Streetknit Knits a Knit House for Toronto’s Homeless
I recall first reading a listserv post about a project to create a knit house in an effort to raise awareness about the issue of homelessness. My immediate thoughts turned to Katrina. It’s not that we don’t have a homeless problem in New York, but having been to New Orleans recently, I know that the residents of the Gulf Coast are still lacking in sufficient housing. And it seems my thoughts turn to home so often lately. Shortly after reading this post, I shot Ryan Kamstra an email to see if he would be interested in an interview, and so began our effort to document the building of Streetknit’s knit house.
Ryan does publicity/outreach for Toronto-based Streetknit. Steetknit is the organization founded by Sadie Lewis that encourages knitters to knit warm winter goods to be distributed throughout Toronto’s shelters to help keep people warm in the winter. Steetknit also helps to run events to draw attention to the situation of homelessness in Toronto. We were particularly interested in Ryan’s efforts to interact with the media and create a public face for homelessness. Ryan feels that the real upswing of this project is not only a knit-goods donation-drive for Toronto’s homeless, but to keep the crisis of homelessness in Toronto on the radar. Toronto is Canada’s largest urban centre and the homeless across the country tend to migrate to the city. Despite the issue being raised to the national level, many feel that Toronto hasn’t received the resources to deal with the influx of people. This year through Ryan’s coordinated outreach efforts, Streetknit plans to raise awareness to a higher level. The house will be part of City of Craft and will be made almost entirely out of scarves and blankets that will then be donated to homeless shelters around Toronto. City of Craft will take place on December 1, 2007 at The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen Street West, Toronto.
We are going to take a peek at Ryan’s journal to see how the project is going so far.
Ryan Kamstra
StreetKNit
Week 1
City of Craft invites StreetKnIt to attend their reindeer games, Dec. 1rst, Toronto. Perusing the small-print of their email invite I see a “please notify us” if we intend to do an installation the day-of. It’s like asking a magic tree if it would like to produce an enchanted water melon in the midst of barren winter, with no seed, perhaps, if you have a little time? A magic tree of some years, I can’t resist the gambit.Ok it with Sadie, StreetKnit’s head honcho. Sure. We are going to try to knit a whole house in the name of streetknit. Within moments the call goes out on the StreeTKnIT listerve for participants to help me knit a house. My invite appears here, there, on the Internet, on relevant blogs and sites based in Toronto and then in totally different parts of North America. Within days Sadie and I get a pile of interested emails. Some interested press, some people who live in Toronto, some people who will be commuting to Toronto day of City of Craft to add to our house. Cool.
Somewhere in our winter goods drive is usually the disclaimer “while we can’t knit shelter.” To hell with it. We might as well give it a try. The inaction on Toronto’s housing shortage is frustrating. The official Left doesn’t even pretend to be concerned anymore. What was declared a state of emergency was left a state of emergency. It’s quixotic, but I’m going to knit a house. I want to see a whole house knit. We’ll show them. I’m not sure what we’ll show them. But I’m in a fighting mood.
Week 2
I send an email out to the potential crew. None of these people I have met before. I am suddenly acutely aware of the fact I don’t knit. I mean, that I’ve planned a lot of stunts/interventions/attention-grabbing ploys of this nature for this and other activist in nature projects, I have proven radical stage-managing skills, but I have just proposed a whole knit house, and I don’t knit. I came to streetknit as the glee-clubish, jingoistic, fun, clever outreach guy and artist, that’s what I do. Get us in the media. Make sure everyone has heard of us. Throw a few events so the media doesn’t chew us up and forget us. I know a knit house is a great ploy in this regard. However, I don’t knit. A whole house, eh? Could be a liability?I try to arrange a meeting. Everyone—really digs the house idea, really digs the working individually idea–doesn’t quite dig the meeting idea. I set a Sunday meeting. A local fair trade coffee shop, near my house. Two people ok to it. When I get to the coffee place, very crowded for there is a large patio and it is an abnormally balmy day for autumn and I have a little handwritten sign in front of me “strEETknit” and an old laptop bag full of knitting needles. A boy, I feel conspicuous. Eventually only Kate shows up. She eats an empanada on a park bench while I wax poetic about the idea. We are going to knit shelter. Damn it, if three levels of Canadian government won’t do anything to address the chronic housing shortage in Toronto, we will, admittedly quixotically but symbolically and symbols are very important in media-drive political terrain, draw upon collective effort to knit an entire house just to say, see, you know, see, see, this is where collective action will bring you! I have brought Kate plans, blueprints. A fold-paper habitat for humanity house designed by some artist that I found on a google search, and several designs for gingerbread houses, suggesting we could blow any of these up in big. Kate is not much of a knitter either, or rather, she prefers crochet. I don’t want to get involved in any internal craft rifts, so I confess my ignorance of both crafts equally, trying to be democratic. Kate takes the news in stride. She has the frame of, basically, a hardware store ready-made wood shed which she has used in other displays at crafts fairs that we can use as a frame. Cool. We have our start.
