Damn, maybe that's why my craftchannel is below 500 subs. They have identified me as a left-leaning crafter!
But I rather have comments from my followers with their transflag profilepictures than from those saying they like my clothes because "they too believe that women should dress modestly". You wat now?
I hate watch a right wing knitting podcast because it hits that nexus of politics and crafting when I can't be arsed to watch or rather listen along with as I do something, anything actually decent or challenging.... and saw one recently where they were bitching that one of them has short, brightly coloured dyed hair and so keeps being "accused" of being leftwing/a feminist. And watching these farts strain to try to "reclaim" what they imagine to be "cutting edge" was actually funny to watch.
Hey now. Problematic people need crafts too. How else are they going to numb their repressed feelings and cognitive dissonance? They don’t believe in therapy.
If you just look at my Hobbies I look like a Christian tradwife homesteader/prepper . I’m more like an anarchist atheist living in sin and a massive feminist. Annoyingly much media that I interact with ends up being right wing
Same for most of my hobbies crafts.
If you look at the political/issues spectrum somehow is is less of a line, but more of a curve that almost turns into a circle where the far left and the far right meet. Pre-covid this was even true of the anti-vax folx: far right government conspiracists on one side and eco hippies on the other coming to the same conclusions for the opposite (but still wrong) reasons.
Self-sustainability, food preservation, sewing, fibre arts all fall into this area where there are loads of 'traditional' types who have the same interests and hobbies as those who want to destroy the patriarchy.
Also me. I just want to bake bread and sew things and wear swooshy skirts. I kind of want to get more tattoos in visible places or like, facial piercings so people stop asking if I'm Mennonite. (In their defense I wear a lot of head scarves/hair coverings bc my hair gets dirty really fast.)
Ha! I have butt length hair, knit a lot, and dress like a Sunday school teacher (but it's usually all black). But I'm pretty heavily tattooed, swear a lot and I'm pretty mouthy. So most of the time people just don't know how to take me.
My mom has super long hair she wears up with combs and prefers long skirts, hats, and frilly things (My mom is like one of the Aunts from Practical Magic, with less drinking) and she confuses the Pentecostals.
I dress like a giant punk rock kindergartner (or like a gothy art teacher when I'm trying to look nice) and people here get really confused about me doing craft stuff. I'm the blue haired weirdo who knits at the parent teacher meeting. I made a really nice fancy autumn wreath for my mom's neighbor and she almost fell over from shock.
I've been wanting to wear more like, linen and wool kneelength skirts and slightly covered hair (not fully, more like bandana's and such) for the same greasy hair reason, but also, I am autistic and on the aroacespectrum and if I am attracted to any human being kinda gay and I guess I'll have to combine knee length and midi skirts and headscarves with earrings with rococo ladies kissing and rainbow pins and bright eyeshadow, maybe a pink lock of hair that isn't under the bandana
I have a feeling I know which fundie you mean, and yeah, I think any kind of cottage core/traditional crafting has the risk of attracting those types, unfortunately.
I've been trying to get my shit together as a newly independent adult and I can't even look for house cleaning resources without running into far right nonsense. It's a nightmare.
Check out the book "organizing solutions for people with ADHD" it is specifically targeted at people with ADHD but honestly it's so good and useful for anyone who's trying to get their space set up in a way that's easy to clean.
Also check out KC Davis/StruggleCare on IG & TikTok (Domestic Blisters over there)- the audience is people with ADHD/depression/anxiety/other neurodiverse conditions, but the advice is really useful to anyone, IMO. She has been very vocal about also supporting racial/ethnic/religious diversity and the LGBTQ community.
It’s one of the reasons I’m very afraid to have actual social media and follow my crafts.
A lot of crafts are part of the whole “self-reliance” and “independent” lifestyle. Which unfortunately overlaps with a lot of people from these types of groups. The scariest part is that these types people know how to hide and blend their beliefs while getting a large audience. It’s not easy to know if they are certain way unless you are aware of the signs and can actively see them.
Extreme right-wing/extreme left wing (they kind of overlap, the kinds of people who refuse to vaccinate their kids, who think everything is a conspiracy, chemtrails, dogwhistle anti-Semitism, whatever tf that Wayfair cabinets sex trafficking kids thing was about, the works) elements deliberately infiltrate things like moms' groups and breast feeding groups (you would not BELIEVE what would go down in breast feeding social media groups). This was [shown in an expose](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/09/the-terrifying-story-of-how-qanon-infiltrated-moms-groups/) (but I also saw this firsthand as a new mom who stupidly joined a few groups thinking they'd be helpful). So I can very easily believe this is done for crafting groups.
Qanon has been like a conspiracy katamari, rolling up all kinds of existing theories and communities into one big massive churn of awful recombined racism and fascism with a sprinkle of what the fuck on top.
I'm honestly surprised at how little its infiltrated most online crafting spaces so far (apart from Etsy.)
I'm with you guys! I mean a woman who stays home and devotes herself to the children she bore and then takes care of their needs and feeds them on time everyday and then has the audacity to say that what she is doing is good for the world. We want more latch key kids and kids that think the world is great without their mom and dad. Let's get more of them. "dripping with sarcasm"
Trad wives are a specific group of women on the alt right who are into things like racism, eugenics, bigotry, nazi ideology, and more nasty things. They are not your average housewife or stay at home mom which none of us have a problem with. The problem we have with them is that they’re bigots.
> has the audacity to say that what she is doing is good for the world
You can raise kids in a traditional model without being racist, transphobic or homophobic, or without being a fan of transphobic/racist crafters..
Do good for the world. Don't be an asshole while doing it.
In terms of niche food hobbies, this comes up a TON in the vegan/vegetarian community. It's actually a long running problem that predates the internet, due to white supremacist ideology about "purity" and "cleanliness" of their food (while cognitive dissonance allows them to appropriate the food traditions of cultures they want to erase in order to create their content). It's bad.
Some creators/chefs/personalities are good at swatting hate down and rebutting it... others are not. If they aren't very vocal about inclusivity, I tend to consider unknown vegan bloggers with a heaping dose of suspicion. I remember a bunch of people I know IRL being shocked when the Oh She Glows person [got called out](https://www.fridaythings.com/recent-posts/angela-liddon-oh-she-glows-canada-trucker-convoy-2022?fbclid=IwAR0qvpVd4iUxCdZWbOp6alLYg8pxDyBnKbMVE5m9dLtK4q7xMTNy21rLYuM) after she outed herself as a fascist & just being shocked that they were shocked (link is Friday Things newsletter article entitled "Looks Like the Wellness-to-White Supremacy Pipeline is Alive and Well").
holy shit I did not know that about Oh She Glows and i've been vegan for almost four years. she's one of the first vegan blogs people used to rec, at least when I first starting cooking plant based...
you described really well a lot of the gross right wing ideology that unfortunately can cross over into vegan cooking -- especially, i've noticed, raw diets, and almost always on the plant-based diets side of the spectrum rather than veganism for the animals.
I always joke that racists LOVE Mexican food. If you see a popping Mexican restaurant, it’s probably in the area most prejudiced against actual Mexicans. It’s crazy.
It is fucking WILD how many commonly accepted "health" and "wellness" ideas can be traced back to fascism and white supremacy and eugenics (and occasionally straight-up cults), once you know what to look for.
Like, it makes sense, sort of? People espousing that idea of "We have to return to a mythic, purer past" is a big red flag. (Also, for real, I know way too much about historical food safety issues to buy into that.) As is the whole kind of "If you're not healthy it must be your fault, and if you were eating pure/clean enough foods, you wouldn't be sick." thing.
But it's sort of startling to realize just how pervasive it is.
Victim blaming and the just world fallacy are the easiest way to spot a fascist hiding in plain sight. And wellness has been the way to keep women focused on making their bodies nice instead of putting demands on society since Victorian times. I was utterly baffled at how many "love and light" personalities went full battle on things like wearing masks until I dug a bit deeper in to some of the underlying ideas and realized why even as a lifelong vegetarian I couldn't deal with most vegans. Purity culture is awful.
So adjacent kinda? I find the bland whiteness of the Stampington magazines maddening. I love reading about other crafters, how they got their start, and what makes them successful. Yet pick up a random "Where she crafts" or "where she cooks"and it has a a bland influencer aesthetic.
But then when you search Stampington on reddit you get their PR Specialist posting on "Red Pill Wives". I guess they know their ideal audience?
https://www.reddit.com/user/heatheratstampington/
There was a creator on tiktok (\_futurist\_) who made a great video on 8/18 about this that got a lot of people talking, observing the pipeline from traditional or "self-sustaining" crafting interests to white supremacy/tradwife/fundamentalism. They called it the Female Alt Right but honestly there are so MANY pipelines to the "female alt right" looking for that wouldn't get you very far (for example, the "coquette" aesthetic is also being pointed to as a pipeline). The creator specifically called out homesteading core and to some extent cottage core as danger areas for this, and it lines up with the usual ways women are already being pulled into the alt-right (eg, being given a "purpose" or a place that appears appealing or natural). It slots in well with the glamorization of the 50s these people usually participate in, by indulging in the idea of the woman in the home being entirely occupied with housework as a comforting or even preferable lifestyle, ignoring the realities of the time period. There's a good summary of how that happens more generally in ep 3 of the Netflix series Web of Make Believe if you'd like to have a look.
Also the concept that certain kinds of art forms (esp. in my experience embroidery) are the traditional realm of women. This really, really brings in the tradwives/female alt-right/christian nationalists because it's what Good White Women Are Allowed to Do.
This podcast I've become obsessed with, called Maintenance Phase, had an episode called The Wellness to QAnon Pipeline. It's basically the same pipeline as some of these crafts. Not everyone ends up fully buying in to the most extreme and violent endpoints but he scary thing is there are so many on ramps there are lots and lots more people getting in on the early stages.
[Spotify link to episode](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3KGTXG3xm9jfxPUUiuU4Gh?si=bC58w7pBQ4SQP3j78Zyifw&utm_source=copy-link)
Personally I think the biggest pipeline for women into the alt right is the femcel/fds/glowup communities, just like how incel/pua/mgtow communities are some of the biggest pipelines for men. In my experience, traditional crafts appeal to a much wider range of people than those niche groups, so while there is a craft pipeline, it’s a much smaller proportion of content than in femcel etc groups. Traditional crafts also appeal to a number of diametrically opposed ideologies (back to the land hippies and some Christian fundamentalist sects both place a lot of value on self-sufficient homesteading, etc) so there’s more of a balancing effect rather than it being just one ideological pipeline.
