These past few weeks have been incredibly hard and emotional, especially for every person who has to face racism every single day of the year because of the colour of their skin. They need you right now!
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How to Support Black-owned businesses, indie dyers and knitting designers:
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We encourage you to support black-owned businesses because they need all your love and encouragement right now! They need to feel like valued members of our crafting community. Go visit their websites, Instagram pages and look at their amazing work! Follow them and buy something from them! We recommended a couple of indie-dyers that make beautiful yarns in a Facebook post (which you can read at the end of this post) but of course, there are so many more indie-dyers and designers for you to discover, support and share your love with! We’ve found a comprehensive list in Jeanette Sloan’s blog and this is a great place to start! Click here to start supporting and spreading some love! We realise that this list is from 2018 and may be in need of an update as many more designers have emerged in the last 2 years. We encourage you to actively look around instagram and we are sure you will find many more! A great knitting designer that we don’t see on this list is Denise Bayron. Click here to visit her Instagram page @Bayron Handmade.
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Also, please read this post from GGMadeit, where Gaye “GG” Gaspie explains why she, as a black woman, can not just “get back to her knitting”. You can follow her on Instagram. GG is also part of the KNIT STARS family, which we also belong to, and she will be teaching in KNIT STARS 5.0 this fall! We are super excited about that and can’t wait to see what she will be doing there!!
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Last week, in the Facebook group for quarantine knitting that we founded at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a knitted “Black Lives Matter” square led to a lot of hatred, prejudice and bigotry. This is something that we can not and will not tolerate. We addressed the members of the group on June 5th and thought that we should share what we wrote here as well. We have a large platform and therefore, a great responsibility. Here is the post:
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Posted in the Quarantine Knitting Group on Facebook
June 5, 2020
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“We are still here, looking around and thinking about everything that has happened in the past days. We have a few things to get off our mind and share with you:
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Firstly and most importantly: we don’t think it is OK for people to start writing racist and nasty comments just because of a Black Lives Matter knitted square. To us, the Black Lives Matter square has the same value as the squares that we designed for Covid-19: Love, Hug Me Later and Alone Together as well as our Rainbow square. It is sad to see how much hatred has come out of this knitted square, and this is not OK. We also find sentences like “I just want to get back to my knitting” and “all lives matter” extraordinarily offensive and would like to ask people to stop writing them. Black people do not have the luxury of escaping reality to get on with their knitting. And all lives will matter only when black lives matter. Which, considering the latest events in the USA where an innocent Black man got killed by the police just because he was Black, clearly proves that all lives still don’t matter.
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We want to recommend a book which was recommended to us last year: “Me and White Supremacy” by Laila Saad. This book made a massive impression on us. It opened our eyes to what white supremacy is and explained to us that we have consciously and unconsciously been perpetuating a system that gives enormous privilege to white people. It showed us that we had never actually looked at what racism really is because it was comfortable for us that this system was in place. It taught us that as white people, we need to grow, educate ourselves and move from being against racism to becoming anti-racist. Everyone needs to read this book. Do this book. We all need to understand what white privilege and white supremacy are, in order to become better allies and begin the hard work of dismantling this system.
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Other things that we can all do right now? Support Black-owned businesses! There are a ton of Black dyers and knitwear designers that need your support and encouragement in these hard times! Some of our favourite indie dyers that make gorgeous yarns are Ocean by the Sea, Lady Dye Yarns and Lolabean Yarn.
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And if you’d like to donate some money towards the Black Lives Matter cause, this article has 115 ways to donate in support of Black lives:
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We are proud supporters of the Black Life Matters movement and donate to this cause.
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There are many other books about racism that you can read, here are some that have been recommended to us: So you want to talk about Race by Oljeoma Oluo, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
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We hope that people who still have not educated themselves and think that they are not racist because they have never discriminated anyone will go and get “Me and White Supremacy” by Layla Saad and do the workbook. What you will learn about yourself will make you extremely uncomfortable. But ultimately, it will also open your eyes and give you some tools to start becoming a better ally.”
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ARNE & CARLOS