art + craft = craftivism.

More knitting soldiers! You may be asking yourself, “Why is this important?” Well, war and craft are two things throughout history found in almost every culture, and each of them got more or less “assigned” to a particular gender along the way. Women, the childbearers, needed to stay close to home to watch their babies, so war was pretty much out. Men, well, let’s just say there are loads of reasons why they ended up with war instead of craft. As they are prevalent throughout history, I’m interested in the links between the two, as if you look at America’s wars of last century, the rise in popularity in craft, follows the same timeline. Crazy, no?

The accompanying text is the only mention I’ve ever seen of soldiers knitting for evacuated children.

Two soldiers knitting in wartime, 31 October 1939. ‘If you drop in at ‘The Peggy Bedford’ on the Great West Road in Longford, Middlesex, the landlady will ask you to knit. She will hand you knitting needles with your drink, and the idea is that you knit a few squares between the orders. These squares are later made up into clothes for soldiers and evacuated children. Two customers in uniform busily knit after obtaining their drinks’.

Slowly, I’m discovering more evidence of soldiers being taught knitting in previous wars because of its therapeutic nature. The text below accompanies the photo below on the website for Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine:

Great strides were also made in occupational therapy. The men were taught new job skills that could be used once they were dismissed from the hospital. Subjects taught in the Fort’s vocational school included telegraphy, metal work, basketry, commercial art, shorthand and typing. Carpentry, upholstery, auto repair, bookkeeping and even knitting were also offered to keep the wounded occupied and provide them with a possible means of livelihood. It was the first serious attempt to give disabled American veterans real employment.

Probably the spirit of the hospital’s rehabilitation program was best depicted in an illustration on the anniversary cover of “The Trouble Buster,” Fort McHenry’s own magazine, printed on its own presses by it own patients.

There is more about “The Trouble Buster” in Carry On: A Magazine on the Reconstruction of Disabled Soldiers, Part 1 published in 1919 by the Office of the Surgeon General. Not only does Carry On have awesome article titles such as “The Seas of Opportunity are Waiting for Specialized Brains” and “The Sluggard and the Ant,” it also provides a pretty interesting look at what returning soldiers were facing after World War I.

And lastly, the first thing I found online that mentioned teaching soldiers to knit because it’s a “mental stimulus.” From the Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester NY, February 7, 1918, page 12:

Rochester Women Have Proficient Pupils in Camp Dix Hospital
Rochester women are teaching soldiers in the base hospital at Camp Dix to knit. Wooford G. TIMMONS, of New York, and Elmer ADLER, of Rochester, were instrumental in procuring the instruments and a big supply of wool and the Y. M. C. A. has installed a number of small table looms. Among those who are teaching the soldier patients to knit are Mrs. Joseph ALLING, wife of Joseph T. ALLING, of this city, who is doing Y. M. C. A. work at the camp, and Mrs. W. J. WOOD; Mrs. ALLING is the chief instructress.
The physicians have declared that knitting is beneficial to the men as a mental stimulus.

I also really dig that Mrs. Alling is called “the chief instructress.”

Researching the therapeutic value of knitting, I came across this from 1918. More later, but too cool not to share now.

As for anyone who thinks that knitting is just for wusses, please note that this picture was taken at Walter Reed. Yes, Walter Reed Army Medical Center.*

ca. 1918-1919, Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, DC, USA — Bed-ridden wounded knit to help pass the time. Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, DC, ca. 1918-1919. — Image by © CORBIS

*Restraining with all my power to not type “Take that, hardasses” here. Yes, I know a lot of really nice military guys, but knitting, let’s just say is not on their radar.

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead. [...] To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
– Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

Last night, while watching the Olympics (multi-tasking!) I updated my Facebook page, which I hadn’t done in over a year. I also updated the photo of me on here.

While the photos we choose to represent ourselves online are also curated by us, online photos are, shall we say, carefully edited. Or scripted or public relations related or any of a million other things photos do. Although yes, now I have to uncomfortably look at myself when and if I log into Facebook, and then I just sit there typing while the me of the last week watches the me now.

Eventually I got down to the box where it asked me about my “Favorite Quote” and I put the above. It captures who I am better than any photo ever could and it reveals more about me, too. Noticing this, I then got annoyed that that particular box was all the way down at the bottom, when that box really should be at the top.

As instead of the photos we choose to show the world, the words we choose to hold dear and sacred enough to remember despite being barraged constantly with more and more and more words are what really define us.

The rest? Fluff you have to muddle through in order to get to the good part, discovering what we hold to be true and right and kind. So we take the photo, put it up and hope that the people who come into our lives have the patience, the love and the wherewithal to stick around long enough to find that teeny tiny really way far down box. As that’s what holds the essence of who we are always, not just who we chose to be frozen in a moment in time.

Now that I’m back from Guatemala, all I can think about is trash. Garbage. Waste. Sewage. Landfill. Bins. Dumps. After thinking about prettier things for ages, it’s been weird to think instead about trash. It’s not pretty, cute, lovely, soft, cuddly or cozy. It’s gross. Today over on one of my other projects, Make and Meaning, I wrote a fairly lengthy post about it, which you can read here.

What are the crafty DIY possibilities of trash? We love coming up with ideas to make our own lives happier, brighter and cuter with trash as a way to reduce our footprint on the earth, but what can we create and teach other people to make that will make their lives better? Having embraced DIY and craft since sometime around 2001, isn’t it time we challenge ourselves to see what we can do on a larger scale?

I don’t think it is. I think it’s a direction that can fuel our designs and ponderings and tests in new directions, ultimately allowing us to become better, stronger makers. After all, even thousands of years ago craft was the original DIY worldwide, why can’t it be embraced by all now in modernity?

I also realize that maybe this is somewhere that DIY doesn’t need to go now. And that maybe I need to follow that divergent path to see where it might lead.

While there are many, many photos documenting the waste we produce, these photos of children in Ghana are absolutely amazing.

Back home from Guatemala. Can still feel tiny hands clutching mine. The giant smiles on tiny faces looking up at me and the rapid Spanish? Miss those, too.

As for craftivism, have you seen the article about it in The Observer? It’s about the awesomeness of Carrie Reichardt and her house. Will put up the whole article later as the pics don’t show online… either does the sidebar about the work of Garth Johnson, Sarah Corbett and me! Yay!

P.S. This is also the only photo I will ever upload online of me from the back. I have better ones of the children, but given the rate of child kidnapping in Guatemala (for adoption, sex trade and organs), am not going to put them online. Those mothers have enough to worry about, I’m not going to broadcast their children’s faces on the internet.