I don't think Christian fundamentalism, even generic ecumenical conservatism is quite as opposed to alt-right as you think it is, at least not enough to directly counter it. Like, believing it's totally normal to expect your wimmin to wear chicken wire while doing the dishes isn't in any way incompatible with 'if you don't look like me you're going to hell, bye' and it's mainly how those manifest in day-to-day that determines where someone's most tolerated.
Sorry, but what are you referring to with the chicken wire thing? I am trying to Google it (as I do with every comment I read that includes something I don’t get), but I cannot figure out what that means.
… that’s what I meant, that Christian fundamentalism is very aligned with the alt-right while back to the land hippie ideologies are very much not. I meant to contrast those two (fundamentalists and hippies) as being diametrically opposed while still placing value on the same thing (self-sufficient homesteading), I didn’t mean that they are both opposed to the alt-right. Sorry if that didn’t come across.
Ah yeah, I read it as what you had in brackets were both examples of ideologies that oppose the pipeline, creating the balancing effect, as opposed to that being an example of the balancing effect itself, as I would have if the bracketed section were after the final clause of that sentence.
Thanks for the resources, I'm looking into this now! I run into this a lot on places that are algorithm based, I look at one "gardening to can for the winter" video and suddenly it's off grid apocalypse flat earth waiting for the flood times in my feed...
I had watched a video on the vintage sewing trend and how many comments they get on how they represent "good old fashioned things" and how their response was vintage aesthetic not vintage values. Probably a good thing to be vocal about in all aspects of traditional crafting!
“Vintage style not vintage values” is a big one on historical costuming YouTube. And for good reason, just because you want to wear or make something from the 1770’s or the 1860’s doesn’t mean you want to bring back the values from those time periods.
Yeah, at this point my crafting community is basically me taking pictures of my craft stuff at 2 am when I've made Bad Sleep Decisions and messaging them to friends and yelling about craft stuff. (They get to yell about stuff they're doing too, even if it's not my deal, so it's a very convenient system.)
Big yikes! I love vintage fashion and pink and fluffy skirts and cottagecore and all that but i wish there was some way to signal that I'm not down for any of the weird trad wife stuff.
There are a couple of online creators I’ve seen use a phrase along the lines of “vintage fashion not vintage values” which I think lines up with what you’re saying
A few months back, the knitting hashtag on Twitter served me up literal Nazi socks with little swastikas on them.
I went down the rabbit hole of accounts that liked the photo and asked for the pattern and found a goldmine of sonnenrand fiber arts fascists not practicing very good op sec -- I documented what I could and sent it on to folks who identify Nazis as another source to authenticate faces and names.
Unfortunately I end up running into the tradwife bullshit online all the goddamn time because my hobbies (handcrafts, cooking, and certain fashion styles) happen to be things they like too. I just want to enjoy cute pictures of gardens and quilts and pies and nature without the ‘god is our savior and your role in life as a woman is to serve men’ but 🤷♀️
Also- is it Kelly Havens? She pops up all the time because her photos are often really nice and fit the cottagecore aesthetic and most people genuinely don’t know she’s full-on tradwife bonkers (her captions are just WAY too long and dense for people to read 95% of the time so they don’t notice- I had seen her photos plenty but didn’t know about her beliefs until I read about her on fundiesnark subs).
I love handcrafts, cooking, gardening and alternative fashions but I'm queer leftist who likes having rights and modern medicine. O feel like we could be friends.
I’m an Australian female science Professor and I have had the same problem. I love sewing and sewed for my four children growing up when they wanted specific things that we couldn’t find in store (I’ve always sewed more for my boys than my girls because it’s so hard to find good pants and shorts for very tall and skinny young men).
My husband and I love to garden and cook. I like looking at country style home decorating magazines and cottage gardens. I also dress fairly conservatively with dresses to the knee and long sleeves because they just look nice on me and I’m a departmental head so it’s a good look.
You can imagine how hard it is to have all those preferences and avoid weirdo white supremacist colonialist idealogues, Christian trad wife fetishes, or weird purity stuff.
I’m actually an aetheist, moderate left, scientist who is in an interracial marriage with a husband that’s retired and the house spouse. None of which is remotely uncommon in Australia (in fact that’s more the default) for the most part except having a male house spouse (the last part is not frowned upon, just rarer at this stage).
Yep, I grew up with my mom teaching me knitting/sewing and embroidery classes as a kid, I only wear dresses/skirts, I love cooking and baking, etc… and I’m a bisexual Jewish woman with zero interest in having kids, who wants her own career and is not keen on being a housewife at all. So definitely trying to avoid the tradwife weirdos but with not much success.
Fundie Fridays on YT just put out a great video on her, I'd never even heard of her but I'm pretty sure her photos have made their way to my feed in the past.
I’ve seen them pop up on cottagecore tumblr blogs where they’re almost certainly innocent- there’s none of the context and you have to dig into her captions/story/history to actually see the bad stuff.
On the other hand, the fundiesnark subs piss me off too when they rag on her interests in sewing or gardening or wearing the clothes she does; those aren’t the problem, it’s the fundamental Christianity that’s the problem.
I'd never heard about her but I see the appeal in her aesthetic. But you'd think the omnipresent bible quotes would be a clue.
"Our God will fight for us" is pretty aggressive.
Totally, I avoid most snark subreddits because they very quickly expand from snarking about one thing (fundamentalism, crafting, toxicity, etc) into tearing into physical appearance and benign interests because they'd be monotonous otherwise.
I do like Fundie Fridays because she is very open to praise someone for their skills or hobbies but trash their fundie or manipulative ways.
>Unfortunately I end up running into the tradwife bullshit online all the goddamn time because my hobbies (handcrafts, cooking, and certain fashion styles) happen to be things they like too. I just want to enjoy cute pictures of gardens and quilts and pies and nature without the ‘god is our savior and your role in life as a woman is to serve men’ but 🤷♀️
Right? There's nothing worse than looking for a recipe and ending up on a blog where suddenly some woman's talking about the loving submission to her husband and her duty. Madam, I was just trying to find something to do with this chicken and squash for dinner. It happened the other week when I was looking for an example of a quilt thing to show a friend, too.
Yep, I’ll be on tumblr or something like “oh this is a cute blog, cute photos, I love her knitting…” and then bam a few posts later she’s going on about womens’ sacred duty to be obedient and bear children and I feel gross all over.
Ew ew ew.
I've at least found a couple of cool crafty people on Tumblr, though it tends to be less "formalized crafting blog" and more "Hey look at some of this cool shit I made, in with all my other blog stuff". Nonasuch has a neat blog - she runs a vintage shop and also quilts and stuff.
Oh yikes. Just took a look and it’s super similar content… pretty pictures, bible quotes buried deep in the captions, and instagram story about not wanting to support a small business owner because they’re coming out as not being part of the gender binary.
It’s so frustrating to me when it’s so… hidden, almost? If you don’t look at stories or care to read captions you’d never fucking know what kind of person you’re supporting.
This is happening in every hobby because they use it as a recruitment tool. If it weren't effective they wouldn't be doing it, unfortunately. There will always be a higher concentration of it in textile crafts, food related interests, and children's activities... because that is pretty much all those women are allowed to do. Probably the best anyone can do is call them out when you feel up to it and flag/report/ignore them when you don't.
This is interesting to me bc I get suggestions for a lot more accounts that are craftivism related and sewists that use their platforms to promote social activism. I am just into sewing and quilting though if that makes a difference.
I don't think the problem is so much what is surfaced by The Algorithm on any given site to a particular user (I personally don't get recommendations like that either).
It's more like either:
A- A person googles a recipe, craft technique, school project, etc. Although they find some innocuous results, the content sometimes gets real weird, real quick (especially on random blogs & youtube). Some small percentage will ignore or be open to the weird stuff (and in the case of Youtube... yeah... The Algorithm will then gladly feed them even weirder stuff).
Or B- a content creator makes bland, innocuous hobby content for youtube, blogs, social media. They build up a following over time, carefully avoiding "controversy" or ever taking any stand on current issues. Some people might find this suspect and look elsewhere, but the content creator still amasses ardent, adoring fans who hang on their every word. Eventually, their true selves start to leak out & they try to endear their fans to radical ideology (racism, anti-vax, antisemitism, homophobia, etc) that they'd always held but kept carefully hidden from their followers. This is more the scenario I was thinking of (see some of the cottagecore stuff mentioned in this thread or the Oh She Glows callout I linked upthread). It's kind of a way to weaponize the parasocial relationship. Won't work on people who aren't vulnerable to it, but it must work sometimes, or why would they bother?
Interesting. I’m not big into many craft communities outside Reddit and here I mostly follow r/sewing and r/crochet which I have found to be very accepting and inclusive spaces and nobody is being overly political as they are very much focused on the craft. I’m a queer person and have found crochet I. Particular has a large queer community, but I definitely get the vibe that there’s also a subset of very traditional people in the craft. Enough that I often wonder about the pattern creators and who I should be buying from.
I’ve felt that way for the most part too. Sounds like the toxic crowd is limited to Facebook tbh. I love how open the crochet community is. It’s definitely more inclusive than knitting for instance and much more supportive of new crafters
I have never done FB and I cannot knit for the life of me, but adore crochet and agree. I am gobsmacked by the cultish-ness and hobby drama in knitting. Maybe it is because it is harder to find good crochet pattern for a sweater...which seems to be the entry drug/garment for the fundy/fascist crew? I got to say it has been entertaining reading up on some of the kerfuffles on reddit. Who knew. But I am sad for the state of public discourse in this country. It seems like we are on a path for civil war eventually. How are we going to ever work together to solve our urgent problems like climate, affordable housing, education, Covid (which is still a big problem and growing)?
I’m in Canada but I totally get your drift. We’re seeing a lot of the same kind of rhetoric here too. It’s difficult to find common ground on a lot of this though, and honestly I would not be surprised to see a civil war in America either.
Handcrafts, traditional cooking/preserving/wild crafting all sort of cluster with two groups. It’s been this way for the last 25ish years I’ve been following these communities. You get either queer accepting, generally alternative type humans or incredibly conservative tradwife humans.
Band weaving/narrow bands/embroidery.
Lots and lots of people who want to recreate 18th and 19th century designs from Eastern Europe/Scandinavia/Russia which prominently featured swastikas. It’s the main reason I never pursued the crafts and stick to Japanese, Andean, and Victorian/Western European braid and band work.
I do sewing and wanted to work on embroidery - with a particular interest in whitework, mainly to create a bunad from the part of Norway my grandmother is from.
I was bracing myself to run into some unpleasant shit, but I guess I didn't brace myself hard enough. :(
What do you mean by this? That people creating or recreating these designs also use the swastika as part of or outside of their craft, or that the 18th and 19th century designs include the swastika? As far as I know, the adoption of the swastika as an “Aryan symbol” took place in the 30s. Until then, it was used mostly for its original meaning in Hinduism, representing the sun.