We also devise the plan to knit in blocks of scarves and blankets so the whole house can be deconstructed later on and the goods donated to shelters to distribute among the homeless.
I share this plan with the crew via email. People are excited to get working. And apparently are. My inability to get an in person meeting going means I will have to take it on trust that the house is being produced.
I revisit my old mantra of “trust no one.”
Week 3
SKETCH, a cool arts program for street involved youth, invites me and my knit house to sit at a crafts fair with them. “Creativfest” in the capacious Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Problem is there isn’t much of a house yet. But we do now have a frame and the first donations of wool: Sadie drops off about 8 huge garbage bags full of wool. Yikes. The craft fair is deep, deep underground in the convention centre, a bomb-shelter depth away from sunlight. The house-frame I assemble with the help of Rebecca, the one-staff-person from from Sketch here. It looks nothing like the mild-mannered shed that I picked up from Kate’s apartment, but something exaggerated and out of perspective instead, straight out of a German expressionist nightmare flick. Rebbecca and I decide this is a suitable effect. Homelessness: Spooky.I find it all a little tedious, the fair, but I meet Christian a fantastic artist originally from Quebec who makes trees out of wire and I talk up all the knitters at the fair. It was a skill he learned from a Quaker, he says, to make quick money instead of panning. Now he works and volunteers at Sketch, and gives demonstrations on how to produce these actually pretty realistic-looking trees.
Our knit house right now is but a skeleton with a tonne of information of homelessness taped to it, draped in a hodgepodge of knit hats and scarves, and up to it’s ankles in donated wool which I pour from the eight bags around for effect. A sign written in knitting needles says “street knit” and “under construction.” A scary amount of the craft aficionados, bargain-seekers and tourists promise to donate their wool stash, the stash they’ve had since their mother passed on, etc., and I am being promised seven boxes-full at a go. I sign people up to be involved. Rebbecca starts knitting a tea cup for the house. She’s a knitter, and has already smelled out my weakness. She shows me how to cast on. I pretend to learn, concealing that I feel like weeping in frustration, like back in elementary school gym class when I realised, spatial-visual-wise, I didn’t understand which right or left they were ordering my limbs to move in, at any given moment, and would never learn, and was condemned to a life in the liberal arts. Another knit-ringer stops by and seems amused at my fumbling, showing also how to cast on and knit. I nervously demonstrate what she has just shown me back to her. She smiles approvingly and says she will be back to check on how I am doing later. I live in dread of this for the rest of the crafts fair. I take a break from knitting to chat up the Vogue Knitting people, and when I return to our booth, promptly have forget how to knit.
Week 4
Try to get people out for a meeting again, but give up because no one can commit to a single date. Teresa, who has been our strEETknit go-to person for any number of projects (teaching teens to knit, to be the smiling face of knitting for a feature on the evening news, etc.), has not heard that I canceled and shows up to my place. This is our first meeting in person after reams of email correspondences. My apartment, which is really just a room with a bathroom, is slightly buried in wool at this point. Teresa has a crew of five at work working on the knit house apparent. Her work at desk is filled with wool. I load her up with more wool, all the wool she can take, say she can come back any time to replenish. She is on my secret, my Achilles heel. But by some feat of magic and humor and patience, Teresa manages to teach me to cast on and then to knit. I have knit a row of a scarf. My loops are nice and loose, I secure each new loop with a lot of effort and an unreasonable amount of commentary and self congratulations, but, look ma, I have knit one row of a scarf. I am feeling confident about the project again, even a bit cocky. This is going to be a great house.
Week 5
The Globe and Mail, Canada’s only national paper, contacts me for an interview about the knit house. I cover all the bases. What streetknit is. The radical nature of craft: how all knit goods, in a consumer society, take the nature of surplus goods, because we have produced them with our own labour. That people who knit can cover this town in free hats, mitts, scarves, blankets because these self-made goods exist outside the normal modes of our economy. Contrast this “boon economy” to three levels of government inaction on Toronto’s housing shortage and our city’s nearly decade-long homelessness crisis. I flesh out the raison d’etre of our central symbol, knitting a house. This is what non-elected democratic volunteers can do, with minimal planning, and no expert criteria. Clearly, she just thinks knitting a whole house is kinda cool, and also likes what I can only term as the “charitable” aspect of this work. I cross my fingers I just got a few good quotes in. And feel less nervous of becoming Toronto’s “KnitBoy” now that I have a whole one row of one scarf knit and so have a modicum of knit cred. Note to self: I haven’t touched my scarf in a week.Note to self also: We are being mentioned in the national press. We need a house!
Stay tuned as we follow the progress of Streetknit’s knit house and peek some more into Ryan’s journal.
Craft Fairs diy eco friendly Interviews
