and embroidery. Making a mini banner for our new Zero Waste pop-up shop. 'Proper' craftivist projects will follow...

 

A tiny brooch

A little brooch for my sister - and a slightly larger piece of boro and embroidery

 

Craftivist - quiet activism through craft: Why make mini banners?

 

 

The Calming Effects of Sewing

‘A way to exorcise pain using a tactile language scripted by a needle and thread.’ Illustration: Eva Bee

I grew up in post-war Britain when, saved from German invasion – men returned from war, children from evacuation, families were reunited – the comfort of the home became paramount. Its importance was marked out in sewn domestic niceties: embroidered tray cloths, cheval sets and tea cosies. My home had a sewing machine in the corner, an ever-ready sewing workbox by my mother’s chair and a box that brimmed with buttons for us children to rifle through by way of entertainment. This was my material world.

Living in industrial Glasgow, a city grimed with soot, smog and smoke, my landscape was monochrome until the day, when I was about six years old, my mother took me to an Aladdin’s cave in the city centre. There she bought me linen cloths already stamped with floral flourishes, packets of gold-tipped needles and silver scissors with handles shaped like a bird’s wings – and she let me choose loops of embroidery threads from a carousel of colours that dazzled me.

 

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An article on mending

Fix up, look sharp: how to mend more and buy less

Instagram is awash with beautifully mended socks. Photograph: Kyoko Uchida/Alamy

An industrious weaver called Krysta Relyea recently wrote a post on Instagram saying she had just realised she owned enough pairs of jeans to get her through the rest of her life, provided she maintains her weight. “Of course, patches and new zippers will be a must,” she said. “Some just need a little altering.”

Search the terms with which she tagged that nugget – including #buynothingnew, #visiblemending and #makedoandmend – and a world of possibility opens up. Whereas visibly repaired clothes might once have been considered a sign of not being able to afford new ones, the mending movement celebrates the ingenuity our forebears deployed to make old things last. If your new year aim is to buck the national trend by not buying a suitcase-worth of new clothes – not to mention the new items to the value of £9,000 that the average household wastes or doesn’t use every year – mending skills may come in handy.

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Craftivisim - a gentle way to make important points and to share them with the world

FOR the past six months activists across Scotland have been sitting in their homes, or in gathered groups, knitting squares in wool colours that represent the land, the sea or the sky. Their clicking needles have also created honey bees, flowers, bugs and birds.

These are an Extinction Rebellion group called Knitstinction Rebellion, and what they are doing is often described as craftivism. Mass die-ins, blocked roads and fake blood sprays, of the type Extinction Rebellion have become known for, are not the only way to change the world. You can also knit your way to a better one. Or crochet. Or embroider. Activism, after all, has many threads, and the needle of protest already has a long history, dating back to the suffragettes and beyond. It’s also having a bit of a moment now.

One of the people who has done more than most to promote such an approach to campaigning is Sarah Corbett, a lifelong activist who describes her method as “gentle protest craftivism”. Corbett, who presented a talk and workshop this week as part of the Festival of Politics at the Scottish Parliament, has written a book, How To Be A Craftivist, and delivered campaigns across the country through her group Craftivist Collective. She is behind projects like Don’t Blow It, in which personalised, hand-embroidered handkerchiefs were sent out to the 14 board members of Marks & Spencer and ultimately persuaded them to deliver the Living Wage to 50,000 members of staff.

 

Craftivist Collective’s 10-point manifesto was used by the World Wildlife Fund in a campaign that led to the changing of a law to protect migratory birds. It’s an approach she has been honing for the last 10 years, on a journey that began on a five-hour train ride to Glasgow. She was working for the Department for International Development at the time and taking a Pendolino train whose swaying she knew would make it hard for her to read work papers or answer emails, so she decided that instead she would pick up a cross-stitch set of a teddy bear picture.

 

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three cosy sockhead hats

Hats knit with some of my finds from Perth Festival of Yarn

 

:: here's the pattern 

Because of the moths

....who had to seek out my most expensive cashmere sweater - Johnstones of Elgin (even extremely expensive in a sale) and create a good dozen holes, some of them quite large. This has given me an opportunity for a mending-in-process project. Some darning and some patching.

wheesht

A gift for myself, for quiet reading time over the festive period: 

wheesht

creative making in uncertain times

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Wheesht int.v., n., adj., Scots and northern English dialects: to be quiet, to quieten, to hush, to remain silent. To haud or keep one’s wheesht: to be quiet, to hold one’s tongue. Also in diminutive forms (whish, whishie): the slightest sound. The least whisper. The faintest rumour or report.

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In Wheesht, Kate Davies asks how we might best enable and encourage our creative practice in the face of ambivalence, uncertainty and doubt. At a cultural moment when it seems that creativity can be anything to anyone, Wheesht  poses a set of radical and redefining questions. What if, instead of breaking or disrupting, we made mending and repair the focus of our work? How might creative praxis change if it became more about bringing other people forward than blowing one’s own trumpet? What if we stopped wishing for creative freedom and thought much more carefully about what limitation or impediment might have to show us? Might shutting up and hauding our wheesht be, in the end, of as much importance to our creative work as other, louder, forms of expression?

Whether you like creating words or images, sounds or sweaters, at moments of uncertainty it is important to try to find new things to say and different ways in which to say them. With her firm belief that simple acts of making can always make things better, this book is Kate Davies’ creative call for us all to haud our wheesht and listen, before making our work, with conviction, with purpose and with heart.

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