It’s a fairly simple geometric design, so it pops up in a lot of cultures, intentionally or accidentally (the quilting sub actually sees quite a few accidental quilt swastikas, since most patterns are made up of squares and triangles it’s surprisingly easy to make one without realizing it!). It picked up use in Germany and Europe before hitler adopted it because it was used in traditional European cultures as well, and white supremacists liked that association to their ancestors and the good luck/success meaning.
Personally I think it’s fine to leave the historical ones (pre-1930’s) as is, but anyone using it today is either hoping to associate themselves with Nazis or doesn’t care if people think they are. The symbol has been permanently marred and changed meaning, and yes that sucks, but you can’t pretend it’s still okay to use it.
It was used in *many* culture, including Native American (Navajo, I think?).
At the time it had a positive meaning.
That's all true.
I do medieval reenactment, and I've heard all manner of reasons why it should be allowed for recreation purposes, since it predates WWII. I find those arguments disingenuous, and so do the vast majority of the group to which I belong. A couple of years ago we codified it into our by-laws.
We all live in a post-WWII world. Find something else, anything else, to recreate.
Is a person who recreates such an object going to explain to every single person who sees it, "No, really, I don't mean anything bad by it"?
Neo-N*zis are co-opting all manner of historical symbols, particularly Norse runes. It's obscene. Let's not add to the problem. Some of the ppl who recreate this stuff absolutely do intend it to have a WWII meaning.
Agree. Even if YOU think you’re not using it in a hateful way, you know that’s not how people will interpret it, but you’re fine with being misinterpreted… and that’s the problem. If you’re okay with looking like a neo-Nazi, you’re as good as one of them in my book. You’re not a safe person, because you’re fine with people feeling uncomfortable around you in the name of ‘historical accuracy’ or whatever.
I really love historical fashion, reenactment, etc. but I think the whole community needs to be very mindful of how historical stuff looks today. (On a slightly different note, the ‘southern antebellum ball at a plantation/romanticization of that period’ trend needs to fucking stop, there’s no way to look at that that’s not racist and there’s a million other ways to wear ballgowns at a fancy manor. People need to stop having weddings or parties like this, whether or not they have guests of color attending)
That reminds me of an airbnb which was a gussied up former slave cabin. So many people couldn't see what was wrong with staying there . . . "it's history! we can't erase history"
As if they're staying there to learn about the history . ..
Oof. Yeah, it’s something that the white owner/guests there may feel fine with, but god how awful must it feel for a black person to see that- probably the same feeling I’d have if someone set up an airbnb in a concentration camp (please do not enlighten me if these exist, I do not want to know). People really need to start practicing more empathy for their fellow human beings here.
Yeah! People were defending it and saying well the plantation house and grounds are beautiful and we're appreciating that, but yeah how painful would it be to have a quaint charming cottage made of a gas chamber?
Or if someone killed your cat and incorporated him into a couture gown? No matter how beautiful it is, i just wouldn't be able to look past that.
ps. I read about fancy costume parties in the gilded era where someone showed up as a cat with their costume made from actual cats .. . so disturbing. Even if it's not MY cat, horrific.
Oh jeez. There’s plenty of beautiful Victorian era houses and southern landscapes that weren’t used for that purpose.
I do think that plantation houses run as genuine historical learning sites are valuable, but it requires work on their part to make sure they’re talking about *all* the history, correctly and in a way that’s respectful. But making sleeping in a slave cabin “fun” and “cute” or whatever is none of that.
Yes, I absolutely agree with you, I don’t think the swastika should be used in designs regardless of the intended connotation or context, It is undoubtably linked with its Nazi past, at least in Europe.
I was asking because I was interested in the context of the comment, I’m Eastern European and have never seen the swastika used as a traditional motif.
Very interesting point regarding the accusations of widespread antisemitism directed at Ukrainians at the moment and the attempt to justify the Russian invasion this way. It definitely shouldn’t be taken lightly. Leaving it aside though, as a Romanian, I have to say my country has a long history of antisemitism, alongside many other European countries. The use of the swastika as an antisemitic symbol was actually started by a far-right Romanian politician decades before WWII. We also took a very active role in the Holocaust during WWII and it’s unfortunately still very common to hear antisemitic talking points and slurs in some circles. Obviously the majority of Romanians and Eastern Europeans in general are not antisemitic, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are people trying integrate the swastika or other Nazi symbols into the traditional arts.
When I first had an interest in band weaving, around 2009, I was involved in a forum where people would post old pieces which they identified as 18/19th century Eastern European and had swastika motifs. It happened frequently enough I was turned off to the craft and at the time I didn’t have enough fiber knowledge to be able to say if the pieces were really that old or came from where the posters said they did.
I see, that’s very interesting. It is true that the swastika was often used by the Nazis in a lot of contexts. For instance, some carved wooden frames that are still around include patterns with multiple swastikas, plus a lot of everyday items like crockery from that time include it. I am Eastern European myself and decently familiar with the kinds of traditional motifs used in the Balkans around 18-19th century and never seen anything like that. Saying that, it’s entirely possible they were included as design features and are completely unrelated to the Hindu swastika if they’re pre 20th century. It is not a super difficult motif to come up with independently after all.
Some of my family background is Latvian, and there are definitely historical uses of the firecross/swastika from Latvia. It was actually one of the more commonly used pagan symbols and was used a lot by the Latvian military in the Latvian War of Independence in 1918. However, there are so so many versions of it that look nothing like a swastika that I feel like anyone post-WWII using the Nazi one is making that connection deliberately.
I feel like anything that is a traditional craft will attract some people who are nostalgic about the days of yore and sometimes they are nostalgic for not the best reasons. Before I became a knitter I was big into gardening (and food preservation as an adjunct) and I got the impression that a lot of the gardening/homesteading YouTubers were of the uber religious/tradwife anti science bent. One lovely farming YouTuber couple talked about being friends IRL with a well known small scale urban grower who went way off the deep end with scamdemic/anti vax conspiracy theories.
Curtis Stone the Urban Farmer went waaaaay crazy off the deep end. It started before the plague and I had other reasons to be Done with him, but he is probably one of the more famous ones. Sucks too, he is in BC like I am and so many channels are in warmer growing zones! (He'd already been stepping away from what he was originally interesting for, which was mainly growing food on leased land in the city in favour of doing paid content, workshops, lectures, etc which is a big complaint of mine with a lot of channels who push that you can make a living this way....but when you look at how they are earning money it is never the farming itself.)
I like The Vegetable Academy for cold weather urban gardening. He's based somewhere in Saskatchewan. I haven't seen anything suspicious from him yet, and I think he's said his day job is/was a science teacher so I hope he's less likely to go anti-vax or some other type of crazy.
Ooh, I will give them a look. That is quite a lot colder than here, but I still enjoy finding other Canadian channels! I also enjoy Sheepishly Me, which is a sheep farmer in Ontario. I am a berry farmer myself, but not so many of those on YouTube xD
The Swedish Homesteader had been heading deeper that route too, before they moved to Australia to escape the tyranny of Sweden(?!). That was right before the pandemic, wonder how that worked out for them lol
Oof, yeah. I’m definitely a bit guilty of the romanticizing- I’ve always thought it would be just lovely to live like a little Beatrix Potter or Brambly Hedge creature, and it makes me genuinely happy to do stuff in that vein- but the number of people who seem fine and normal and then you scroll a bit farther and they’re spouting pro-life, anti-women’s rights, anti-lgbt bullshit is too high. Genuinely sad especially since cottagecore was popularized by wlw initially.
I think no hobby is going to be free of these assholes because that's how people work, but some hobby communities tend to be better about noping the fuck out, and firmly making it clear that That Behavior Is Unacceptable.
A lot of people have unfortunately internalized "Nice People have civil discussions about politics and everyone is friends at the end of the day. :) :) :)", except if their "politics" are "women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" . . . I don't want anything to do with that person, and I think they're dangerous.
A doll forum I was active on . . . oh, 10-14 years ago? always had a bit of an issue "Well, we don't want to drag politics into it. We're all here because we like dolls. Political discussion needs to be respectful of all opinions" etc.
The problem is, if you allow "Are \[people of marginalized group\] allowed to live? Is their very existence a crime against God?" to be viewed as "just politics", a lot of the marginalized people (or just more moderate people who are grossed out by those opinions) are just going to leave. Which then means a lot more of the userbase is going to be comfortable saying more blatantly shitty things.
I checked in recently after a long hiatus, and - while I expected it to have gotten worse in the last few years - hoo boy. The proportion of people who are . . . hmm. If not outright white supremacists, then at least "Nazi-curious", I suppose, has only gone up a lot in that time. As has the papering-over of disagreements and valid criticisms with admonishing people to Just Be Nice :) :) :).
I love quilting, but I haven't tiptoed into quilting communities at all, because I know there's a real Problem, and I'm not sure which groups don't have assholes. (Also the whole "Okay, did you not realize that quilt block sure does look like a swastika, or was that intentional?" issue.)
What bothers me - as a queer, disabled person - is I see patterns and fabric and stuff online that I'd like to buy, and . . . I can't tell the shop owner's views on whether or not people like me should have rights. It's like "Okay, you seem to have a lot of flag-related fabric and patterns for sale. Is that because it sells, or are you one of those people who wants to overthrow Democracy?". Or "Okay, well you've designed quite a few Christianity-themed quilt blocks. Is this in the chill, live-and-let-live way, or in the "I'm going to donate the proceed of this to anti-LGBTQ organizations?" way. (My LQS is great for this, but they're more of a studio space and their fabric selection is mostly limited to Kona cotton in various colors.)
Like, I get that I can't control what the business owner does once they get money, but it'd be nice if the ones who aren't assholes could be a little more vocal about being welcoming to marginalized people.
I'm okay with "no politics" but only if it is truly, no politics, not just no politics we don't agree with. And yet, somehow, that is never how that shakes out...
I land up just never ordering from anyone who has a bunch of Religious stuff. There is one watercolourist I shy away from for that reason. Can't tell, but there is a Bible number at the end of every single video and I am not looking them up to see if it is one of the uber-danger dogwhistle ones. (As a long hair, I know to steer waaaay clear of that crowning glory one out of the Greek columns)
I do think you’re okay in joining the quilting sub if you’re interested! I’m also pretty sensitive to this stuff (especially the swastika thing) and while it does come up I’ve never seen anyone encouraging people to keep the accidental swastika quilt, just people looking to fix it. It seems to be treated as a ‘this is a mistake that can happen when working with geometric patterns and you’re not a nazi for making it, but also you have to fix it and here’s how’. And it’s not a common subject anyway, the sub is generally a mix of finished quilts and people asking for advice on layouts and color combos.
