Subversive Knitting

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Subversive Knitting Links

Here are a few fun links for ways to use your knitting to shake up the status quo a little bit!

The MicroRevolt web site includes the KnitPro software program that will turn any digital image into a knitting chart. You don't need to install any software. You just upload a GIF, JPEG, or PNG file, and the software makes a chart for you. It's very cool. If you're not careful, you'll spend hours uploading different photos just to see what the charts look like!

CitiPaper Online has an article about "countercultural knitting" with photos of some very unusual knitted items made by the Baltimore Stitch-n-Bitch group. The Baltimore Art Museum's contempory art curator, Chris Gilbert says, "In making, creating, doing, farming, even consuming, one is engaged in a political act."

The Knitty Winter 2005 issue features an article by David Demchuk called "The Only Boy." That alone makes his knitting subversive in the United States, where well over 90 percent of knitters are women.

Last January, The Guardian had an article about Debbie Stoller, editor of Bust magazine and author of the best-selling book, Stitch-n-Bitch. Debbie's work shows how knitting, once shunned by modern women as a relic of an older age, is being used by young women today as a declaration of newfound feminsm. No more the hobby of gray-haired grannies, today knitting is popular with college students, actresses, and women of all ages.

The KnitKnit Sundown Salon, held at Fritz Haeg's LA-based "Sundown Salon" in February of 2004 won a prize for being the "most subversive" because of its "monumental appreciation of handcrafted knitwear... The repetitive creative process of knitting, offset by the dramatic unraveling of labor so symbolic of forces in life and nature, and the depiction of neoprimitive knit costumes in action actually dare to suggest a new social order, to hint at some secret truth to be discovered in the knit and purl." You can order a video or rent a DVD of the event on the web page.

We Make Money -- NOT! is a very cool website that features several articles about knitting, including one about knitting for penguins (if you can't believe it, here's a picture. Click the photo for more info). Just put "knitting" in the search box to see what other fantastic knitting stories they have.

The Royal College of Art in London has a bio of Freddie Robbins and some photos of her unusual knitting projects. On her Shockwave website, she compares knitting to using the internet. Freddie considers her knitting subversive, because she takes the traditionally tame and feminine craft, and turns it on its head by making bizarre and macabre art objects.