Craftivism = Dialogue, Dialogue = A New Beginning.

| Betsy

NB: For this post, I recommending physically clicking on the photos to see them at their full size. You won’t be disappointed.

Growing up in the 80s, we were all terrified by AIDS, even though, at that time, our chances of getting it as tweens and early teens was pretty nil. But the unknowableness of the disease made it terrifying. This photo came to our cultural consciousness from the pages of LIFE magazine in 1990.

I gave Ryan White a hug at a church function. He was a hugger, of course, so this was totally okay. I think it was the first time I truly realized that you could give with your presence, your attention, your touch. After all that we had heard on the news with fear mongering, hearing the reality straight from the teen’s mouth and having him stand in front of us, it seemed like the only thing we could do. To show him that we weren’t afraid, to show others there was no reason to be afraid, and to show ourselves that there was a real person in front of us. And sometimes when we’re farther afield, it feels like making something is all we can do.

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Often times when people ask me about craftivism, I mention the AIDS quilt* as an example, because everyone knows the AIDS quilt! Its presence has helped ease the stigma of AIDS and HIV. Its presence has helped create dialogue of all sorts, from family members who created the squares to visitors walking among the squares to people viewing photos of the squares, it helped start the conversation about AIDS. It moved all of us from being too frozen to do anything to literally giving us something to talk about. A literal quilt.

From a wonderful piece on the AIDS quilt by WBUR, here is a bit about its humble beginnings:

In spring 1987, Bay Area activist Cleve Jones—a friend and protégé of Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay San Francisco politician—began working with friends to assemble quilt squares. Each panel was 3 feet by 6 feet, the size of a human grave. Each was emblazoned with the name of someone lost to AIDS. And they put out a call inviting others to make more.

“My political cronies said it couldn’t work,” Jones told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1996. “I always knew it would be successful.”

The idea had come to Jones during a 1985 march to remember Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, who were both murdered by a gunman at City Hall in 1978. Jones asked participants to carry signs featuring the names of San Franciscans who had died from AIDS. At the end of the procession, they taped the signs to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The patchwork look reminded Jones of a quilt.

In June 1987, the first 40 panels of the AIDS Quilt were hung outside San Francisco City Hall. “We were founded to remember their names and to advance a movement,” Rhoad says. “We were founded by a group of grassroots activists to transform the conversation from statistics, the other, all the things that were driving the conversation in the ‘80s.”

The article continues to say that the quilt “honors 96,000 people” and that “they get a new panel almost every day.”

Amazing, huh?

Dialogue was the reason why I started craftivism in the first place. To highlight how what we make with our hands can start a conversation that we may not be able to otherwise put into words. And this, to me, is the most important thing about craftivism. The thing I’m the most proud of, knowing that in making craftivist pieces we are creating conversations that may not have otherwise happened. As craftivists, we are allowing our crafts to have a life beyond utilitarianism and aesthetics, we are allowing craft itself to enter the conversation.

You may be one person or 96,000 to contribute to your project or see your work, and that’s okay, because you started a dialogue with someone. Someone (hopefully!) put the connection together about the medium and the message and why they fit together. And as I talked about last week, it’s the you element that is the most important here.

Because often craftivist pieces are about subjects that we find difficult to talk about. Race, illness, class, harassment, assault, and more. All issues that are involved and not for bus stop chatter. All issues that we talk about amongst people that we know. All issues that are sticky and tricky and full of weight and frustration and layers. These conversations get caught in our throats and make our voices quake. Yet, when we have a craftivist piece about the issue, we can go into it sideways by explaining the process or aesthetics or reasoning.

I guess in a way, you could say that for craftivists, our pieces are literally our shields. Pieces of armor that deflect those who want to hurt us. If necessary, we can hide behind them. But more often than not, it is their very presence that gives us courage to go into battle. We know it will cushion any possible verbal blows and give us conviction with its coverage.

And with each dialogue we start, we create a new beginning, a new way of understanding. Yes, there may not be agreement, but that doesn’t mean something valuable hasn’t happened. You started the hard conversation. Your work opened the door to a back and a forth, instead of a one-way lecture.

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Over the past few days, pieces (here and here) have come out about a new issue of the Vangardist that was literally printed with the blood of HIV+ people. Talk about helping people work on their own feelings about AIDS! How many dialogues (both with others and internal) were started because of this? Amazing!