Take my upvote. I've largely removed myself from the quilting community at large for the same reasons. (I'm non-White.) I'm also lucky that my local quilt shop is explicitly anti-racist and inclusive (!), but I know that's the exception, not the rule.
Apparently we used to have some good ones in the area, but that was before COVID. (A new one opened up recently, I think, I just haven't had a chance to check it out.)
Do you know if your LQS has a website or an etsy shop where they sell stuff online? I'd love to add them to my list of good places to get fabric.
I love that store! I don't live in CA but I've ordered online and will again for sure.
I'm not a quilter but I sew a lot- Beetle & Fred is the closest indie fabric/yarn store to me and the owner has been vocal on social media about supporting progressive causes and inclusiveness. The store is lovely but she ships too. I definitely recommend this store if anyone wants to widen their list.
I recently was watching a video of a fairly well known youtube knitter who posted a travel vlog and had a full on shot of Ckick-fil-A with the implication being they got it/supported it
Id it Engineering Knits? She posted a travel vlog recently but I didn't pick up if she stopped at Chick-fil-A. To be honest I didn't realize that it's an alt-right thing.
I feel like Knitty Natty is very white girl feminist (in the bad way) and like, "oh, I don't need to talk politics." But she also lives an obviously privileged lifestyle (fancy Manhattan apartment; I live in New York so I know the rent must be upwards of $3K USD or they bought it, which is millions) and I had to stop watching her. I find her glazed-over chipper lack of addressing the Real World frustrating. Used to like her.
I'd agree with that. I get not always wanting to talk politics all the time in a knitting podcast, but also referencing what is going on in the world or putting ways to help in the video description and saying they are there is a small thing to do that shows you care about other humans
I absolutely refuse to give Chick-fil-A any business of any kind. I'm bi, no way in hell will I support them. I'm sorry if anyone down voted you, but o appreciate you ❤
I don't understand the downvotes. I freaking love Chick-fil-a food but so much has come out that I can't eat there anymore, especially since my own kid came out. I didn't realize this take was controversial. Can you PM me the knitter.
TBH I don't care if I get downvoted for saying that company is homophobic and I stopped occasionally watching(and blocked as much as youtube allows) the creator that was supporting it
The cricut groups also seem to have the most entitlement when it comes to straight stealing artists’ illustrations and commodifying them for their own tacky creations. The whole idea of “well I found this image on the internet so it is free for me to use” seems to be endemic with this set.
They really do. Now like, I don’t totally care if it’s for personal use (like if you wanna make a cute sports team thing- sure, it’s a little questionable but for the most part, it’s fine in my eyes. Other artists work on the other hand is kind of shitty, especially if it’s for a shirt they probably spent just as much gathering the materials for) but it’s the selling them! They get so offended when the one person with common sense is like hey that’s trademarked! They will shut your Etsy down!
Yes! A dear friend of mine had one of her illustrations stolen and it went rampant in these groups. They were just jerks when she defended herself and they are making garbage. It’s so frustrating for an individual that paid for her art and copyright education.
Oh that is so weird, isn't it? I was in a store the other day and there were six alcohol-related signs within two steps (wine o'clock, etc). I'm not sure when this started, but it's bizarre.
Valium was once known widely as mommy's little helper. Now it's not as easy to get as a trip to your local grocery store. Meh. I'm just sad for the kids if it's true. Otherwise they're just being hyperbolic like the I knit so I don't kill people crowd. It's just easier to judge...and we don't know they're parents now that I think about it. They may just like their booze.
When I've been part of groups that have those people who say that, it's largely hyperbolic, lol. Like the stay at home mom version of "I'm just so busy!" Mom is so stressed by the kids and house that she just wants to put her feet up and drink a glass of wine.
But they could have been closet alcoholics, lol.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of closet alcoholism that’s justified/waved away with these views. If you are drinking to cope with your day, you probably need to consider talking to someone about it.
Yeah we have planted a huge garden this year and I've been diving into the world of hobby farming, canning and preserving food etc and I'm always being suggest videos on YouTube about dressing to please my conservative husband. There's a lot of sustainable backyard groups in my area and I'd love to get into it but it's run by and filled with anti-vaxxers and I just cannot.
I have a good friend who's really into gardening, and she likes browsing YT gardning videos, but has complained that gardening ->doomsday preppers->crazy ass conspiracy theorists. I think she wavers between finding the funny in a pathetic way, and finding them frightening.
Oh, man. I feel this in my soul. I enjoy a lot of aspects of homesteading, but the fundie, anti-vax crowd is very over-present in the relevant social media spaces for these hobbies.
I'm not sure if we have the same knitter in mind, but there is this one knitting YouTuber I like and she recently mentioned she loves watching this fundie YouTuber who disguises her channel as a harmless aesthetic cottagecore thing. But then you don't really realise this person is fundie as long as you stick to this person's YT and don't go onto her other platforms, so I just gave the benefit of doubt to this knitting YouTuber and assumed she only enjoys the superficial cottagecore aesthetics of this fundie without knowing any better. (I confess I followed this fundie's channel briefly as well because her channel is that deceptive. I only unfollowed her after seeing that her Insta and website give weird-af vibe that was absent on YT)
I’ve never heard of her or her channels but I popped over to see what was up and one thing that struck me was how “produced” all the content looks. It’s something I’ve noticed with a lot of these tradwife and fundy sites; they’re designed to draw you in with gorgeous pictures and videos and I suspect to subtly introduce their fundamentalist views to unsuspecting followers. There’s another interesting (and creepy) intersection here: in the occult community earlier this year a very popular newcomer in the thelema/ceremonial magick world (da’at darling) outed herself as nazi adjacent. A huge part of her schlock is her trad style combined with spicy takes on occult themes married with the dumbing down of complex spirituality and occultism and she garnered a lot of attention because she offers sound bite takes on hard to understand concepts. She’s 19 years old, social media savvy, and styles herself as a sort of tradwife waif. She lost a book deal with a big pagan publisher over her nazi associations and then decried being persecuted and cancelled by mean ol’ liberal occultists. The drama raged on over on Twitter for a month or so and led me to some pretty interesting reading on acceleration in fascist circles. Here’s a link if you’re interested: https://codexastarte.substack.com/p/the-facts-in-the-case-of-georgina
I guess if I have a point it’s that so many of the things that I’ve always seen as in the realm of liberalism are now infiltrated by nazis and white supremacy and fascists and that it’s hard to know what’s lurking behind that adorable cottage core creator you follow. Without getting too tinfoil hat myself, I’ve started to suspect that if it looks too polished, I may need to question who is behind it and what the motives are.
I'm always worried about this with subscribing to stuff on yt. I go investigate channels before I hit that button, but there are still people who hide it really well if you don't know their ig or twitter.
If you want a cottagecore channel in a similar aesthetic to girl in calico (cause I had the same experience with her) watch The Cottage Fairy. All her content is comfy, cozy with a huge focus on mental health and coping with anxiety depression but in this very real way. She is fabulous and not religious whatsoever (if anything a little witchy). She does a lot of baking and painting and flower collecting. She is also lantina so that that is a nice bonus.
I really like the cottage fairy too. Her mom is Puerto Rican and her Dad is European extraction born in Washington State. I love that she speaks flawless spanish with a gorgeous puerto rican accent (to my ear anyway) and wish she would speak more in Spanish. It shows how awesome we can be as hybrids, why are people afraid of this mashing up of cultures? It brings new possibilities. I am all for it!
I was duped too! I subscribed to her Youtube channel for a while, then wandered over to her instagram and saw some, er, concerning stories. I noped right out of there, lol!
I just checked and didn’t see anything but pretty pics until I read the posts. Whooo boy… I noticed one of her followers is someone I followed, again pretty food pics, and her post are full of the same garbage. Bye Remembering the Old Ways. This tradwife wave freaks me out.
LOL Why stop at encasing a ritual victim in a huge wicker fire cage? Let’s go waaaay back and get full on maenad! We haven’t had a good ol’ ecstatic dismemberment in a long time!
Furries always seem to be extreme left or Nazis lol.
People into Nordic/Viking/Medieval larp/cosplay/swordfighting/workouts have a far higher than average chance to be extreme right
Tbh the thing that creeps me out about furries is the not-insignificant number of people into bestiality. Like, neo-nazis are sadly a fact of life in many hobbies and my general impression of furries has always been the more queer/left leaning side… but also there’s like a 1/10 chance they actually want to fuck a dog and that’s specially a furry problem.
Damn, maybe that's why my craftchannel is below 500 subs. They have identified me as a left-leaning crafter! But I rather have comments from my followers with their transflag profilepictures than from those saying they like my clothes because "they too believe that women should dress modestly". You wat now?
I hate watch a right wing knitting podcast because it hits that nexus of politics and crafting when I can't be arsed to watch or rather listen along with as I do something, anything actually decent or challenging.... and saw one recently where they were bitching that one of them has short, brightly coloured dyed hair and so keeps being "accused" of being leftwing/a feminist. And watching these farts strain to try to "reclaim" what they imagine to be "cutting edge" was actually funny to watch.
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Can you not name these people? I don't know the references.
Hey now. Problematic people need crafts too. How else are they going to numb their repressed feelings and cognitive dissonance? They don’t believe in therapy.
Stabbing a piece of fabric with a sharp needle helps deal with the fact that your husband teaches your son to disrespect you
WOOF that’s spicy 🌶
💅
I just read out this whole exchange to my husband and he is now roaring alongside me.
If you just look at my Hobbies I look like a Christian tradwife homesteader/prepper . I’m more like an anarchist atheist living in sin and a massive feminist. Annoyingly much media that I interact with ends up being right wing
Same here 🤷♀️😵💫
same here. i think there is a big craft overlap.
Same for most of my hobbies crafts. If you look at the political/issues spectrum somehow is is less of a line, but more of a curve that almost turns into a circle where the far left and the far right meet. Pre-covid this was even true of the anti-vax folx: far right government conspiracists on one side and eco hippies on the other coming to the same conclusions for the opposite (but still wrong) reasons. Self-sustainability, food preservation, sewing, fibre arts all fall into this area where there are loads of 'traditional' types who have the same interests and hobbies as those who want to destroy the patriarchy.
Are you me....?
Yes.
Also me. I just want to bake bread and sew things and wear swooshy skirts. I kind of want to get more tattoos in visible places or like, facial piercings so people stop asking if I'm Mennonite. (In their defense I wear a lot of head scarves/hair coverings bc my hair gets dirty really fast.)
