Yarn Bombers, Wooly Taggers and Guerilla Knitters

I first learned of the Church of Craft way back in the good old days of 2008. I was in San Francisco to give a presentation at the Popular Culture Association’s annual conference. The conference was a wild event. Popular Culture includes, well, almost everything. Somebody does it, whatever it is, and they were all there, gathered together to share their ideas in the town that defines Popular Culture. Lots of people dressed as their favorite Star Trek characters, lots of sessions about Spider Man, lots of research papers about Professional Wrestling. The guide book listing all the sessions, times and locations was three inches thick for a four-day conference. There on page 472, down in the corner, was my little session: Screenplay Writing in the College Composition Classroom. My presentation went well enough. But after all the preparation and planning for my fifteen minutes of being noticed, I found that the best part of the conference was everything else. For an omnivorous grazer like myself, this conference, happening in this town, was nigh to heaven. I spent day after day not only eating well, but tasting the scholarly fare at presentations on various minutiae and obscurata that I would otherwise never have suspected of ever rising to the level of scholarly subject matter.

One that I attended was "Post-Modern Clothing Design and Marketing." So there is a word for dressing strange: it’s post-modern. A member of the panel had failed to show up, so I stepped in and gave an impromptu talk about shoemaking, with the post-modern, self-made shoes on my feet as examples. (The day before, in an art gallery full of Grace Slick’s paintings of white rabbits, the gallery owner had commented on these shoes and proclaimed them, “Very Sausalito.”) But at the onference, what made that particular session most memorable, what ultimately changed my life, was a slide show about the Church of Craft. The Church of Craft believes that people should make things. That's it. No hymnals, no ceremonies, no prayers or dogma, just handcrafts. Faith simply means making stuff. Rather than listen to a preacher, their spiritual convocations involve sitting in somebody's living room, the coffee table piled with tools and materials and plates full of cookies. They just get together and make stuff and talk and eat cookies, and figure this is enough spiritual enlightenment for anybody.

Every major city around the world has a branch: London, Paris, Tokyo, Athens, Des Moines (the image above was in Prague) and the list goes on. They are everywhere, and they pose a threat to America's Corporate Value System. They seem peaceful enough, but as I listened intently to tales of heroic exploits of the great Crafters of yore, my spine tingled. This, I thought,

this is the way the Industrial Revolution ends,

this is the way the Industrial Revolution ends,

not with a bang but with a crochet hook. I guess any fanatical sect is going to have an evil aspect, and the Church of Craft does not keep theirs a secret. They are so reckless, so driven, so willing to risk everything to spread their faith that, well, I'll let these photographs tell the story...

What began as a seemingly harmless social organization has grown to be a worldwide assault on the very foundations of our society. They are all around us, quietly undermining the two most important underpinnings of the New World Order: television and shopping. Sometimes their gatherings take a turn for the dark side, and the faithful will go out into the black hours of night, the wee hours of darkness, raking the coals of hell with their knitting needles. People wake in the morning to find that they, their houses, their pets, their bicycles or their trees have been "yarn bombed." All of a sudden their entire world is covered in coozies.

For the remainder of my visit in San Francisco I kept noticing knitting in the oddest places. They—the Guerilla Knitters, the Yarn Bombers, the Wooly Taggers —call their nocturnal creations by many names, but one of the more prevalent is "coozies." I myself was witness to what happens when a bicycle has been parked in the same place for too long: its handlebars were tagged with a nice warm wool handlebar-coozie. Trees, telephone poles, and handrails are particularly defenseless when a gang of yarn bombers goes out in the gloom of night stalking anything that will stay still long enough to get knitted.

If you do a little research, you'll find that Church gatherings are unevenly mixed: mostly women, not as many men. I suspect they'd get more guys to join if they changed the name to something more masculine, such as "Concealed Carry Class of Craft" or "Chain Saw Soul." But maybe the issue is something more inherent in male-ness itself. Guys tend to do forms of craft that make it hard to carry on a conversation, and even harder to keep metal shavings and sawdust from getting on the cookies. But the Church remains at least ostensibly open to all comers, regardless of spiritual or mechanical leanings. Their single, all encompassing commandment is "Do Your Own Thing, but Don't Burn the Cookies."

In their own fuzzy way, the Church of Craft is offering the world a new vision, a radical, fanatical, twisted (spun?) vision of what life is all about. Rather than accept the reality that people exist to serve the needs of the Big Machine, they seem to believe that it's not about productivity or economics or security, not related to gasoline or electricity, not connected to name brands or money or even a matter of power. They think it's about knitting...just making stuff.

On my way home, in the Los Angeles airport, I saw only one culture. No diversity. Jeans, sneakers, polo shirts, nylon luggage that rolls, the same hair styles, the same pastel colors, no all-black punks or high end suits or variety of any kind. One cowboy hat. That was it for variety in that entire airport, and even that guy was wearing jeans, a pink polo shirt and running shoes and dragging a rolling bag.

I returned from San Francisco a changed man. The very next semester I began to preach the new gospel, thinking of ways to work the Church of Craft into the writing assignments for my Composition classes. I had high hopes for one student, Beatrice. While the rest of my students spent their class time texting, Beatrice sat on the back row knitting. As placid and peaceful as a summer breeze, covered in knitwear from afro to All Stars, Beatrice operated on a higher plane than the rest of us. She seemed unperturbed by the small stuff like homework and grades. Unfortunately, shortly after accepting my suggestion that she do her assigned research project on the Church of Craft, Beatrice disappeared. I later learned she'd gotten pregnant and her parents had dragged her out of that school. I'm sure her kid will never want for baby booties.

Me, I would love to live in a world where everybody just did their own thing. I get no thrill from herds of little business clones dressed for success, or mile after mile of chinos and polo shirts lined up outside the mall waiting for the big glass doors to swing open. People seem to have no “me” to be, no "my own thing" to do. The interesting people we meet, the memorable moments in life, the indelible places, foods, and experiences that overtake us all share some characteristics. The very traits that make some experiences valuable, also make clear why we keep these experiences as rare as possible. They are unexpected, awkward maybe, rough perhaps but definitely textured, having highs and lows, peaks and valleys, and above all they are absolutely colorful. These are the experiences that will become great stories (later, that is, assuming you survive the experience) and, if you think about it, these are also the characteristics that make for great coozies. May they keep coming...even faster than I run from them.