cause of boycotting, of dropping out, but because of building, or knitting, of plug-
ging in something new. Craftivism is about hands-on commenting on the domi-
nant modes of existence today, not by returning to folkloristic romanticism, or
raising violent demonstrations on the streets, but by updating existing models,
crafts and systems to a participatory and open mindset of hands-on collaborative
building.
American artist Cat Mazza can exemplify this approach in her “microRevolt”
projects. She sees the concept of “microRevolt” as a loosely inspired application of
the idea of philosopher Felix Guattari’s “molecular revolutions” (Guattari 1984).
To see social change not simply as a consequence of governing or economic poli-
cies but instead to encourage and implement small networked and overlapping
resistant acts to nudge along change. She creates software and critical attention to
form communities for
networking craft hobbyists in a form of labor activism, but the efficacy or value is hard
to measure. If it’s “revolutionary” to favor drastic economic or social reform, knitting
could be an interesting place to begin. (Mazza 2008)With her microRevolt projects, such as knitPro and Stitch for Senate, she creates
platforms for this low-scale form of social change. The knitPro application is an
online freeware tool where participants can upload digital images that are trans-
lated into knit, crochet, needlepoint and cross-stitch patterns. These are later
shared between participants to form an open library of knitting designs. The task
of designing and knitting is no longer an isolated practice but a community effort,
something Mazza also exemplifies in her Nike Blanket Petition, where people from
over 30 countries have collaborated to put together several hundreds of crocheted
and knitted pieces for a huge swoosh-quilt that will, when finished, be sent to Nike
founder Philip Knight as a petition for better labour conditions for the Nike sweat-
shop workers.
Mazza’s project Stitch for Senate is a project where participants are encouraged to
knit helmet linings to every US senate member as a petition to end the war in Iraq.
knitpro 2.0 is a software by Cat
Mazza that transforms images into
knitting patterns. In many of her
projects she has used it to copy corpo-
rate logos so as to facilitate for others
to make their own logo-knitware
(below).