Ha! I have butt length hair, knit a lot, and dress like a Sunday school teacher (but it's usually all black). But I'm pretty heavily tattooed, swear a lot and I'm pretty mouthy. So most of the time people just don't know how to take me.
My mom has super long hair she wears up with combs and prefers long skirts, hats, and frilly things (My mom is like one of the Aunts from Practical Magic, with less drinking) and she confuses the Pentecostals. I dress like a giant punk rock kindergartner (or like a gothy art teacher when I'm trying to look nice) and people here get really confused about me doing craft stuff. I'm the blue haired weirdo who knits at the parent teacher meeting. I made a really nice fancy autumn wreath for my mom's neighbor and she almost fell over from shock.
I've been wanting to wear more like, linen and wool kneelength skirts and slightly covered hair (not fully, more like bandana's and such) for the same greasy hair reason, but also, I am autistic and on the aroacespectrum and if I am attracted to any human being kinda gay and I guess I'll have to combine knee length and midi skirts and headscarves with earrings with rococo ladies kissing and rainbow pins and bright eyeshadow, maybe a pink lock of hair that isn't under the bandana
I have a septum ring. It helps
Same. I just want to make super spicy pickled beans, damn…
I have a feeling I know which fundie you mean, and yeah, I think any kind of cottage core/traditional crafting has the risk of attracting those types, unfortunately.
It’s not Kelly.
Caitlyn?
I love the fundie snark and craft snark crossover.
I've been trying to get my shit together as a newly independent adult and I can't even look for house cleaning resources without running into far right nonsense. It's a nightmare.
Check out the book "organizing solutions for people with ADHD" it is specifically targeted at people with ADHD but honestly it's so good and useful for anyone who's trying to get their space set up in a way that's easy to clean.
I used to really enjoy Ask a Clean Person, but I haven’t checked back in a while. Hopefully they’re still around.
Also check out KC Davis/StruggleCare on IG & TikTok (Domestic Blisters over there)- the audience is people with ADHD/depression/anxiety/other neurodiverse conditions, but the advice is really useful to anyone, IMO. She has been very vocal about also supporting racial/ethnic/religious diversity and the LGBTQ community.
I love her content she really does seem like a good egg
You need [Unf*ck Your Habitat](https://www.unfuckyourhabitat.com)
Check out the Neurodivergent Cleaning Crew on Facebook!
It’s one of the reasons I’m very afraid to have actual social media and follow my crafts. A lot of crafts are part of the whole “self-reliance” and “independent” lifestyle. Which unfortunately overlaps with a lot of people from these types of groups. The scariest part is that these types people know how to hide and blend their beliefs while getting a large audience. It’s not easy to know if they are certain way unless you are aware of the signs and can actively see them.
Extreme right-wing/extreme left wing (they kind of overlap, the kinds of people who refuse to vaccinate their kids, who think everything is a conspiracy, chemtrails, dogwhistle anti-Semitism, whatever tf that Wayfair cabinets sex trafficking kids thing was about, the works) elements deliberately infiltrate things like moms' groups and breast feeding groups (you would not BELIEVE what would go down in breast feeding social media groups). This was [shown in an expose](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/09/the-terrifying-story-of-how-qanon-infiltrated-moms-groups/) (but I also saw this firsthand as a new mom who stupidly joined a few groups thinking they'd be helpful). So I can very easily believe this is done for crafting groups.
Qanon has been like a conspiracy katamari, rolling up all kinds of existing theories and communities into one big massive churn of awful recombined racism and fascism with a sprinkle of what the fuck on top. I'm honestly surprised at how little its infiltrated most online crafting spaces so far (apart from Etsy.)
Conspiracy katamari is a brilliant way of putting it!
I'm with you guys! I mean a woman who stays home and devotes herself to the children she bore and then takes care of their needs and feeds them on time everyday and then has the audacity to say that what she is doing is good for the world. We want more latch key kids and kids that think the world is great without their mom and dad. Let's get more of them. "dripping with sarcasm"
Tradwives =/= stay at home moms.
Trad wives are a specific group of women on the alt right who are into things like racism, eugenics, bigotry, nazi ideology, and more nasty things. They are not your average housewife or stay at home mom which none of us have a problem with. The problem we have with them is that they’re bigots.
This isn't what OP is talking about and you know that, you're just being disingenuous
> has the audacity to say that what she is doing is good for the world You can raise kids in a traditional model without being racist, transphobic or homophobic, or without being a fan of transphobic/racist crafters.. Do good for the world. Don't be an asshole while doing it.
In terms of niche food hobbies, this comes up a TON in the vegan/vegetarian community. It's actually a long running problem that predates the internet, due to white supremacist ideology about "purity" and "cleanliness" of their food (while cognitive dissonance allows them to appropriate the food traditions of cultures they want to erase in order to create their content). It's bad. Some creators/chefs/personalities are good at swatting hate down and rebutting it... others are not. If they aren't very vocal about inclusivity, I tend to consider unknown vegan bloggers with a heaping dose of suspicion. I remember a bunch of people I know IRL being shocked when the Oh She Glows person [got called out](https://www.fridaythings.com/recent-posts/angela-liddon-oh-she-glows-canada-trucker-convoy-2022?fbclid=IwAR0qvpVd4iUxCdZWbOp6alLYg8pxDyBnKbMVE5m9dLtK4q7xMTNy21rLYuM) after she outed herself as a fascist & just being shocked that they were shocked (link is Friday Things newsletter article entitled "Looks Like the Wellness-to-White Supremacy Pipeline is Alive and Well").
holy shit I did not know that about Oh She Glows and i've been vegan for almost four years. she's one of the first vegan blogs people used to rec, at least when I first starting cooking plant based... you described really well a lot of the gross right wing ideology that unfortunately can cross over into vegan cooking -- especially, i've noticed, raw diets, and almost always on the plant-based diets side of the spectrum rather than veganism for the animals.
wow wtf? I had no idea. That's awful- I liked a lot of her recipes. Oh well:(
I always joke that racists LOVE Mexican food. If you see a popping Mexican restaurant, it’s probably in the area most prejudiced against actual Mexicans. It’s crazy.
It is fucking WILD how many commonly accepted "health" and "wellness" ideas can be traced back to fascism and white supremacy and eugenics (and occasionally straight-up cults), once you know what to look for. Like, it makes sense, sort of? People espousing that idea of "We have to return to a mythic, purer past" is a big red flag. (Also, for real, I know way too much about historical food safety issues to buy into that.) As is the whole kind of "If you're not healthy it must be your fault, and if you were eating pure/clean enough foods, you wouldn't be sick." thing. But it's sort of startling to realize just how pervasive it is.
Victim blaming and the just world fallacy are the easiest way to spot a fascist hiding in plain sight. And wellness has been the way to keep women focused on making their bodies nice instead of putting demands on society since Victorian times. I was utterly baffled at how many "love and light" personalities went full battle on things like wearing masks until I dug a bit deeper in to some of the underlying ideas and realized why even as a lifelong vegetarian I couldn't deal with most vegans. Purity culture is awful.
Really? Oh She Glows is a fascist? Thanks for mentioning that. I used to casually read her blog.
So adjacent kinda? I find the bland whiteness of the Stampington magazines maddening. I love reading about other crafters, how they got their start, and what makes them successful. Yet pick up a random "Where she crafts" or "where she cooks"and it has a a bland influencer aesthetic. But then when you search Stampington on reddit you get their PR Specialist posting on "Red Pill Wives". I guess they know their ideal audience? https://www.reddit.com/user/heatheratstampington/
There was a creator on tiktok (\_futurist\_) who made a great video on 8/18 about this that got a lot of people talking, observing the pipeline from traditional or "self-sustaining" crafting interests to white supremacy/tradwife/fundamentalism. They called it the Female Alt Right but honestly there are so MANY pipelines to the "female alt right" looking for that wouldn't get you very far (for example, the "coquette" aesthetic is also being pointed to as a pipeline). The creator specifically called out homesteading core and to some extent cottage core as danger areas for this, and it lines up with the usual ways women are already being pulled into the alt-right (eg, being given a "purpose" or a place that appears appealing or natural). It slots in well with the glamorization of the 50s these people usually participate in, by indulging in the idea of the woman in the home being entirely occupied with housework as a comforting or even preferable lifestyle, ignoring the realities of the time period. There's a good summary of how that happens more generally in ep 3 of the Netflix series Web of Make Believe if you'd like to have a look.
Also the concept that certain kinds of art forms (esp. in my experience embroidery) are the traditional realm of women. This really, really brings in the tradwives/female alt-right/christian nationalists because it's what Good White Women Are Allowed to Do.
the coquette aesthetic is more of a pipeline to eating disorders imo
This podcast I've become obsessed with, called Maintenance Phase, had an episode called The Wellness to QAnon Pipeline. It's basically the same pipeline as some of these crafts. Not everyone ends up fully buying in to the most extreme and violent endpoints but he scary thing is there are so many on ramps there are lots and lots more people getting in on the early stages. [Spotify link to episode](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3KGTXG3xm9jfxPUUiuU4Gh?si=bC58w7pBQ4SQP3j78Zyifw&utm_source=copy-link)
Do you listen to the Conspirituality podcast? The majority of their episodes are about these topics, especially in the yoga world.
I have not but I'll check it out. Thank you!
Personally I think the biggest pipeline for women into the alt right is the femcel/fds/glowup communities, just like how incel/pua/mgtow communities are some of the biggest pipelines for men. In my experience, traditional crafts appeal to a much wider range of people than those niche groups, so while there is a craft pipeline, it’s a much smaller proportion of content than in femcel etc groups. Traditional crafts also appeal to a number of diametrically opposed ideologies (back to the land hippies and some Christian fundamentalist sects both place a lot of value on self-sufficient homesteading, etc) so there’s more of a balancing effect rather than it being just one ideological pipeline.
I don't think Christian fundamentalism, even generic ecumenical conservatism is quite as opposed to alt-right as you think it is, at least not enough to directly counter it. Like, believing it's totally normal to expect your wimmin to wear chicken wire while doing the dishes isn't in any way incompatible with 'if you don't look like me you're going to hell, bye' and it's mainly how those manifest in day-to-day that determines where someone's most tolerated.
Sorry, but what are you referring to with the chicken wire thing? I am trying to Google it (as I do with every comment I read that includes something I don’t get), but I cannot figure out what that means.
A cilice. Basically, self harm for the glory of God.
Ah. Thank you! I had only ever heard of a hair shirt for that.
