Cincinnati’s Crafty Supermarket co-founder Grace Dobush is now based in Berlin, Germany. But as an expat living abroad, she’s still deeply impacted by the policies, politics and injustices happening at home.
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests and #SayTheirNames movement — a social media campaign to reinforce the individual humanity of each BIPOC victim of police brutality or racial violence — Dobush has produced an alphabet crochet pattern that allows crafters to create banners to spell out the names of the injured and murdered.
“In preparing for a Black Lives Matter protest, I wanted to make something meaningful that would also allow me to meditate on the lives of unarmed Black people killed by police,” reads the pattern intro for the project, titled Crochet Their Names.
Download the pattern at gracedobush.files.wordpress.com.
“The BLM protests have been in the news all over Europe, and there were like 15,000 of us at the rally in Berlin in June,” says Dobush in an email interview. “A lot of U.S. expats I know in Berlin feel a little helpless, watching from afar. But we’re still citizens, we still vote. I wanted to make some kind of handmade sign to bring with me, and after some experimentation I figured out how to embed letters into a banner. Each one bears the name of a Black person murdered by police.”
As Dobush says, she didn’t invent the concept of “craftivism” — it’s a movement with its own website, manifesto, history and Wikipedia page. But this “form of activism, typically incorporating elements of anti-capitalism, environmentalism, solidarity or third-wave feminism…centered on practices of ‘domestic arts'” (per Wikipedia) can be a “meditative act,” she says.
“Working with yarn, especially, means working through knots and complex problems. But craft is also joyous and a community act and about creating something that wasn’t there before, or fixing something that doesn’t work anymore,” says Dobush, also mentioning the Yarn Mission and their anti-racism work.
Crochet Their Names is a free pattern and project, available to anyone, and Dobush has been making personal donations to bail funds and BLM organizations versus monetizing it.
“I felt like Crochet Their Names would be more impactful as an open-source project,” she says. “If people connect with the project, I hope they try it themselves and that these banners, wherever they’re displayed, remind us all that Black lives matter, every day.”
On her Instagram, Dobush shared an image from a friend in Cincinnati who had crocheted a yard full of names — you can see Michael Brown, Samuel DuBose, Timothy Thomas, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Ahmaud Arbery, Oscar Grant and Justin Howell.
And on that friend’s Instagram — @jsulthandmade — she says, “A neighbor said this gave her chills. I think that’s about right. A group effort with Scout and @jen.edwards.1656.”
This article appears in The Summer Guide.