So, as the godmother of craftivism, I say to you, if you take nothing else away from me or craftivism itself, take away that your acts of craft are powerful, the dialogues you start are important, and your willingness to create them is immeasurable.

*If you’d like to read more about the AIDS quilt and craftivism, LJ Roberts’ essay in Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism is about just that.

What was your first activist act?

| Betsy

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This thought is on my mind today, even though I first shared this photo in June 2013. I’ve been going through some old Flickr photos as I look at various new (and free*) responsive WordPress themes to change this site over to one that is more friendly with the new(ish) Google mandate about mobile-friendly themes and Google search rankings. (If you’re not sure if your website is mobile friendly, you can check it out using Google’s Mobile Friendly Test.) While my site passes the test thanks to the theme I’m currently using (Canvas by WooThemes), I decided this site needed a makeover after creating my freelance site, HelloBetsyGreer.com, and using a beautiful new WordPress theme, Sela.

While we all know I’ve needed to update this site for forever, I hadn’t because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go with it… more personal? Less personal? Sadly, there’s no sourcebook for what to do when you create an -ism! Or at least one that grows from 2 Google hits to 100,000+, because it wasn’t just me who did that, it was you, too. So what responsibility do I have to you for that? (If you have thoughts or feelings on this, I really, truly want to hear them.)

I think about this question a lot, actually. And each time, I come to the decision that I need to be the person who shares other people’s craftivism (and craftivism-esque) projects, both past and present. Because together, we created an international creative movement! Do you know how entirely rad that is? We made this thing together. I may have put out the first** public flag, but it was you that continued to do so over the past 12 (!!!) years.

In redoing the site, I’m going to make it clearer about people’s projects that have been shared here over time, so that current, curious, and future craftivists can find them. And finally obtain more academic papers to share here, so that students can find this site as more of a resource. Along with that, I’m also going to continue to write my own opinions about the craft world, creativity, and craftivism, because I think there is a place for that, too.

So nothing too drastic, but hopefully an easier site to navigate whether people want to know craftivism’s history or its present form. In the photos that I’ll be using for the site, I’m going to be using some old personal photos, as well as hopefully using the photos of others with attribution. If you have some you’d like to share, please let me know!

Oh, and my first activist act? Probably stopping eating red meat at 16. A high school frenemy gave a talk in class about the meat industry, and I went home and announced I was no longer eating red meat. While it may not seem like a big deal in 2015, in 1991, it was huge deal, as my family stuck to a meat and 2 sides regimen. In the 22 years since then, I’ve been vegetarian, vegan, and finally settling on pescetarian, even though personally I keep a strict vegetarian kitchen.

Do you remember your first activist act? (Or craftivism act?) If so, do share!

* I’ve used both free and paid themes, and have decided to go with a free theme this time. I’ve used paid themes in the past, and have gotten burned by having to pay various charges after the fact.

** Technically, the Church of Craft put out the very first flag! I first wrote about the connection of craft and activism for a grant, then told my knitting circle what I was doing. One of them came up with the word “craftivism,” so I went home and Googled it, to find that the Church of Craft had previously (this was late 2002) done a craftivism workshop, for which there were 2 Google hits.

Follower Count, Popularity, + Your Holy Grail

| Betsy

A high follower count. Engagement. More RTs than that frenemy of yours. Enough likes to fill your heart, or so you’d think.

That’s the goal, right? I mean, what we’re all really going for?

Although I’m not sure how exactly I came across it yesterday, I ended up reading Anil Dash’s article on having 550K followers on Twitter, but not actually being, well… famous. And how it works and how it also doesn’t. One of the best things about the piece is that it literally shows you how having that many followers does not actually mean much, as you don’t get that many RTs (all things considered) or any real cool perks. Instead you get assholes spamming you to share their product, people that don’t actually care about you, they only care that you might be somebody.

The piece also shows us that we want to know that someone sees us, listens to us, validates our existence by reflecting part of themselves back on us, in the form of a comment or like.

From the article, “What becomes clear after a few years of having a large social network is that people are desperate to be heard… much of it ties back to people feeling powerless, of flailing toward any person who seems like they could provide opportunity or a way forward… But the truth is, our technological leaders have built these tools in a way that explicitly promotes the idea that one’s follower count is the score we keep, the metric that matters.”

Did you get that? Things were built so we can judge ourselves on our follower count. Things someone else built. Things that aren’t even very important in the grand scheme of life. (If you’re really wondering about this, go ask your grandmother about Twitter’s legacy.)