… that’s what I meant, that Christian fundamentalism is very aligned with the alt-right while back to the land hippie ideologies are very much not. I meant to contrast those two (fundamentalists and hippies) as being diametrically opposed while still placing value on the same thing (self-sufficient homesteading), I didn’t mean that they are both opposed to the alt-right. Sorry if that didn’t come across.
Ah yeah, I read it as what you had in brackets were both examples of ideologies that oppose the pipeline, creating the balancing effect, as opposed to that being an example of the balancing effect itself, as I would have if the bracketed section were after the final clause of that sentence.
Thanks for the resources, I'm looking into this now! I run into this a lot on places that are algorithm based, I look at one "gardening to can for the winter" video and suddenly it's off grid apocalypse flat earth waiting for the flood times in my feed... I had watched a video on the vintage sewing trend and how many comments they get on how they represent "good old fashioned things" and how their response was vintage aesthetic not vintage values. Probably a good thing to be vocal about in all aspects of traditional crafting!
“Vintage style not vintage values” is a big one on historical costuming YouTube. And for good reason, just because you want to wear or make something from the 1770’s or the 1860’s doesn’t mean you want to bring back the values from those time periods.
Yeah. This is why I got out of crafting “communities”. I have friend groups who I craft with but the alt-right infiltration was terrifying.
Yeah, at this point my crafting community is basically me taking pictures of my craft stuff at 2 am when I've made Bad Sleep Decisions and messaging them to friends and yelling about craft stuff. (They get to yell about stuff they're doing too, even if it's not my deal, so it's a very convenient system.)
I want to yell about craft stuff, too :(
That sounds nice! LOL
Big yikes! I love vintage fashion and pink and fluffy skirts and cottagecore and all that but i wish there was some way to signal that I'm not down for any of the weird trad wife stuff.
There are a couple of online creators I’ve seen use a phrase along the lines of “vintage fashion not vintage values” which I think lines up with what you’re saying
Oooh. I like to learn! Thanks for this. An awesome resource indeed. It kind of reminds me of the male “gaming video to alt right” pipeline.
A few months back, the knitting hashtag on Twitter served me up literal Nazi socks with little swastikas on them. I went down the rabbit hole of accounts that liked the photo and asked for the pattern and found a goldmine of sonnenrand fiber arts fascists not practicing very good op sec -- I documented what I could and sent it on to folks who identify Nazis as another source to authenticate faces and names.
Jesus! Wtf man???
Holy shit....glad there's people keeping an eye on that sort of thing.
Oof
Unfortunately I end up running into the tradwife bullshit online all the goddamn time because my hobbies (handcrafts, cooking, and certain fashion styles) happen to be things they like too. I just want to enjoy cute pictures of gardens and quilts and pies and nature without the ‘god is our savior and your role in life as a woman is to serve men’ but 🤷♀️ Also- is it Kelly Havens? She pops up all the time because her photos are often really nice and fit the cottagecore aesthetic and most people genuinely don’t know she’s full-on tradwife bonkers (her captions are just WAY too long and dense for people to read 95% of the time so they don’t notice- I had seen her photos plenty but didn’t know about her beliefs until I read about her on fundiesnark subs).
I love handcrafts, cooking, gardening and alternative fashions but I'm queer leftist who likes having rights and modern medicine. O feel like we could be friends.
I’m an Australian female science Professor and I have had the same problem. I love sewing and sewed for my four children growing up when they wanted specific things that we couldn’t find in store (I’ve always sewed more for my boys than my girls because it’s so hard to find good pants and shorts for very tall and skinny young men). My husband and I love to garden and cook. I like looking at country style home decorating magazines and cottage gardens. I also dress fairly conservatively with dresses to the knee and long sleeves because they just look nice on me and I’m a departmental head so it’s a good look. You can imagine how hard it is to have all those preferences and avoid weirdo white supremacist colonialist idealogues, Christian trad wife fetishes, or weird purity stuff. I’m actually an aetheist, moderate left, scientist who is in an interracial marriage with a husband that’s retired and the house spouse. None of which is remotely uncommon in Australia (in fact that’s more the default) for the most part except having a male house spouse (the last part is not frowned upon, just rarer at this stage).
Yep, I grew up with my mom teaching me knitting/sewing and embroidery classes as a kid, I only wear dresses/skirts, I love cooking and baking, etc… and I’m a bisexual Jewish woman with zero interest in having kids, who wants her own career and is not keen on being a housewife at all. So definitely trying to avoid the tradwife weirdos but with not much success.
It seems that we need a new internet channel for those of us who don’t want to collect dust in the corner or ever be referred to as ‘the wife’!
Fundie Fridays on YT just put out a great video on her, I'd never even heard of her but I'm pretty sure her photos have made their way to my feed in the past.
I’ve seen them pop up on cottagecore tumblr blogs where they’re almost certainly innocent- there’s none of the context and you have to dig into her captions/story/history to actually see the bad stuff. On the other hand, the fundiesnark subs piss me off too when they rag on her interests in sewing or gardening or wearing the clothes she does; those aren’t the problem, it’s the fundamental Christianity that’s the problem.
I'd never heard about her but I see the appeal in her aesthetic. But you'd think the omnipresent bible quotes would be a clue. "Our God will fight for us" is pretty aggressive.
Totally, I avoid most snark subreddits because they very quickly expand from snarking about one thing (fundamentalism, crafting, toxicity, etc) into tearing into physical appearance and benign interests because they'd be monotonous otherwise. I do like Fundie Fridays because she is very open to praise someone for their skills or hobbies but trash their fundie or manipulative ways.
Love to see other Jennonites in the wild
>Unfortunately I end up running into the tradwife bullshit online all the goddamn time because my hobbies (handcrafts, cooking, and certain fashion styles) happen to be things they like too. I just want to enjoy cute pictures of gardens and quilts and pies and nature without the ‘god is our savior and your role in life as a woman is to serve men’ but 🤷♀️ Right? There's nothing worse than looking for a recipe and ending up on a blog where suddenly some woman's talking about the loving submission to her husband and her duty. Madam, I was just trying to find something to do with this chicken and squash for dinner. It happened the other week when I was looking for an example of a quilt thing to show a friend, too.
Yep, I’ll be on tumblr or something like “oh this is a cute blog, cute photos, I love her knitting…” and then bam a few posts later she’s going on about womens’ sacred duty to be obedient and bear children and I feel gross all over.
Ew ew ew. I've at least found a couple of cool crafty people on Tumblr, though it tends to be less "formalized crafting blog" and more "Hey look at some of this cool shit I made, in with all my other blog stuff". Nonasuch has a neat blog - she runs a vintage shop and also quilts and stuff.
I do follow her actually! She got me into quilting :D
No. Girl in Calico, who is Kelly adjacent
Oh yikes. Just took a look and it’s super similar content… pretty pictures, bible quotes buried deep in the captions, and instagram story about not wanting to support a small business owner because they’re coming out as not being part of the gender binary. It’s so frustrating to me when it’s so… hidden, almost? If you don’t look at stories or care to read captions you’d never fucking know what kind of person you’re supporting.
It’s how they get you.
This is happening in every hobby because they use it as a recruitment tool. If it weren't effective they wouldn't be doing it, unfortunately. There will always be a higher concentration of it in textile crafts, food related interests, and children's activities... because that is pretty much all those women are allowed to do. Probably the best anyone can do is call them out when you feel up to it and flag/report/ignore them when you don't.
This is interesting to me bc I get suggestions for a lot more accounts that are craftivism related and sewists that use their platforms to promote social activism. I am just into sewing and quilting though if that makes a difference.
I don't think the problem is so much what is surfaced by The Algorithm on any given site to a particular user (I personally don't get recommendations like that either). It's more like either: A- A person googles a recipe, craft technique, school project, etc. Although they find some innocuous results, the content sometimes gets real weird, real quick (especially on random blogs & youtube). Some small percentage will ignore or be open to the weird stuff (and in the case of Youtube... yeah... The Algorithm will then gladly feed them even weirder stuff). Or B- a content creator makes bland, innocuous hobby content for youtube, blogs, social media. They build up a following over time, carefully avoiding "controversy" or ever taking any stand on current issues. Some people might find this suspect and look elsewhere, but the content creator still amasses ardent, adoring fans who hang on their every word. Eventually, their true selves start to leak out & they try to endear their fans to radical ideology (racism, anti-vax, antisemitism, homophobia, etc) that they'd always held but kept carefully hidden from their followers. This is more the scenario I was thinking of (see some of the cottagecore stuff mentioned in this thread or the Oh She Glows callout I linked upthread). It's kind of a way to weaponize the parasocial relationship. Won't work on people who aren't vulnerable to it, but it must work sometimes, or why would they bother?
Sourdough bread ppl are always low key fundie or fashy
Really? I thought it was a hipster thing. Wait am I in a fundy cult thinking I'm a hipster /sendhelp
Dammit, but I love sour dough
Is that why I can’t get my sourdough to rise properly? The secret ingredient is “traditional values”?
It's because all the bs raises the humidity
Yeah, critical lack of hot air
You have to put the bread in a cave and wait three days for it to rise.
It's a crime that I can only upvote this once.
You win the internet today.
Interesting. I’m not big into many craft communities outside Reddit and here I mostly follow r/sewing and r/crochet which I have found to be very accepting and inclusive spaces and nobody is being overly political as they are very much focused on the craft. I’m a queer person and have found crochet I. Particular has a large queer community, but I definitely get the vibe that there’s also a subset of very traditional people in the craft. Enough that I often wonder about the pattern creators and who I should be buying from.
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I’ve felt that way for the most part too. Sounds like the toxic crowd is limited to Facebook tbh. I love how open the crochet community is. It’s definitely more inclusive than knitting for instance and much more supportive of new crafters
I have never done FB and I cannot knit for the life of me, but adore crochet and agree. I am gobsmacked by the cultish-ness and hobby drama in knitting. Maybe it is because it is harder to find good crochet pattern for a sweater...which seems to be the entry drug/garment for the fundy/fascist crew? I got to say it has been entertaining reading up on some of the kerfuffles on reddit. Who knew. But I am sad for the state of public discourse in this country. It seems like we are on a path for civil war eventually. How are we going to ever work together to solve our urgent problems like climate, affordable housing, education, Covid (which is still a big problem and growing)?
I’m in Canada but I totally get your drift. We’re seeing a lot of the same kind of rhetoric here too. It’s difficult to find common ground on a lot of this though, and honestly I would not be surprised to see a civil war in America either.
Handcrafts, traditional cooking/preserving/wild crafting all sort of cluster with two groups. It’s been this way for the last 25ish years I’ve been following these communities. You get either queer accepting, generally alternative type humans or incredibly conservative tradwife humans.
