EG: When we left you last month, JB and I were preparing our election night hot dish and jerk chicken, filled with joy and optimism (well, I was optimistic; JB was anxious). I joked that I was going to have a Big Mac and ketchup on hand to hurl at the wall, in case the election took a turn. It turns out the joke was on all of us. The ketchup is finally off the wall, but oy gevalt!
I remember how much it helped me to churn out scores of pink hats in 2016, so I started knitting a sweater this week. I have been a knitter most of my life. Mom taught me to knit when I was 14, after I requested a posh Ralph Lauren ski sweater. She got me a pattern and yarn to knit it for myself — it was a fugly masterpiece (and way too long; always check your gauge).
This new project should keep me occupied at least through the midterms. How are you coping, JB?
JB: Crafting has always gotten me through stressful times. During the pandemic, I created a group called the Macaroni Gluers, as a way for my women friends to gather and work on projects. Some are serious knitters, but we’ve engaged in all kinds of decorative arts from ceramics, to needle felting, rubber stamp making, and fashioning produce bags from old t-shirts.
I realized how important my own “making” was for my mental health during the first year of medical school. As the hours droned on inside a dark lecture hall, I found myself overwhelmed by the reams of information presented for rote memorization. To ease my anxiety, I sometimes slipped out of lecture for a walk around campus, knowing I could get the notes later (this was really pre-internet). On one walk, I wandered into the campus Arts Center and discovered workshops in the basement. The metal smithing shop was unbelievable. They even had precious gems to buy for settings.
Soon, I was working on a ring with three stone settings. This project required a lot of concentration, fine motor skills and facility with solder and a torch (skills I would apply on my surgery rotation two years down the road, mind you). I may have gotten ahead of myself, but I was hooked. As I missed more than a few lectures in pursuit of the ring, my classmates teased that I was abandoning medicine for jewelry. But I found that if I spent a few hours working on my ring, I was able to relax enough to crack the Cytology notes, which were the size of the yellow pages (for those of us who remember telephone books). Unlocking the creativity of designing the ring also led me to take illustrated notes in class that others wanted to copy. I wasn’t top of the class, but I made it through first year in good shape, and my mother got a funky 3 stoned silver ring for Christmas!
EG: There is evidence that crafting really is good for mental health. Anne Kirketerp, a craft psychologist, has studied the effect of crafting on flow, calmness, positive emotion, and achievement. Her basic hypothesis is that relaxation comes from engaging in an activity where the level of challenge matches an individual’s skill. She calls it the sweet spot of flow — not too difficult and not too easy — as a result, it reduces stress hormones. Additionally, engaging in craft produces micro successes – we can see how well we are doing because the result is tangible. And because sweet spot crafting can be done in groups, we can engage in conversation and build connections with others.
I agree with Kirketerp. As a lawyer, I spend much of my time on complicated issues and long term projects, many of which are adversarial (I don’t have control over the outcome). It helps me to find a finite project that I can control, which follows a set method, with a tangible result, like knitting. When I am stressed, I pick up my knitting needles. It soothes me on multiple levels – the familiar feel of the yarn tautly wrapped around my fingers, the defined process from casting on to binding off, the repetitive motion and needle clicks, and the sense of accomplishment from transforming a single thread (or multiple threads tied together) into a finished object. During the pandemic, I knitted a blanket to mark the months.
This past month, as I’ve pondered what the country could have done differently, I have been thinking of an essay by Ann Hood called “Ten Things I Learned From Knitting” (in her collection, Knitting Yarns). I have taken a couple of writing workshops with Ann, who has written extensively about how learning to knit helped her recover from a devastating personal loss. In the essay, she talks about how in knitting, if a project goes awry, you can effectively fix it by unraveling your work and starting over (and changing the ending). It helped me to think of democracy as an ongoing project – time to rip out the dropped stitches and start over, and make a better version learning from the mistakes we’ve made along the way. I remain optimistic that we can still change the ending.
JB: You were a prolific Pussy Hat knitter, and I loved getting one from you. In retrospect, I’m not sure the hats were effective politically, but they sure brought women together! Come to think of it, craft has played an important role for him marginalized groups forever (God, I can’t believe I’m saying women are marginalized in the US today). Besides women, who are better crafters than gay men? Think of all the theatrical sets that have been built by gay men, all of the costumes! I wonder how the Drag community will respond to this transphobic fever. I am paying attention to San Francisco’s Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and hope they find a creative way to fight back.
EG: The Pussy Hats followed in a long tradition of women’s craftivism in the U.S., starting with weaving homespun cloth during the American Revolution (rejecting British textiles as a symbol of colonial rule) to knitting socks for soldiers during the Civil War, to the AIDS quilt. Loosely speaking, craftivism is activism that uses crafts to create social or political change. We are going to need more than yarn to get us through the coming years, but we can learn from craftivism.
