This article is from our associated project, CreativeResistance.org
Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action’s NO To NEW TRIDENT campaign is joining knitting needles across the sea for some major guerilla woolfare.
Here are the basics:
You knit a pink scarf.
It gets assembled, along with other people’s scarfs, into one long section. We ship the whole thing to the United Kingdom where it joins a 7-mile long scarf stretched between the UK’s nuclear weapons factories on August 9, 2014.
Then, your scarf is sent to a conflict zone to become a humanitarian blanket.
Read on to learn more and get involved.
While the U.S government is planning to build a new fleet of ballistic missile submarines, the United Kingdom is working on its own plans for new subs. The connection is that the Trident II D-5 missiles deployed on the British subs are manufactured by Lockheed Martin and “leased” from the U.S. Both plans will drain huge amounts of money that is desperately needed for vital social programs in both countries, and will undermine global disarmament efforts.
Our colleagues in the United Kingdom have devised a wonderful and crazy plan to stage a nonviolent direct action protest involving 7 miles of pink wool. That’s right 7 (SEVEN) miles!
Wool against Weapons is a project to draw people’s attention and get them active against the replacement of Trident in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Peace activist and knitter Jaine Rose hatched a plan with Angie Zelter from Action AWE (a UK based grassroots peace campaign dedicated to banning nuclear weapons) to get a huge crowd of knitters and crocheters together to knit a massive knitted Peace Scarf to run between the Women’s Peace Camp at the nuclear weapons facilities at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire. The project is supported by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
It will be one big old woolly protest against the U.K’s ongoing involvement with nuclear weapons, and the money their Government is intending to spend in 2016. Then on August 9, 2014 people will unroll this beautiful (7 mile long) woolly scarf, and have a day of fun and funky guerrilla wool-fare as we yarn bomb the route between these two sites.
After the work is done, the scarf will be taken down and re-purposed in to blankets for local hospices, and refugees in war zones. Nothing wasted!!!
NO To NEW TRIDENT is participating in Wool against Weapons. We want to send a section of scarf to be joined with theirs in solidarity and common cause. Before we ship our section of the scarf to the UK we plan to use it here in some creative (and subversive) ways to make a serious statement about our government’s plans to spend $100 billion on a useless nuclear weapons system.
We invite knitters across the country to participate in Wool against Weapons. And what better time to get started than this cold and snowy (depending on where you live) time of year. Norman Rockwell has nothing on this – a warm fire, a cup of tea, and knitting (or crocheting) away in the rocking chair.
You don’t have to be a knitter to get involved. You can spin or dye wool for the project. You can buy some wool for a knitter to use. You can share information about the project with family, friends, co-workers, social organizations and beyond. You can donate money to help with the cost of shipping the scarf to the UK.
Here are all the details to get you started.
You can knit or crochet 1 unit (or more if you are able) that will then be put together with other units to build the scarf.
Knitting & crocheting dimensions: 1 unit = 39.5″ long x 23.5″ wide (100cm long x 60cm wide)
You can use any stitch and any wool. Suggestion – approx. 80 – 90 stitches wide – dk size 7 needles/4.5mm with approx. 100 rows – use a tape measure, it really varies! crochet dk chain approx 75 st
You can use any color of pink.
Send your finished unit(s) to:
Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action
Attn: Wool against Weapons
16159 Clear Creek Road NW
Poulsbo, WA 98370
You can send donations made out to Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action (and note “Wool against Weapons” on the memo line) to Ground Zero Center (at the address above).
All this information is also available at our Wool against Weapons page at NO To NEW TRIDENT.
Click here to see photos of some of the pieces submitted by knitters in the UK. We invite you to submit digital photos of your pieces before sending them off. We will share them on a special page at NO To NEW TRIDENT. Email your photos to subversivepeacemaking@gmail.com. And, you can email questions to me (Leonard Eiger) at this same address.
Wool against Weapons website (UK)
With warm, woolly wishes,
Leonard (Eiger)
NO To NEW TRIDENT Campaign Coordinator