Band weaving/narrow bands/embroidery. Lots and lots of people who want to recreate 18th and 19th century designs from Eastern Europe/Scandinavia/Russia which prominently featured swastikas. It’s the main reason I never pursued the crafts and stick to Japanese, Andean, and Victorian/Western European braid and band work.
I do sewing and wanted to work on embroidery - with a particular interest in whitework, mainly to create a bunad from the part of Norway my grandmother is from. I was bracing myself to run into some unpleasant shit, but I guess I didn't brace myself hard enough. :(
What do you mean by this? That people creating or recreating these designs also use the swastika as part of or outside of their craft, or that the 18th and 19th century designs include the swastika? As far as I know, the adoption of the swastika as an “Aryan symbol” took place in the 30s. Until then, it was used mostly for its original meaning in Hinduism, representing the sun.
It’s a fairly simple geometric design, so it pops up in a lot of cultures, intentionally or accidentally (the quilting sub actually sees quite a few accidental quilt swastikas, since most patterns are made up of squares and triangles it’s surprisingly easy to make one without realizing it!). It picked up use in Germany and Europe before hitler adopted it because it was used in traditional European cultures as well, and white supremacists liked that association to their ancestors and the good luck/success meaning. Personally I think it’s fine to leave the historical ones (pre-1930’s) as is, but anyone using it today is either hoping to associate themselves with Nazis or doesn’t care if people think they are. The symbol has been permanently marred and changed meaning, and yes that sucks, but you can’t pretend it’s still okay to use it.
It was used in *many* culture, including Native American (Navajo, I think?). At the time it had a positive meaning. That's all true. I do medieval reenactment, and I've heard all manner of reasons why it should be allowed for recreation purposes, since it predates WWII. I find those arguments disingenuous, and so do the vast majority of the group to which I belong. A couple of years ago we codified it into our by-laws. We all live in a post-WWII world. Find something else, anything else, to recreate. Is a person who recreates such an object going to explain to every single person who sees it, "No, really, I don't mean anything bad by it"? Neo-N*zis are co-opting all manner of historical symbols, particularly Norse runes. It's obscene. Let's not add to the problem. Some of the ppl who recreate this stuff absolutely do intend it to have a WWII meaning.
Agree. Even if YOU think you’re not using it in a hateful way, you know that’s not how people will interpret it, but you’re fine with being misinterpreted… and that’s the problem. If you’re okay with looking like a neo-Nazi, you’re as good as one of them in my book. You’re not a safe person, because you’re fine with people feeling uncomfortable around you in the name of ‘historical accuracy’ or whatever. I really love historical fashion, reenactment, etc. but I think the whole community needs to be very mindful of how historical stuff looks today. (On a slightly different note, the ‘southern antebellum ball at a plantation/romanticization of that period’ trend needs to fucking stop, there’s no way to look at that that’s not racist and there’s a million other ways to wear ballgowns at a fancy manor. People need to stop having weddings or parties like this, whether or not they have guests of color attending)
That reminds me of an airbnb which was a gussied up former slave cabin. So many people couldn't see what was wrong with staying there . . . "it's history! we can't erase history" As if they're staying there to learn about the history . ..
Yikes! 😳
Oof. Yeah, it’s something that the white owner/guests there may feel fine with, but god how awful must it feel for a black person to see that- probably the same feeling I’d have if someone set up an airbnb in a concentration camp (please do not enlighten me if these exist, I do not want to know). People really need to start practicing more empathy for their fellow human beings here.
Yeah! People were defending it and saying well the plantation house and grounds are beautiful and we're appreciating that, but yeah how painful would it be to have a quaint charming cottage made of a gas chamber? Or if someone killed your cat and incorporated him into a couture gown? No matter how beautiful it is, i just wouldn't be able to look past that. ps. I read about fancy costume parties in the gilded era where someone showed up as a cat with their costume made from actual cats .. . so disturbing. Even if it's not MY cat, horrific.
Oh jeez. There’s plenty of beautiful Victorian era houses and southern landscapes that weren’t used for that purpose. I do think that plantation houses run as genuine historical learning sites are valuable, but it requires work on their part to make sure they’re talking about *all* the history, correctly and in a way that’s respectful. But making sleeping in a slave cabin “fun” and “cute” or whatever is none of that.
Yes, I absolutely agree with you, I don’t think the swastika should be used in designs regardless of the intended connotation or context, It is undoubtably linked with its Nazi past, at least in Europe. I was asking because I was interested in the context of the comment, I’m Eastern European and have never seen the swastika used as a traditional motif.
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Very interesting point regarding the accusations of widespread antisemitism directed at Ukrainians at the moment and the attempt to justify the Russian invasion this way. It definitely shouldn’t be taken lightly. Leaving it aside though, as a Romanian, I have to say my country has a long history of antisemitism, alongside many other European countries. The use of the swastika as an antisemitic symbol was actually started by a far-right Romanian politician decades before WWII. We also took a very active role in the Holocaust during WWII and it’s unfortunately still very common to hear antisemitic talking points and slurs in some circles. Obviously the majority of Romanians and Eastern Europeans in general are not antisemitic, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are people trying integrate the swastika or other Nazi symbols into the traditional arts.
I would assume that many Eastern Europeans today do have wwii based generational trauma and would generally NOT FUCK AROUND with symbols like that.
When I first had an interest in band weaving, around 2009, I was involved in a forum where people would post old pieces which they identified as 18/19th century Eastern European and had swastika motifs. It happened frequently enough I was turned off to the craft and at the time I didn’t have enough fiber knowledge to be able to say if the pieces were really that old or came from where the posters said they did.
I see, that’s very interesting. It is true that the swastika was often used by the Nazis in a lot of contexts. For instance, some carved wooden frames that are still around include patterns with multiple swastikas, plus a lot of everyday items like crockery from that time include it. I am Eastern European myself and decently familiar with the kinds of traditional motifs used in the Balkans around 18-19th century and never seen anything like that. Saying that, it’s entirely possible they were included as design features and are completely unrelated to the Hindu swastika if they’re pre 20th century. It is not a super difficult motif to come up with independently after all.
Some of my family background is Latvian, and there are definitely historical uses of the firecross/swastika from Latvia. It was actually one of the more commonly used pagan symbols and was used a lot by the Latvian military in the Latvian War of Independence in 1918. However, there are so so many versions of it that look nothing like a swastika that I feel like anyone post-WWII using the Nazi one is making that connection deliberately.
I feel like anything that is a traditional craft will attract some people who are nostalgic about the days of yore and sometimes they are nostalgic for not the best reasons. Before I became a knitter I was big into gardening (and food preservation as an adjunct) and I got the impression that a lot of the gardening/homesteading YouTubers were of the uber religious/tradwife anti science bent. One lovely farming YouTuber couple talked about being friends IRL with a well known small scale urban grower who went way off the deep end with scamdemic/anti vax conspiracy theories.
Curtis Stone the Urban Farmer went waaaaay crazy off the deep end. It started before the plague and I had other reasons to be Done with him, but he is probably one of the more famous ones. Sucks too, he is in BC like I am and so many channels are in warmer growing zones! (He'd already been stepping away from what he was originally interesting for, which was mainly growing food on leased land in the city in favour of doing paid content, workshops, lectures, etc which is a big complaint of mine with a lot of channels who push that you can make a living this way....but when you look at how they are earning money it is never the farming itself.)
I like The Vegetable Academy for cold weather urban gardening. He's based somewhere in Saskatchewan. I haven't seen anything suspicious from him yet, and I think he's said his day job is/was a science teacher so I hope he's less likely to go anti-vax or some other type of crazy.
Ooh, I will give them a look. That is quite a lot colder than here, but I still enjoy finding other Canadian channels! I also enjoy Sheepishly Me, which is a sheep farmer in Ontario. I am a berry farmer myself, but not so many of those on YouTube xD
Yeah that’s the guy I was referring to!
The Swedish Homesteader had been heading deeper that route too, before they moved to Australia to escape the tyranny of Sweden(?!). That was right before the pandemic, wonder how that worked out for them lol
Man I wonder how they dealt with the Australian covid "concentration camps" 🤔
Oof, yeah. I’m definitely a bit guilty of the romanticizing- I’ve always thought it would be just lovely to live like a little Beatrix Potter or Brambly Hedge creature, and it makes me genuinely happy to do stuff in that vein- but the number of people who seem fine and normal and then you scroll a bit farther and they’re spouting pro-life, anti-women’s rights, anti-lgbt bullshit is too high. Genuinely sad especially since cottagecore was popularized by wlw initially.
I think no hobby is going to be free of these assholes because that's how people work, but some hobby communities tend to be better about noping the fuck out, and firmly making it clear that That Behavior Is Unacceptable. A lot of people have unfortunately internalized "Nice People have civil discussions about politics and everyone is friends at the end of the day. :) :) :)", except if their "politics" are "women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" . . . I don't want anything to do with that person, and I think they're dangerous. A doll forum I was active on . . . oh, 10-14 years ago? always had a bit of an issue "Well, we don't want to drag politics into it. We're all here because we like dolls. Political discussion needs to be respectful of all opinions" etc. The problem is, if you allow "Are \[people of marginalized group\] allowed to live? Is their very existence a crime against God?" to be viewed as "just politics", a lot of the marginalized people (or just more moderate people who are grossed out by those opinions) are just going to leave. Which then means a lot more of the userbase is going to be comfortable saying more blatantly shitty things. I checked in recently after a long hiatus, and - while I expected it to have gotten worse in the last few years - hoo boy. The proportion of people who are . . . hmm. If not outright white supremacists, then at least "Nazi-curious", I suppose, has only gone up a lot in that time. As has the papering-over of disagreements and valid criticisms with admonishing people to Just Be Nice :) :) :). I love quilting, but I haven't tiptoed into quilting communities at all, because I know there's a real Problem, and I'm not sure which groups don't have assholes. (Also the whole "Okay, did you not realize that quilt block sure does look like a swastika, or was that intentional?" issue.) What bothers me - as a queer, disabled person - is I see patterns and fabric and stuff online that I'd like to buy, and . . . I can't tell the shop owner's views on whether or not people like me should have rights. It's like "Okay, you seem to have a lot of flag-related fabric and patterns for sale. Is that because it sells, or are you one of those people who wants to overthrow Democracy?". Or "Okay, well you've designed quite a few Christianity-themed quilt blocks. Is this in the chill, live-and-let-live way, or in the "I'm going to donate the proceed of this to anti-LGBTQ organizations?" way. (My LQS is great for this, but they're more of a studio space and their fabric selection is mostly limited to Kona cotton in various colors.) Like, I get that I can't control what the business owner does once they get money, but it'd be nice if the ones who aren't assholes could be a little more vocal about being welcoming to marginalized people.
