I have been dreading today since November.  It is of no surprise that the weather seems to be mirroring my mood today.  So I am finishing up the last of a project that I have been working on for a month in preparation.  Normally I am not much of a pink fan but for the past month I have been knitting hats for the upcoming Women's March on Washington.  Stitching together these hats that women would carry with them to march in solidarity has been a bright spot in my own mental preparation of saying goodbye to an incredibly impactful president and stepping into a 4 year run of The Twilight Zone.



In starting on this project I wanted to be conscious of sourcing the yarn I choose as well as go for bulky weight for speed.  Wool is was, and I actually ended up going with Brown Sheep Wool Co. as they are a USA family run and operated yarn mill and company.  I found a solid pink and two variegated pinks that I decided hit the mark.  Three of the hats are with their marchers today as they are traveling to Washington.  A couple with friends and one a stranger- I wish them all safe and empowered trips this weekend!

The last hat that is being finished today is for me as I will be attending my own community sister march.  I will wear it proudly tomorrow.  I march with my community to support all of our rights and to show my sons that their is future worth fighting for and about respecting diversity and civil liberties.

As I have often shared in my years of blogging I am a firm believer in watching what the universe puts in your path.  Some call it the "law of attraction"- for me it is just reading the signs.  I am sure there are signs that just pass me by that I never catch, but an interesting series of signs caught my attention this weekend.



Sunday night I was preparing for a volunteer youth knitting project meeting that I lead and was thumbing through my book Knitting Ephemera by Carol Sulcoski for some bit of trivia to share with the kids.  I remembered passing by a passage discussing Charles Dickens' creation of his infamous Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities based on the historical tricoteuse (french for knitting woman).



I did not think too much about it till later in the day when my eldest told me he was still working on reading a book for his civics class- and you want to wager a guess as to which book?  Yep, A Tale of Two Cities.

So I went back and read again the passage in my book and then started to read some academic essays on the work and the role of the tricoteuse in history.  In some shape or form I managed to escape reading this work by Dickens- no small feat considering my degree in English literature!

So I checked out the book from my beloved local library today and am going to start reading it tonight as I finish my hat.  I am not sure what the lessons are but I am sure there is some connection between knitting for a march against a billionaire entertainer that just took the highest office in our country and this fictional character who steps outside the stereotype of the kindly grandmother knitting who instead knits without dropping a stitch while sitting at the executions during the french revolution after being denied an active role in the political assemblies at that time.  Madame Defarge seems more bent on vengeance than what is in my heart but I am curious on analyzing this more after I read the book.

I am most interested in the notion of empowering and owning something like knitting.  Busting open those notions of that stereotype of knitting/knitters and how it can be incorporated into activism- exactly what the Pussyhat Project did in my opinion.

So knit on my friends- sharing also a link to a Knitting as a Political Act download available on Ravelry that I came across last night and here is a link to the sister marches for tomorrow.