Visit Wo!'s MySpace:

Street art goes soft

Like graffiti — only removable and arguably less offensive — ‘knit-tagging’ is the latest in public installation, gracing lamp-posts and hand-railings around Sydney. Helen Gregory reports.

Mar-May 2007

It’s a blustery Monday night and Rebecca, a knitting addict, has hurried to Harts Pub in The Rocks to get her fix. Sinking back into an emerald green armchair, eighties power ballads scream from the jukebox. Rebecca has come here for one reason: to stitch…and bitch.

As a member of the Sydney ‘Stitch and Bitch’ (S&B) collective, she meets at the Sydney pub every Monday. Attendance numbers fluctuate each week, but on this particularly inhospitable evening, Rebecca is joined by only two other members: Meg and Mark.

Meg is knitting a ‘sunrise circle’ jacket from red cotton, pausing every few minutes to squint at a pattern she is copying from a magazine. Rebecca and Mark however, have other ideas. “Why don’t we try to get this outside Martin Place?” Rebecca asks. “Yeah, see if it gets on Sunrise?” Mark replies. They are both knitting non-descript rectangular shapes which, to an untrained eye, could end up as a scarf, but will instead become ‘knit-tags.’

“Basically knit-tagging is when you go out and put up all of this unfinished knitwear in public places. Kind of like street art,” Rebecca says.

Rebecca was inspired by ‘Knitta’ — a Houston based group of knitters who have set up a website documenting their adventures bombarding different cities, statues and prominent landmarks with their knitting. A woman who goes by the pseudonym ‘PolyCotN’ started the group in October 2005 after gathering a collection of her uncompleted projects. Half finished jumpers, blankets and scarfs were soon spotted around railings, traffic signs and car antennas.

“I had a fetish a few months ago for orange,” Rebecca smiles, and rolls her eyes. “I would never wear anything peaches and cream, so I decided to make a blanket. I got about half way through, got sick of it and decided to just stick it up!”

Since then, Rebecca has ventured out on many late night missions, including a quest to wrap a red and white ‘tag’ with a ‘Go Swans’ label around a Martin Place lamp post before the AFL grand final, and her pink ‘fun fur’ creations, with attached photographs of 1950’s pin-up girls, were hung from railings near Circular Quay before security removed them.

As she describes her current work in progress — a blue, yellow and purple rectangular piece designated for a cold and lonely railing in Martin Place, Meg shakes her head.

“I’ve never been into that tagging stuff. I’m a product knitter. I get greedy when I can see the finished product in my head. I just go for it and can’t stop till I have it in my own hands,” she says.

Rebecca, on the other hand, is a process knitter. “I usually get sick of what I’m knitting or end up stuffing it up. I just like knitting for its own sake, which is why I’m into the tagging. It’s an art form — subverted from something which is supposed to be based on organised patterns and design,”

The sole male knitter of the group, Mark, an IT technician by day, is in the middle of a range of different projects to improve his knitting. “I was into archery and wanted a protective covering for my arrows so they wouldn’t get scratched,” he says.

Searching the internet one day, he came across the S&B blog. “I joined, and since then I have knitted a black jumper with flames on the side and am now tagging. I still haven’t done the arrow cases. I don’t even really care about them anymore.”

At this point the group is interrupted. “Hey…are you girls knitting?” a portly man slurs as he stumbles inside the cosy room. Rebecca rolls her eyes. “Sure are, why, you want to join in?” Meg humours him. By now he is staggering towards the middle of the room. “How do I join this club?” he asks, eyes transfixed by Rebecca’s clicking needles. “You have to knit.” Meg replies, smiling wryly. “Oh yeah! I was a really good knitter at school you know….I had speed and style…”

Rebecca isn’t impressed. “It’s like they think that just because we’re women who knit, we must have a really small world,” she says. “The worst is when they ask us ‘Are you knitting for your babies?’ We’re knitting for ourselves!”

As the needles click, conversation flows from stereotypical views of knitters, to the best way to unravel a ball of yarn, to relationships, corporatisation, beer, bread makers and even Hillsong. But ultimately, it always comes back to knitting.

“When people say ‘Oh, you could have just bought that from a shop’ they’re forgetting the creativity and work which has gone into it,” Rebecca says.

“It’s an expensive enough hobby,” Meg says. “The cotton for this jacket? I unravelled it from a jumper at the Red Cross.”

Kris Howard is the manager of Tapestry Craft, the largest knitting store in Australia. She says that while knitting is an expensive craft, it is ‘incredibly rewarding,’ allowing the knitter to create a garment or product which is unique and suited to their own needs and wants.

“People see an expensive item in a shop window and are interested in making it themselves. What they create will fit perfectly, be of better quality and probably end up cheaper,” she says.

According to Howard, the resurgence in knitting’s popularity is indicative of a change in women’s attitudes. “Our grandmothers had to knit for economic reasons, to provide and mend clothing for their families. Then in the feminist era, women of our mothers’ generation chose not to knit. But now women are reclaiming it, choosing to knit. Now you can’t knit for economic reasons; yarn is too expensive. It’s a luxury now.”

She also links the popularity of knitting to the service-based workforce of contemporary Australia. “I used to work in IT and I didn’t actually make anything tangible. Knitting is a way of creating a concrete thing that someone can make and value. It may also be a response to the change in culture — people are now more interested in organic foods and the like. There is a growing segment of the population who don’t want mass produced goods.”

In August, Howard’s Tapestry Craft became the first store in Australia to provide ‘Knit and Quit’ classes for people who wanted to quit smoking. A Quitline representative attended each meeting to discuss progress with the group and supply ‘Quit Kits’.

“We ended up with a core group who loved it so much we had to extend the one month program by another month. Five even became regular knitters who attend ‘Stitch and Bitch’ groups!”

Howard believes that the success of the program, with most participants either quitting or reducing their smoking, can be attributed not to knitting itself but the support network that the group provided. “All of the members were on the same level — they were able to share advice and support each other if they felt they were falling back into old patterns of smoking.”

And there are even internet-only knitting events.

“The knitting online community is successful because it is so small: ideas go around fast," Kris Howard explains. “People love doing things together at the same time, and they get so excited to be able to keep in touch with other knitters. They can find where they belong.”

The online knitting community, for example, is largely responsible for the success of the Beaconsfield community scarf project.  In the tiny Tasmanian town, which was rocked by the mining disaster in April last year, a 500 metre long scarf continues to grow in length as contributions flow in from around Australia and New Zealand. So far 205 pieces of knitting have been sent to the town’s Uniting Church Hall to add to the scarf, in a show of support for the close-knit town.

Want to join a S&B?

Stitch and Bitch collectives operate throughout Sydney. Tapestry Craft seems to be the hub for most Sydney knitters and the calendar page on their website posts details of upcoming knitting events. Go to http://www.tapestrycraft.com.au/calendar.php

There are a few different Stitch and Bitch collectives operating throughout different locations in Sydney.

The Sydney S&B collective meets at Harts Pub, Sussex Street, The Rocks every other Monday (starting February 5th) from 6:30pm onwards.

A 'Tapestry Craft' S&B is held at Tapestry Craft, 50 York St, Sydney on Thursdays from 5-7pm.

There is also a 'Courthouse' S&B which meets at the Courthouse Hotel, 202 Australia St, Newtown on Sunday afternoons from 2pm onwards.

There is also a Manly S&B, that meet every second Tuesday (starting February 13th) at the Manly Wharf Hotel (Lounge Bar Area), East Esplanade, Manly Wharf from 7:15pm onwards.