Category Archives: Craftivism

March 19, 2014 · 4:19 pm

Drive-by dyeing and mending

On my bike ride home from work (about a 40 minute ride), I pass just one Eucalyptus Cinerea. Well, there are two, but one is inside someone’s front garden.  A person has to have some boundaries!  The street tree had dropped a small branch.

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I decided I’d better collect it.  Usually I carry a calico bag in my bike pannier for such contingencies, but this was what I found when I scrabbled about in the bottom of my pannier on the day, so in went all the stray leaves I could find.

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This tree has had to contend with a lot.  It has had a  very strange pruning job designed to protect the electrical wires that now pass through its branches.  The pruning took out a lot of the canopy, but the tree is still standing.  For this, I am grateful.

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Recent events have caused me to reflect on the way I think about trees on my regular routes… like old acquaintances.  I think about them as I pass, the way I think of people when I pass near their homes without visiting.  I notice what happens to them.  I check them over when I have the chance.  I remember how they were when they were younger, or before that accident befell them.  It’s not entirely unlike the way I notice people I don’t know well, but see out and about in the neighbourhood regularly.

Further along, I saw that my “thanks for cycling” bunting had been ripped and some of it was lying on the ground.  Soon it was in my other pannier headed for the mending pile.

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A few days later, the E Cinerea made it into the dye pot and produced its usual dependable flamelike orange.  I also collected some ironbark leaves that had fallen in the parklands near where we had exercise class.  Once the E Cinerea was all but exhausted I reused that dyebath with the ironbark leaves, thinking I would save water and energy, but clearly this was not E Sideroxylon–it produced that sad, damp little pile of fawn alpaca on the right.

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I have come to regard this as a sign: The orange leaves in the picture below are the E Cinerea leaves, which have gone from silver-grey-green to orange in the dyebath.  The ironbark leaves, on the other hand, have remained a robustly green shade even after cooking.

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And, I’ve mended the bunting ready to hang it again on a suitable occasion…

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March 2, 2014 · 1:08 pm

Thanks for cycling! The bunting.

There is a new segment of cycleway near our place that has been one of the upsides of living beside a major engineering project for most of the last 2 years.  It seems only right to celebrate.  The new segment isn’t terribly long, but is one of those little pieces of path that make a big difference to a cyclist.

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I started out with some bike themed fabric.  It was originally intended as a shirt for a small bike loving friend… but he grew quickly into quite a large, keen cyclist and my sewing queue moves slowly sometimes.  Some of the fabric became a bag and the rest was sitting there ready to go.  I decided in the end that worrying about aligning the grain was beside the point for bunting, so relentlessly pieced leftovers together until there was just about nothing left.

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Then I moved over into some purple fabric.  It dates back over fifteen years to when there was a shop nearby that sold offcuts from sheet and quilt manufacturing.  I made all kinds of things from those offcuts!  This came in one of the odd shapes that I am sure could be explained by someone who had been to the factory: a square with three squared off corners and one rounded corner.  Soon it was all triangles, some constructed from two smaller triangles.  On went the lettering.

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Some more of my vintage bias binding was pressed into action, and pretty soon…

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Last night a friend was visiting and she was keen on hanging it, so we had bunting hanging before dinner.
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Hopefully it will cheer up weary cyclists (and energetic ones) as they pass.
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January 23, 2014 · 11:30 am

A Community Celebration

As I read The Little Book of Craftivism, ideas kept popping into my head.  This one took a little longer to execute than the mini banners. There is a row of immense, sugar gums (Eucalyptus Cladocalyx) over 100 year old in our neighbourhood which were scheduled to be cut down due to changes in the railway corridor.  Many people in our neighbourhood were part of a campaign to save them.

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We managed to save these trees (albeit very severely pruned) while dozens of others were cut down.  People have been saying to me when they visit the nearby local neighbourhood centre how awful it looks now that all the trees that used to stand between the neighbourhood centre and the railway have been cut down.  They often say how relieved they are that the ones we saved are still there–but they do not realise what went into saving them.  They don’t even know those trees were threatened.  There are still all night works and daytime works and continuing campaigns and about noise going on and many people in the area feel very discouraged living with the aftermath of all the infrastructure works.  So I imagined bunting that read ‘these trees saved by community action’ and a bit of a celebration of our having actually succeeded in this part of what we have tried to do.