On a similar theme, Meighan O’Toole wrote another great post about this, reminding us that “social media is about business.” Someone else’s.

We use social media to be heard and either distill our true selves into a feed that’s a perfect amalgam of who we are or concoct a feed that shows who we want to be. And I think that it’s this distillation that we seek, this crystalization of who we are at our truest essence, whether we’re showing the world the true us or a false sense of self. We use these systems and platforms to show ourselves to the world, but if we’re not careful, we can forget who we are in the process.

Our follower counts make us feel like we are missing out on the party if we don’t follow someone with lots of followers and like there’s nothing to miss if the counts are too low. We feel embarrassed when we post something that gets very few likes, especially if we were truly enamored with the photo or thought. We mistake the silence, which doesn’t mean you’re a failure, but that perhaps your friends are busy cooking a delicious meal, your cousins are at a movie, and your Mom is taking a nap. And in letting this affect us, we’re changing who we are to become people sharing for validation, not because we want to connect.

So what if we reframed the silence? And didn’t think any less of ourselves because of it?

The great thing about the internet is that we don’t always know who’s looking at our posts, especially if we’re using social media, as we don’t own the stats. If we post what makes our hearts sing, a lonely teenager in Greenland may find it and find solace and someone else may beam at a memory that your photograph evokes. If they don’t comment or like, that doesn’t mean they didn’t like it or didn’t see it… but we discount all those non-commenters by only caring about the ones who did comment. We discount their very experience with our content.

Think about it, how many times do you read something online and agree with it and don’t comment because it’s too much of a pain to deal with CAPTCHA or you’re in a hurry or your bus just went into an area with no spotty wireless? And how many times do you read something that really resonates, but don’t comment because you feel like you’ll sound stupid or won’t add anything new or it hits a really vulnerable (and good) place and you can’t possibly choose the right words?

The internet needs good content amidst the fluff. We need you for who you are, not on a projection of you solely based on likes. We need you to be a beacon someone can cling to when they feel all alone or the answer to someone’s problem or the reason someone smiles. We need you to show up despite the possible silence. We need you to strive to put out content that makes people think, without caring about the response. We need you to make good content, tag it well, and fall in love with it because it’s good. And because you never know who it will find or help.

The internet needs you. Not another asshole who posts a bad joke because he knows someone from 3rd grade will RT it. We need good content to be your Holy Grail, not high engagement. We need you to show up. Because your people will find you when you are really you. You will build your own community based on people that like this real you. And yes, you will be heard. But first, first you, the youest you, need to dare to show up.

ETA: So OMG, the cool widgetized links aren’t being found when you click on the pics at the bottom here. I changed the link for my blog, not realizing I also needed to go back and change things in the 600-old posts, too. Holy crap. I’m working on it, please bear with me. Should anyone have a magical fix, please let me know!

Fashion Revolution Day + Notes from the Labor Industry

| Betsy

For over 4 years, I worked in the labor industry, editing auditor’s reports of factories (mainly) overseas. Having no previous background in the industry, I first found it boring and initially just used the time to work on my editing skills, as I worked with reports written by people from all different nationalities and linguistic backgrounds. I enjoyed how reports came to us as somewhat of a puzzle that needed to be put back together in order for the public to be able to read them easily.

But then, I became fascinated by the contents of the reports themselves, not just their grammatical components. I learned that in some countries people had more days off for the death of their father than for the death of their mother (or even their own wedding). That in many countries both workers and managers firmly believe that workers perform their duties just as well on the 4th hour of their shifts as they do in the 18th hour. And that often, if a factory changed its working hours to within a 48-hour work week (in order to satisfy our organizational benchmarks), many workers would quit and go find jobs in a factory offering a 60-hour work week because they couldn’t earn enough money at the first factory.

Some of the findings were surprising, as in some countries women could take sick days off for having their periods. And some canteens in one country catered to the local food preferences of their migrant workers from others. And that even though it’s often used in journalism as the biggest problem in factories, child labor was not actually found very often in the apparel and footwear factories that we worked with.

There were sometimes also ghastly findings, like rodent-infested factory canteens and live wires in dormitories and lung problems due to the inhalation of dust or tiny microscopic bits of fabric. My least favorite thing of all to find in these reports, however, was that sometimes factory doors were kept locked during the day with chains and that fire escapes were either non-existent or too rickety to hold many people.

