This has been a sad and horrible week, difficult to sleep, stop watching the news about a massacre, and why so many guns. It seemed absolutely correct to stay up late last night to read The New Yorker. This is the Style & Design Issue, which is always dreamy, even though many of us are in our jeans or bathrobes most of the time.
A story titled “The Unravelling,” written by Carrie Battan, offers a lot of information about how knitting and hand work was important over the centuries. The history of knitting continues to be flexible, especially now when people have been stuck at home being happy to create wonderful things. A friend is one of those people who deserves an Oscar.
The story’s subtitle is “How politics tore the fabric of an online crafting community.” The photograph that accompanies the story, is credited to Greg Arden and Solomon Burbridge. The caption notes: “ ‘We were kind of innocent and naive, thinking that people will behave well,’ one of Ravelry’s founders said.”
In “The Unravelling,” Ravelry has 9 million followers; it began in 2007, and took off, with patterns and ideas and more. But going forward, politics crept in when Barack Obama became president. But the pussy hat, which turned into a pink tide, suddenly became a political garment (and totally understandable because of the hundreds of marches in January 2017).
There is only one link for this to a story that an historic creative pursuit somehow was polarized. Since this country is polarized anyway right now, why not knitting?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/how-politics-tested-ravelry-and-the-crafting-community
Chandler in Denver 