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Well, I made the bunting.  And another member of our local group emailed out the most beautiful invitation to come and hang it up and celebrate the continued existence of the sugar gums.  And so a small local celebration, complete with our local MP Steph Key and our local councillor, Jennie Boisvert, who both put considerable effort into supporting our campaign.  I wanted to thank the woman who stared the campaign and was its mainstay, so I made her a little leafy bag.  Here it is filled with rolled up bunting ready to go and celebrate.

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And here we are, after a highly entertaining hanging of the bunting.

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I’ve made a tutorial on how to create this kind of lettered bunting, which you can find in the how-to page (link at the top of the blog) or here, if you’d like to try your own.  I already have another plan, personally….

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January 14, 2014 · 9:50 am

More tree loving craftivism

My second ‘banner’ has gone up another neighbourhood tree.  This one is my favourite E Scoparia. It was the first really promising dye eucalypt I discovered.  It used to be home to a pair of piping shrikes, who nested there in their little mud cup for many seasons.  In the last year it has acquired a nesting box and we’ve seen rosellas coming in and out of it.

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This is the tree my friends and I have been mulching and weeding and we have planted in an understory of native ground covers, mostly forms of saltbush, which are now doing really well.  If you have been reading a while you will have seen this tree protected from passing Royal Show foot traffic in earlier posts here and here.  Those images show how much the groundcover project has progressed in the last 18 months or so.  In the beginning, people would remove plant guards, pull out small plants soon after we put them in or just trample young plants by accident.  Not any more.  I think the evidence of care and the success of the surviving understorey plants generates more thoughtful treatment from passersby, and it’s clear that lots of local people now understand that their neighbours are making efforts that are transforming an almost bare patch of hard earth scattered with weeds and rubbish, into something lovely.  I collected the rubbish that had landed under it this morning and maybe that is ebbing a little too.

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So, four of us stood and admired this tree, delectable breakfast smoothies in hand, and tied on this little banner of admiration and appreciation.

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And here’s the full length picture…

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January 12, 2014 · 4:59 pm

Tree loving craftivism

While I was in Melbourne, I found Sarah Corbett’s A Little Book of Craftivism.  Yes, it is literally small, but inspiring out of proportion to its size.  It is about the work of the craftivist collective, together with proposals about how the reader might engage in their own craftivism.

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For those who might be wondering… one definition of craftivism: ‘Craftivism is a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper & your quest for justice more infinite.’ More at the link.

I loved this little book from the beginning. This is activism of a gentle, slow kind.  It isn’t the only kind of activism the world needs.  But every social movement needs a variety of approaches–I’ve participated in many–and gentle is one of them.  This book is packed with organising wisdom, clear instruction, pictures that inspire and make you wish you had been there and examples of projects from the small to the enormous that offer plenty of scope for DIY.

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For a view of the book and its content, click here.  For a brief review with links to multiple other reviews and ways to purchase online other than through amazon, click here.  To purchase from the craftvist collective itself, click here and check the sidebar.

Did I mention finding this book inspiring?  I think it’s one of the highest compliments that you could pay to a book of its kind to say that I immediately wanted to go out and make some of the projects in this book and could immediately see places that could happen to good effect. Not only that, I tried my ideas out on my nearest and dearest and then created them.  My ‘mini protest banner’ is a little different to the cross stitched versions in the book–but nevertheless the same concept.

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I took:

  • a calico sack from a local business for my banner background (I offered to take the offcast bags from a shop and they accepted)
  • some not-so-glorious leaf print experiments for backing
  • some leaf-printed collars and cuffs for my frame
  • some eucalyptus dyed silk thead and
  • some secondhand bias binding… and…

Before long I had made two banners.  We hung the first one today. One of my friends offered the view that every day was a good day for this kind of event (I guess we’re friends in part because we agree on things like that!) so we had cool drinks of water and cherries and chat and then went out to admire the tree and tie on.  The 6 year old present wants to make more banners, which is additionally promising.

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This banner celebrates a river red gum (E Camaldulensis) that we managed to save from being cut down last year, with help from other local people and our local MP, Steph Key.  It has a legally mandated 3 m exclusion zone around it to protect the root zone, but this is not being observed very well lately and I want the people responsible to know that we care.  I had to measure the tree to be sure I had stitched on enough tape:  3.6 m (11′ 9”) around the trunk, well above the ground.  To give you a sense of its size… and the relative size of the banner (which is in the picture), I give you the full view.

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