Diana Weymar ’91 Encourages Readers to Transform Anxiety into Action

The book: It’s natural to feel anxious given the current state of the world. Society is dealing with the climate crisis, racism, gun violence, and so many more issues on a day to day basis. It makes sense to feel hopeless and helpless among all these issues, but Diana Weymar ’91 hopes to encourage readers to transform their anxieties into action. Crafting a Better World (Harper Collins) serves as a guidebook to combat fatigue and frustrations and includes a mix of essays with contributions from Jamie Lee Curtis, Roz Chast, Gisele Fetterman, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and more. Weymar’s goal is to spark creativity to address the problems we’re currently facing. 

The author: Diana Weymar ’91 earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton in English. Since then she has gone on to become an artist and activist, encouraging others to do the same through her textile and embroidery work. Weymar is the author and curator of the public art projects Tiny Pricks Project and Interwoven Stories, and has worked with a variety of organizations. 

Excerpt:

It all started with a tiny stitch and a big prick. For the first two years of the Trump presidency, I watched in quiet dismay as he assaulted every aspect of our democracy and our decency. He felt anathema to the aspirations for my practice as an artist. I was deeply engaged in studio and public stitching projects that used textiles for personal expression, grassroots community building, and the general betterment of society. I felt the power of the medium to capture emotions, narratives, and context.

I didn’t want anything to do with Trump until he said, “I am a very stable genius.” I knew immediately that this was great material: garish, ridiculous, delusional, horrifying, and hilarious. I pulled a needlepoint cushion cover out of a storage box of textiles inherited from my mother’s family. The background was an indescribable mustard/gold color, the center infused with a cluster of grand, gaudy flowers, and the edges rough, unfinished. In other words, it was the perfect textile for a little subversive craftivism! While my husband drove, I sat in the passenger seat furiously stitching “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS” with bright-yellow embroidery floss into my family heirloom. My “craft on the go” was done by the time we reached our destination about an hour later, and I felt deeply satisfied that I had scratched an annoying itch! I quickly took a picture of it, posted it to my personal Instagram account of a few hundred followers, and unknowingly launched Tiny Pricks Project, an international textile-based public protest art project. A couple of things about that moment: It was pure impulse. Trump had been pricking away at my sanity, and I needed a way of pushing back. I studied writing in college and worked in film for almost a decade in New York City, so I was sensitive to how language and imagery are used. How they make us feel. I also needed an activity that fit into my busy lifestyle. Convenient. My friend Dani Shapiro once referenced “retroactive intentionality” on one of her podcasts, and I want you to know that this was a case of retroactive un-intentionality. I believe that nothing is an accident, but sometimes creative impulses come from an unknown, unknowable place. And that can be a beautiful thing.

Six years, over six thousand posts, hundreds of contributors, more than five thousand textile pieces, and thousands of followers later, this book is in your hands! Tiny Pricks Project has evolved.

Nowadays, my practice is devoted to creating a daily material record of current political discourse, popular culture, and artistic inspirations, and to raising awareness around issues that matter to me. In short,I cannot stitch fast enough to keep up with the material! I’m one of many artist-activists who could be categorized as part of the larger “craftivism” (craft + activism) movement, but whether we are stitching a politician’s quotes into family heirlooms, or sewing face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, or knitting pussyhats, or engaged in a creative approach to a problem, we are crafting a form of resistance and a form of healing.

I have created large-scale public art projects, worked with peacebuilders, generated content for political campaigns, reported the news, and collaborated with other artists and activists. For the past decade, I have stitched my way through presidencies, current events, tragedies, my thoughts, and loss. For my children, I have used textile and thread to weave a story about the world we’re in, how I see it, and what I hope for it. This is a form of documenting in real time. I hope this book shows you that making does not require you to drop everything in your life to clear space for it. It is what happens while you are living. It is a way of life.

This book is about creative work, and trying to make the world a better place. If you let it, it will take you by the hand and lead you to a place of your own unique making. We know a song by hearing it. We know clothing by wearing it. We know art by feeling it. We know a book by reading it. I know a better world by crafting it with others. Please join us.

Excerpted from Crafting a Better World: Inspiration and DIY Projects for Craftivists © 2024 by Diana Weymar. Reproduced by permission of Harvest, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

Reviews:

"The pen may be mightier than the sword, but, as Weymar and her crafting cadre prove, the needle is sharper." — Oprah Daily

"Activist crafters will find abundant motivating forces and community in this collection." — Library Journal