JB: Have you followed the Tiny Pricks Project? Genius. It’s based on the premise that creativity can help you develop tools, community and a healthy outlet to survive troubling times.
EG: I love that project. I agree about community building. For decades, I belonged to a Stitch and Bitch group (spoiler alert: more bitching than stitching). As we knitted, we talked about issues that impacted our daily lives, and it eventually evolved into a political giving circle thanks to the leadership of the women in that group.
Crafts themselves can be a tool for change (or subversion). Even before the pussy hats, knitting has been used as a mode of espionage in literature and history. Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities uses different stitches to represent letters of the alphabet, knitting an enemies list of aristocrats she wishes to vanquish during the French Revolution. But, in the current climate, I’m not a fan of enemies lists.
Several knitters assisted with the war efforts during the first and second World Wars, most notably Phyllis (Pippa) Latour Doyle, who died last year at the age of 102. Doyle parachuted into Normandy in 1944 as a young British spy. Posing as a poor French girl selling soap, she bicycled throughout the area, chatting with the German soldiers. Returning to her quarters, she knit Morse code messages into yarn, which was then delivered through Resistance channels to the British, helping pave the way for D-Day. Her story is chronicled in a The Last Secret Agent, which will be published in the U.S. next May.
Crafting can even teach valuable skills for the resistance.
JB: I am all for creative subversion. Check out these ornaments I made in a ceramics class for my nieces and daughters!
EG: For me, cooking is also a craft, particularly making bread. I never made sourdough during the pandemic, but I did learn to make focaccia. Because I was stuck inside, I decorated the slabs with garden scenes, to reconnect with nature. Here is an example, along with a delicious focaccia recipe from my friend Nick Malgieri.
You can get creative with the decorations.
At the end of the day, even if you are not a craftivist, art is about expression and creating beauty — that in itself is healing. A few days after Election Day, I ventured out of my apartment building, in the deepest bluest neighborhood in Manhattan, and saw a piano sitting by the curb — one of my neighbors had thrown it out.
Where there should have been sheet music, someone had left a poster board covered with a Sharpie-drawn anti-immigrant, anti-vax screed, culminating in, “Kamala, you’re fired.” For an instant, I pondered shredding it, like Christopher Plummer rending the Nazi flag in The Sound of Music. But I left it there —whoever wrote it needed that soapbox. It sparked discussion with several passers-by, and I was comforted by the fact that most seemed similarly appalled by the message.
When I came home two hours later, the sign was gone, and one of my neighbors was playing an impromptu concert on that spinnet. I stood there for a while, smiling for the first time in days as my neighbor used his music to decorate time. Art trumped hate, at least for now.
JB: I expect we will see a lot more musicians, artists, poets and chefs use their talents to tell a different story of who we are as a society. I hope we aren’t as bad as we looked on election night.
Here are some places to get started (and feel free to post additional crafting resources in the comments):
Crafting resources
If you are interested in learning a craft, many local Y’s and community centers offer classes. Knitting and crafts stores typically offer classes and knitting circles. There are also tons of tutorials on YouTube and there is a paid subscription service called Craftsy that offers thousands of online classes and tutorials. Here are some other resources:
Tiny Pricks Project: Inspiration!
Ravelry: Free website for knitters, crocheters and fiber artists
American Craft Council: https://craftcouncil.org/ — Includes national directory of crafting resources https://craftcouncil.org/national-directory/
Online quilting classes: https://www.americanquilter.com/iquilt.html
Wishing you a Favvulous holiday season and a peaceful and healthy 2025!
Your readers should know your focaccia won an art competition in a pandemic era exhibit. I’m sure they’d be in MoMA’s permanent collection if they were constructed of archival materials.
Dear Ellen and Jennifer,
My favorite line in this wonderful post is: "I stood there for a while, smiling for the first time in days as my neighbor used his music to decorate time."
...used his music to decorate time...
I can't say I'm a craftivist, not because I'm averse to crafts, but simply because I've really never developed any abilities in crafts. But I do believe I understand Kirketerp's observation about how crafts can induce calmness, because I derive the same calmness through a kind of distant relative of craftivism, which is the work of maintaining a home, the carpentry and painting, the plumbing repairs and the electrical repairs, the seasonal tasks of shoveling snow, splitting wood, pruning trees, and cutting meadowgrass, the perpetual effort to sustain a house as a home.
The calmness arises in the aftermath, the best part of such work. Showered and dressed, a glass of wine in hand, I'll go outside to where I'd spent hours working that day on one task or another. I'll pause to gaze at a stacked woodpile or a trimmed tree, a repaired fence or a cleared meadow. I'll sense the physicality of the effort I just made, often considerable. I'll revel in the completion of that effort, a safer home. And suddenly, calmness arises from within and radiates throughout, as if cellular in its ubiquity. As I wrote, it's the best part of such work, the most glorious part.
--Bob