Two years ago today, the Rana Plaza building collapsed. I remember sitting at my desk researching articles trying to find out if any of the companies we worked with were involved, looking at the photos online and seeing people being rescued by sliding down slips of fabric (could you imagine that being the standard and means of safety in your place of employment?), the whole while seeing the death toll rising.

I’m no longer at that job, but I am thankful for the world it exposed me to. A world that most people don’t get to look into or even think about on a daily basis. A look into factories where people are making what we wear on our bodies and our feet. A look at how factories both improved and worsened people’s lives, depending on how they were run. A daily reminder that somewhere, someone had a literal hand in making my clothes.

So, today, on this 2nd anniversary, articles are being written, and thanks to the efforts of organizations like Fashion Revolution, people are taking photos of themselves with the labels of the clothes they are wearing. You can check out the #fashrev hashtag on Instagram here. People are talking about what happened, and that’s why I started craftivism in the first place, to open up dialogue between people about subjects that may be seen as difficult.

You can take photos of your labels, wear your clothes inside out, take note of our problems with consumption today. But hopefully that doesn’t mean you’ll forget about it tomorrow, because somewhere someone is making your clothes, your shoes, your carpets. And by remembering that when we make purchases, hopefully we can buy more clothes from producers who are auditing their factories (there are several different ways to do that, some better than others, but that’s not really an issue for this post); treating their workers better (you can check out initiatives like Labour Behind the Label to see how different companies are doing); and learn to make our own clothes (on that front, I always hear raves about Cal Patch’s video classes!)

By making someone else’s day-to-day work part of our day-to-day awareness, that doesn’t mean we have to totally change all our habits right now. It means we can start small by mending old clothes that have holes in them instead of throwing them away (check out Tom of Holland’s rad Visible Mending Programme!); checking the labels in our clothes and become aware of where they come from (hint: they don’t all come from China); and we can think about whether or not we really need that new top. Small changes and decisions lead to even bigger ones over time, the trick is to bring them into your own personal awareness.

But to me, this day will always be about this image below that was captured 2 years ago. His face is reminiscent of hundreds of photos I have seen over the years of anonymous workers in factories. Yet their embrace despite disaster is something that we all can recognize as the basis of humanity, as we all search love and comfort and each other in times of need. This photo reminds me of why it’s important to remember where my clothes came from, because after all, the people that made them, they are just like me.

See Yourself Happy.

| Betsy

So it all started when I posted this photo on Instagram last week. And I posted it because I was happy with it. And because I was super happy to be happy about a photo of me. It felt like a success (perhaps a somewhat pathetic success, but still a success).*

However, my mind kept going back to an #effyourbeautystandards photo (NSFW-ish) I saw last week by the Instagram user _redlipsandliner_. How happy she looked. How fully and completely joyful. I even saved it on my phone, because it hit me so hard how I don’t equate happy photos with beautiful photos of me. Ever. Happy me is not beautiful me in my mind. So I wrote this.

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And looked at other people’s #selfies on Twitter. Not a lot of people using #selfie seemed to think their smiles were worth showing either.

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#selfie4

And so I put on some Taylor Swift and took happy photos of me to see what I looked like. In succession vs. just one photo in isolation. Dorkily, it’s kind of the first time I have ever seen myself happy over a period of several minutes.

This is what happened.

 

You can read it a bit more concisely here, because I couldn’t decide which version was better. Revealing the photo of me, not revealing it? Making a longer post or a shorter one?

And I feel like a total dork for being happy about the happy photos, like really, honestly, practically-bone-shattering happy. Then I checked Facebook and a friend posted this and my whole mood changed. It triggered the living crap out of me. (My experiences were different from hers, but still, whoa.)

And I started cowing in my own house. My shoulders crumpled. My heart constricted. My head bowed. My throat felt like it was closing up. I was holding back tears suddenly after a day post-happy photos of awesomeness. Because a long long time ago, some people took the happy from me, sucked it out like marrow. (Again, it wasn’t the same, so please don’t feel sad, okay?)

And then liking, loving the pretty, happy me suddenly became a rebellion. A celebration. Standing tall instead of trying to be tiny and unseen. And I probably won’t remember what day this happened a year from now, ten years from now, but this video is proof. Proof that a happy me is a pretty me.

So, I’m wondering, when was the last time YOU saw yourself happy? (And liked it!)

You, too, deserve to take back your happiness. Go find it, now. Maybe it’s just me that has this problem. But maybe, maybe not.

*For anyone wondering what this has to do with craftivism… A happy craftivist is a better craftivist.