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Leave it to Portland crafters to get creative with their activism. Groups of fiber artists have been gathering at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building to peacefully protest and also make beautiful works of art. They’ve also been distributing free hat patterns that give a nod to the Portland Frog and Norway’s World War II anti-fascist resistance.
“Crochet never felt to me like it was a box I had to stay in, but instead, a tool I could use to get a message across,” says Vincent Green-Hite, who began offering free crochet tutorials in front of government buildings and, most frequently, at the ICE facility last year.
And more recently, the Multnomah Village yarn shop Northwest Wools began offering free knitting patterns for a cap dubbed the Melt the ICE hat to anyone purchasing red yarn at the shop.
Portlanders didn’t invent knitting or crochet, of course, and we aren’t the only ones using crafting as a tool of resistance. But, as crafters will, we are finding our own ways to tweak the pattern, and bringing our own philosophies into the mix. Zeb Walter, who owns Disco Fibers, a secondhand yarn and fiber shop, designed the Portland Frog Hat. It’s a nod to the Portland Frog Brigade that was just becoming a national phenomenon, but it’s also has a double meaning—knitters and crocheters use “frog” as a verb for tearing out their work.
“This is usually because there is a mistake or error and we need to start over,” Walter writes in an email to WW. “Experienced artists don’t fear this because we have learned from our mistakes and now we can create something better. Right now it feels like we are frogging our country–we are trying to remove the errors and mistakes, and while it’s painful, we will build back better and more beautiful.”