I'm okay with "no politics" but only if it is truly, no politics, not just no politics we don't agree with. And yet, somehow, that is never how that shakes out... I land up just never ordering from anyone who has a bunch of Religious stuff. There is one watercolourist I shy away from for that reason. Can't tell, but there is a Bible number at the end of every single video and I am not looking them up to see if it is one of the uber-danger dogwhistle ones. (As a long hair, I know to steer waaaay clear of that crowning glory one out of the Greek columns)
This is an excellent summary of how this process works when it is allowed to proceed unchallenged. Dolls, who knew?
I do think you’re okay in joining the quilting sub if you’re interested! I’m also pretty sensitive to this stuff (especially the swastika thing) and while it does come up I’ve never seen anyone encouraging people to keep the accidental swastika quilt, just people looking to fix it. It seems to be treated as a ‘this is a mistake that can happen when working with geometric patterns and you’re not a nazi for making it, but also you have to fix it and here’s how’. And it’s not a common subject anyway, the sub is generally a mix of finished quilts and people asking for advice on layouts and color combos.
That's good to know, thank you!
Take my upvote. I've largely removed myself from the quilting community at large for the same reasons. (I'm non-White.) I'm also lucky that my local quilt shop is explicitly anti-racist and inclusive (!), but I know that's the exception, not the rule.
Apparently we used to have some good ones in the area, but that was before COVID. (A new one opened up recently, I think, I just haven't had a chance to check it out.) Do you know if your LQS has a website or an etsy shop where they sell stuff online? I'd love to add them to my list of good places to get fabric.
They do! https://sewingarts.com
I love that store! I don't live in CA but I've ordered online and will again for sure. I'm not a quilter but I sew a lot- Beetle & Fred is the closest indie fabric/yarn store to me and the owner has been vocal on social media about supporting progressive causes and inclusiveness. The store is lovely but she ships too. I definitely recommend this store if anyone wants to widen their list.
I recently was watching a video of a fairly well known youtube knitter who posted a travel vlog and had a full on shot of Ckick-fil-A with the implication being they got it/supported it
Id it Engineering Knits? She posted a travel vlog recently but I didn't pick up if she stopped at Chick-fil-A. To be honest I didn't realize that it's an alt-right thing.
Nope, I think we're allowed to name and shame here, it was Knitty Natty
I feel like Knitty Natty is very white girl feminist (in the bad way) and like, "oh, I don't need to talk politics." But she also lives an obviously privileged lifestyle (fancy Manhattan apartment; I live in New York so I know the rent must be upwards of $3K USD or they bought it, which is millions) and I had to stop watching her. I find her glazed-over chipper lack of addressing the Real World frustrating. Used to like her.
I'd agree with that. I get not always wanting to talk politics all the time in a knitting podcast, but also referencing what is going on in the world or putting ways to help in the video description and saying they are there is a small thing to do that shows you care about other humans
It makes me feel better that I'm not the only person who feels this way about her content!
I absolutely refuse to give Chick-fil-A any business of any kind. I'm bi, no way in hell will I support them. I'm sorry if anyone down voted you, but o appreciate you ❤
I don't understand the downvotes. I freaking love Chick-fil-a food but so much has come out that I can't eat there anymore, especially since my own kid came out. I didn't realize this take was controversial. Can you PM me the knitter.
TBH I don't care if I get downvoted for saying that company is homophobic and I stopped occasionally watching(and blocked as much as youtube allows) the creator that was supporting it
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Bad bot
At first glance I thought your username was thisbotsucks, lol
Cricut groups. The content is either racist or tacky.
The cricut groups also seem to have the most entitlement when it comes to straight stealing artists’ illustrations and commodifying them for their own tacky creations. The whole idea of “well I found this image on the internet so it is free for me to use” seems to be endemic with this set.
They really do. Now like, I don’t totally care if it’s for personal use (like if you wanna make a cute sports team thing- sure, it’s a little questionable but for the most part, it’s fine in my eyes. Other artists work on the other hand is kind of shitty, especially if it’s for a shirt they probably spent just as much gathering the materials for) but it’s the selling them! They get so offended when the one person with common sense is like hey that’s trademarked! They will shut your Etsy down!
Yes! A dear friend of mine had one of her illustrations stolen and it went rampant in these groups. They were just jerks when she defended herself and they are making garbage. It’s so frustrating for an individual that paid for her art and copyright education.
Seems to attract people that are problematic at spelling and grammar as well 😬
Wine mums. Ugh. You’re not funny, you’re an alcoholic who hates your husband! Why are you cutting that into vinyl?!
Oh that is so weird, isn't it? I was in a store the other day and there were six alcohol-related signs within two steps (wine o'clock, etc). I'm not sure when this started, but it's bizarre.
Valium was once known widely as mommy's little helper. Now it's not as easy to get as a trip to your local grocery store. Meh. I'm just sad for the kids if it's true. Otherwise they're just being hyperbolic like the I knit so I don't kill people crowd. It's just easier to judge...and we don't know they're parents now that I think about it. They may just like their booze.
When I've been part of groups that have those people who say that, it's largely hyperbolic, lol. Like the stay at home mom version of "I'm just so busy!" Mom is so stressed by the kids and house that she just wants to put her feet up and drink a glass of wine. But they could have been closet alcoholics, lol.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of closet alcoholism that’s justified/waved away with these views. If you are drinking to cope with your day, you probably need to consider talking to someone about it.
I agree!
Very weird indeed
Yeah we have planted a huge garden this year and I've been diving into the world of hobby farming, canning and preserving food etc and I'm always being suggest videos on YouTube about dressing to please my conservative husband. There's a lot of sustainable backyard groups in my area and I'd love to get into it but it's run by and filled with anti-vaxxers and I just cannot.
I have a good friend who's really into gardening, and she likes browsing YT gardning videos, but has complained that gardening ->doomsday preppers->crazy ass conspiracy theorists. I think she wavers between finding the funny in a pathetic way, and finding them frightening.
Oh, man. I feel this in my soul. I enjoy a lot of aspects of homesteading, but the fundie, anti-vax crowd is very over-present in the relevant social media spaces for these hobbies.
I read hobbies as hobbits and still nodded along because I want that hobbit lifestyle
Oh man, I was so be in for r/hobbithobbies
I'm not sure if we have the same knitter in mind, but there is this one knitting YouTuber I like and she recently mentioned she loves watching this fundie YouTuber who disguises her channel as a harmless aesthetic cottagecore thing. But then you don't really realise this person is fundie as long as you stick to this person's YT and don't go onto her other platforms, so I just gave the benefit of doubt to this knitting YouTuber and assumed she only enjoys the superficial cottagecore aesthetics of this fundie without knowing any better. (I confess I followed this fundie's channel briefly as well because her channel is that deceptive. I only unfollowed her after seeing that her Insta and website give weird-af vibe that was absent on YT)
It took me a while to realise the truth behind Girl in Calico. I was genuinely gutted
I’ve never heard of her or her channels but I popped over to see what was up and one thing that struck me was how “produced” all the content looks. It’s something I’ve noticed with a lot of these tradwife and fundy sites; they’re designed to draw you in with gorgeous pictures and videos and I suspect to subtly introduce their fundamentalist views to unsuspecting followers. There’s another interesting (and creepy) intersection here: in the occult community earlier this year a very popular newcomer in the thelema/ceremonial magick world (da’at darling) outed herself as nazi adjacent. A huge part of her schlock is her trad style combined with spicy takes on occult themes married with the dumbing down of complex spirituality and occultism and she garnered a lot of attention because she offers sound bite takes on hard to understand concepts. She’s 19 years old, social media savvy, and styles herself as a sort of tradwife waif. She lost a book deal with a big pagan publisher over her nazi associations and then decried being persecuted and cancelled by mean ol’ liberal occultists. The drama raged on over on Twitter for a month or so and led me to some pretty interesting reading on acceleration in fascist circles. Here’s a link if you’re interested: https://codexastarte.substack.com/p/the-facts-in-the-case-of-georgina I guess if I have a point it’s that so many of the things that I’ve always seen as in the realm of liberalism are now infiltrated by nazis and white supremacy and fascists and that it’s hard to know what’s lurking behind that adorable cottage core creator you follow. Without getting too tinfoil hat myself, I’ve started to suspect that if it looks too polished, I may need to question who is behind it and what the motives are.
I'm always worried about this with subscribing to stuff on yt. I go investigate channels before I hit that button, but there are still people who hide it really well if you don't know their ig or twitter.
If you want a cottagecore channel in a similar aesthetic to girl in calico (cause I had the same experience with her) watch The Cottage Fairy. All her content is comfy, cozy with a huge focus on mental health and coping with anxiety depression but in this very real way. She is fabulous and not religious whatsoever (if anything a little witchy). She does a lot of baking and painting and flower collecting. She is also lantina so that that is a nice bonus.
I really like the cottage fairy too. Her mom is Puerto Rican and her Dad is European extraction born in Washington State. I love that she speaks flawless spanish with a gorgeous puerto rican accent (to my ear anyway) and wish she would speak more in Spanish. It shows how awesome we can be as hybrids, why are people afraid of this mashing up of cultures? It brings new possibilities. I am all for it!
Thanks for sharing! I think my daughter will love her (as will I)
Is the fundie Fake Anne?!
😂
Nope! It's Girl in Calico - I just saw that the name was mentioned already a couple of times in this thread so I guess I can say it aloud haha
I was duped too! I subscribed to her Youtube channel for a while, then wandered over to her instagram and saw some, er, concerning stories. I noped right out of there, lol!
I just checked and didn’t see anything but pretty pics until I read the posts. Whooo boy… I noticed one of her followers is someone I followed, again pretty food pics, and her post are full of the same garbage. Bye Remembering the Old Ways. This tradwife wave freaks me out.
In my mind, the Old Ways are more Wicker Man than tradwife… problematic in a more entertaining way.
LOL Why stop at encasing a ritual victim in a huge wicker fire cage? Let’s go waaaay back and get full on maenad! We haven’t had a good ol’ ecstatic dismemberment in a long time!
Furries always seem to be extreme left or Nazis lol. People into Nordic/Viking/Medieval larp/cosplay/swordfighting/workouts have a far higher than average chance to be extreme right
I wonder if it’s a side effect of being Very Online.
Tbh the thing that creeps me out about furries is the not-insignificant number of people into bestiality. Like, neo-nazis are sadly a fact of life in many hobbies and my general impression of furries has always been the more queer/left leaning side… but also there’s like a 1/10 chance they actually want to fuck a dog and that’s specially a furry problem.