The Most Radical Protest Right Now Is Handmade
By Amanda Jackson
There’s a sweet settling fiber artists know, where time softens and fingertips warm with effortless energy. Meditating on patterns, settling into rhythm, mesmerized by repetition.
Top to bottom, bottom to top. Stitch, stitch, stitch. My mom taught me to cross stitch as a little girl, kittens, rainbows, and hearts emerging from hundreds of tiny x’s.
Knit, purl, knit, purl. Almost all my classmates knit when I studied visual art at the Interlochen Arts Academy. We may not have known it then, the magnitude of fiber art or it’s connection to resistance, but we were most content with piles of yarn curled in our laps. Butterfly kisses of soft mohair, luxurious cashmere, we even craved thick, scratchy wool against our fingers.
• • •
Fiber art has been a seasoned storyteller. It has passed messages in plain sight, spied on opposition, and formed social movements, threads tightened into banners, votes for women, my body, my choice, love is love. It has documented injustice, asserted identity, and expressed solidarity where words fell short or posed risk. Quiet and unexpected, fiber art has voiced the silenced, resisted unapologetically, and woven strength greater than any one of us could alone.
Suffragettes embroidered protest banners in the early twentieth century. They were marched through city streets, draped over railings, and held up high. Domestic labor became public defiance, claiming space and igniting collective power.
Fiber art has become a global language of protest.
During the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, women made arpilleras, small, hand-sewn tapestries that depicted scenes of daily life, violence, and disappearance, transforming fabric into testimony and bearing witness to human rights abuses where speaking out was fatal.
For Palestinians in the diaspora, the continued practice of tatreez, a traditional hand-embroidery technique, sustains cultural memory and asserts enduring identity.
During wartime, where there were knitters, there were often spies.
During WWI and WWII, the Belgian Resistance and Allied spies used knitting to gather intelligence. Undetected women positioned near railway lines encoded information in their knitting as a form of steganography, or hidden writing. La Dame Blanche, with over 1,000 agents, provided 70 percent of Allied military intel in WWI.
Spies such as Elizabeth Bentley used knitting bags to secretly transport documents. Phyllis Labour Doyle, a notable British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent sent over 135 messages through the language of knits and pearls while operating behind enemy lines in the 1940s.
The U.S. Office of Censorship eventually banned the mailing of knitting patterns abroad during WW II.
• • •
The loom met me like a familiar dance partner, seamlessly moving into step. I’d leaned my full body into the work, digging into memory, borrowing from dreams. I wove Lake Michigan in layered blues, bright, warm sunsets, white pages peeling from birch trees with stories etched in coal. I’d granted them weight line by line in my fiber arts classes at Interlochen.
In another place or time, would I have been layering and stitching fiber into maps or messages, passed openly, unnoticed?
Will I still?
• • •
By transforming yarn and thread into a medium of expression, fiber art continues to take a stand.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Kat Coyle created the “Pussyhat,” deliberately reclaiming the term as solidarity after his misogynist comments surfaced during the campaign. The quote itself does not merit repetition. For many women, its video is easily recalled, its impact still visceral.
The Pussyhat Project remains a collective act of care, visibility, and belonging, with over 160,000 projects recorded: “Women’s rights are human rights. Always have been. Always will be.”
Welcome Blanket was a craft-centered, community-powered response to the first Trump administration’s proposed 2,000-mile wall along the United States–Mexico border. Los Angeles artist Jayne Zweiman invited fiber artists to reimagine the barrier in fabric. Across living rooms and kitchens, hands knitted, sewed, crocheted, and wove blankets, a refusal to let policy have the final word.
The project quickly exceeded its goal and aims to encircle the globe in 36,521 handmade pieces. 8,000 have been collected so far.
Most recently, deep red yarn and pointed red hats with tassels began appearing across social media following a surge of federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota and the deaths of two residents as a result. In response, Minneapolis yarn shop Needle & Skein launched a fundraiser to support the community, offering $5 patterns for “Melt the ICE” hats that quickly gained widespread support.
It was clear to Gilah Mashaal, a Jewish immigrant, how her shop would protest. “What’s happening in Minneapolis has been so egregious and awful and so destructive to our community.”
The hats were inspired by Norway’s WWII “nisselue,” or Santa hat, worn in opposition to Nazi occupation as a symbol of hope and morale. For Norwegians, the hat was meant to be “distinctively non-violent.” They eventually became illegal for citizens to wear or distribute.
Having also learned Norwegian traditions from my mom, I came to recognize their subtle strength early on.
Since launching the “Melt the ICE” hat project, Needle & Skein has raised over $650,000 for organizations supporting community members affected by ICE, inspiring knitters and crocheters around the world.
My local yarn shop, Wool & Honey, started a fundraiser for Minneapolis with bold, red yarn spun to order. They’ve hosted community “Melt the ICE” knitting gatherings at their shop in northern Michigan and the Leland Public Library. Grassroots organization, Indivisible Leelanau purchased 200 stamps for the group to send “resist postcards” to Congress and the White House.
It’s uncertain whether “Melt the ICE” hats will become illegal, like the nisselue before them. For now, the pattern is still available through Needle & Skein on Payship and Ravelry.
From stitched banners to the pink and red hats of contemporary protest, fiber art highlights the persistent power of small, deliberate actions. So, we knit, croquet, embroider, weave, and stitch.
We resist.
Amanda Jackson is a creative nonfiction writer exploring fiber art, resistance, and the politics of domestic craft. Her work uncovers the histories stitched into cloth and the enduring power of art. She lives in northern Michigan with her spouse and loyal rescue shepherd, Jax.
Photo credit: Courtesy of the Norwegian Resistance Museum.
A Note from Writers Resist
Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist on our Give a Sawbuck page.
