anti-war.

Anti-war posts, because more people want love than want war.

Operation W.A.N.T.

| Betsy

There few things that I like more than projects that bring to light the visceral raw truth of situations. It’s so easy to ignore these things happening so far away. It’s frighteningly easy to have it fade into the background news and to have it happen to other people.

That’s one of the reasons I started writing about craftivism, because I think it has the visual punch that is necessary to think about problems in new and different ways, ways that hit you in the gut and make you personalize what’s happening.

The photos above are from Operation W.A.N.T. (We Are Not Toys), when 7 members of the LA chapter of Iraq Veterans Against War placed 4,170 toy soldiers in a parking lot of a gas station on October 11th.

I especially like the fact that they used children’s toys to show just how many people (and how many families) have been changed forever thanks to the past years of conflict. And that’s just a tiny fraction of the number of individuals doing their jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeing all these little green army men lined up in a gas station parking lot (a place where we do pay attention to the numbers) hopefully personalized current events in a way that the 6 o’clock news never could.

With all the attention paid to gas station prices lately, watching them rise and rise and fall, we show that we can, indeed, pay attention to numbers. Just not when it doesn’t pertain to us.



Thanks to Rayna for the link who found it via Groundswell.

(photos: Jonas Lara)

decorating DIY.

| Betsy

This is what greeted me as I was going to get some coffee the other day:

homeland.jpg

There’s something similar about the state of the car and the state of the union. Rusty. Patchy. Old-fashioned.

But it seems that the political tide is somewhere betwixt and between right now, like the boot of the car. Mixed. Both colors (parties) fighting to take over the whole of the trunk.

Photos from Massive Knit’s event Tuesday.

re:defining.

| Betsy

Below is a response to a post earlier in the week that I thought was so beautiful that it warranted a post of its own.

Sometimes people ask me what craftivism means. Sometimes I don’t know quite what to say. Or know how it’s related to me.

But craftivism is more than just a way to express your politics and views, it’s about finding a way to better your life and that of others through creative endeavors. Because I believe that everything we make with our hands has power. Just what that power is, is your own decision.

flags.jpg

I’ve just discovered this site and it chimes so many bells with me. In my younger days I went on protest marches and rallies and carried banners and chanted chants. Now I have three young kids and I don’t seem to do that stuff anymore. It’s not that I no longer care about the same things – believe me, having kids has made me care even more. But nowadays I am more likely to make a sturdy shopping bag out of all the plastic carrier bags in the cupboard cut into strips and knit together, or crochet an afghan out of lots of leftover yarn from my late mother’s stash and give it to my father as a Christmas gift. Things like that. Currently I am braiding a rag rug out of all my old maternity dresses (boy does that ever provide closure!)

What would have happened if I *hadn’t* gone on all those protest marches back then? Nothing much. Everyone else would still have showed up – 30,000 people minus me is still lots of people. But if I hadn’t made that afghan for my dad, I never would have got to see the glistening in his eyes on Christmas day, and the tears in my own eyes when I visit him and see it folded over the arm of his favourite chair, obviously much used.

I never had a name for this before, or for the quilts I made for my kids which I tuck round them extra tight every time I hear another mother’s son or daughter has been killed by a suicide bomb, or the cookies we bake together from scratch because I want them to understand where food comes from (and also they taste good), or all the things I repair around the home not because I can’t afford to replace them but because … because … well just because I *prefer* to. And now I do have a name for it. Craftivism. Thank you.