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Rebel knits

It’s pretty hard to undercut the Warehouse, so craft has a new role—relief from mass-produced sameness

[Startups]

There’s a revolution underway. Its foot soldiers are mostly women, often armed with knitting needles. In Houston, a team of 11 women regularly ‘bombs’ the streets with knitted graffiti. A telephone pole cosy here, a door knob embellishment there—these women (mostly 30-something mums) are using their half-finished knitting projects to warm cold city streets, one car antenna at a time.

The Knitta Please posse could be considered the militant arm of the indie craft revolution. While the Houston-based taggers are a small but attention-grabbing faction, the vast majority of this movement is law-abiding, community-spirited and only occasionally political. What separates so-called indie craft from traditional craft is a blatant disregard for patterns, a preference for recovered materials and a sense of the ironic. Not wanting to replicate what’s already been done and eschewing mass-produced in favour of handmade, indie crafters are people with something to say and they’re using the nearly-lost domestic skills of their grandmothers to say it.

Though this crafty corruption of the ‘feminine arts’ is happening around the globe, it seems Kiwi crafties are particularly good at it.

Heather Barnes is the founder of alternative craft market Craftwerk, where she sometimes sells knitted, anatomically-correct hearts and little pink vaginas. Craftwerk started in Wellington, but in September did a tour of the country that included Auckland, Christchurch, Hamilton and Dunedin. Wellington band collective A Low Hum travelled with the show. Barnes calls the works in her shows “crazy crafts” and believes the trend is a modern adaptation of traditional crafts that blurs the lines between art, craft and fashion.

There’s no economy in crafts anymore. People motivated by price will shop exclusively at The Warehouse. So craft has a new role in the modern household: to provide relief from mass-produced sameness.

More than 2,000 people came through the doors for the last Craft2.0 market at TheNewDowse gallery in Wellington. Co-organiser Sue Tyler says she and Martha Craig have been blown away by the popularity of the events. Craft2.0 grew out of Craftwerk and was developed when the Dowse approached Tyler and Craig to put on a craft fair for the gallery’s re-opening in March. It was so successful that the Dowse has agreed to host the event several times a year. “It works really well with what’s on at the Dowse,” says Tyler, “because they are often exploring how people make things and how people are being creative.”

It’s craft, but not as your grandmother knew it

There’s never enough space for the number of crafters who apply for tables at Craft2.0. The criterion is that everything sold has to be handmade. It’s not a money-maker, says Tyler, who organises the event without pay and sells her own laser-cut jewellery.

“Most crafters are like me and we don’t break even. But I don’t mind. I do it because it’s fun and it makes me happy. In the New Zealand movement there’s a real sense of community.

“A lot of us make money so that we can buy other people’s stuff. Crafting is not competitive. There is a sense of not being greedy about grabbing every single cent you can from something.”

That’s not to say the crafters don’t have commercial ambitions. Esther Lamb is hoping to make a living from Toggle.co.nz, the website she started with friend Shelley Simpson. Toggle is an international online sales portal for handmade New Zealand goods, and Lamb says it helps “augment the domestic economy”.

A former lawyer and restaurateur, Lamb is a lifetime crafter. After her third child was born, she was looking for somewhere to sell her felt bags and quickly realised that the retail environment was punishing for those selling handmade goods. The obvious answer was to do something online. Unlike Trade Me or US-based craft site Etsy.com, the goods at Toggle are curated. Although Lamb struggles with the ‘indie craft’ label, she says the work you’ll find on Toggle often has an ethic of recycling. It’s original and often unusual.

“It’s finding these traditional practices but kind of perverting them or distorting them and making them into something that is unique and individual and very ‘now’,” she says.

Traditional craft enthusiast Rosemary McLeod has criticised the indie craft movement, accusing it of taking the piss. “I think she’s wrong,” says Lamb. “It’s done with a great deal of humour and there is a wit to it, but I think it’s a reaffirmation of those traditional forms. I see it as a sort of celebration of those things, an acknowledgement in a way.”

The indie craft movement may be about to explode. With a healthy appreciation for retro, a sense of humour rooted firmly in irony, a DIY ethos and a strong musical and cultural identity, New Zealand is fertile ground for such a revolution. Inspiration is contagious, so prepare to be conscripted to the cause.

Kris Herbert is a Lyttelton-based freelance writer and curiosity hound

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