Anyone who ever feared that knitting, crochet and other needle crafts were dying arts should be cheered by the decade-long resurgence in their popularity that only continues to intensify and find new expression, including political.
Witness the pink knit caps (“pussy hats”) dotting and symbolizing the women’s marches of the last two years. Or recall the “stress knitting” used by coaches and athletes to calm themselves at Olympic venues in February. Millennials, who have rejected many a deep-seated tradition, have warmly embraced this pastime, which possibly goes back to knitted socks in third century Egypt.
Locally, situated in the middle of SOBO, Baker and West Wash Park neighborhoods, this modern revolution is anchored by two crafting juggernauts that continue to conspire, inspire and arm a new generation of crafters.
Want in? Every Tuesday from 6:00p.m.-9:00p.m. at Fancy Tiger Crafts it’s Open Craft Night. A dozen or so crafters—beginners to experts—sit together at a long farmhouse table in the South Broadway store to share knowledge and enjoy companionship. It has been a welcoming, mellow spot to land since 2006.
No purchase is necessary at Open Craft Night—that is, if you can resist the store’s eye-catching wares. Fancy Tiger Crafts is like a woolly candy store stocked with natural and sustainable fibers and fabrics in every color imaginable, pastel to neon. The spacious store offers it all, from the delicate cobweb and lace weight yarns to roving wool yarn resembling very fat dreadlocks. It’s used in arm knitting (yes, using arms as needles), store manager Miranda Harp says. Fancy Tiger has its own line of patterns and yarns originating from sheep ranches and mills in Colorado, Oregon and California. What you won’t find is polyester.
Pink Pitcher, crafter and graphic artist, has been coming to Open Craft Night for more than a decade. "It’s always a mix of regulars and newcomers," she says. "No topic is banned during the communal conversation, but the exchanges tend toward the pleasant," Victoria Cuellar adds.
Men are fewer, but included, and one Fancy Tiger employee started his own event at the store, called Manmade, A Gentleman’s Craft Society, which offers “camaraderie and crafts” 6:00p.m.-9:00p.m. every first and third Monday of the month.
“We believe that making things by hand makes people feel better, and that if more people made things, the world would be a better place.”
Store co-owner Amber Corcoran, who started Fancy Tiger with Jaime Jennings, says she fell in love with knitting the first time she picked up needles. She clearly enjoys fostering the love of needle arts in others. Formal instruction is offered in a spacious classroom here, but that’s not what Open Craft Night is about.
“We’ve been doing craft night since the beginning,” Corcoran says. “We’ve learned about crafting along with our customers. It’s always been a mix of different people doing different things at different skill levels. We try to be very welcoming to everyone who walks in the door. There’s no formal instruction during Open Craft Night, but there is knowledge sharing.”
Corcoran and Jennings have been in league for years with the crochet gangsters (yarn bombing street artists) with the nearby semi-secretive Ladies Fancywork Society—run by women who use their grandmothers’ names as aliases.
The friendly conspiracy between the store and the society put Denver on the crafting map. If you doubt it, check out the international press clippings of both establishments. Fancy Tiger has been featured in everything from Martha Stewart Living magazine to an Estonian publication.
The Ladies Fancywork Society’s well-publicized rap sheet covers illicitly making art on an epic scale—crafting leg warmers for Jonathan Borofsky’s 60-foot-tall “Dancers” near the Denver Performing Arts Complex in 2009. They attached, under cover of night, a giant ball and chain (of yarn) to the 42-foot-tall blue bear sculpture (titled “I See What You Mean”) stalking the Denver Convention Center. The society’s blue-bear adornment, entitled “Slave to the Craft,” took about 15-miles worth of yarn to create. Since those early years, the society, whose emblems include a raised pink fist clenching a crochet needle, has grown a very long list of yarn graffiti and other “yarn crimes” officially and legally commissioned as major art installations and shows.
Fancy Tiger, which started out as a very small business, moved just up the street from its original location to the bigger store at 59 Broadway in 2012. Like its founders, Corcoran says, the store has grown one small step at a time. There weren’t many stores like it around here when they started, she says.
Whatever the reasons, Fancy Tiger and friends’ influence on the Denver crafting scene has been enormous.
“We believe that making things by hand makes people feel better, and that if more people made things, the world would be a better place,” the store’s mission statement says on the website.
The needle arts, far from being simply benign and wholesome pastimes, historians tell us, always have been important forms of artistic and political expression for women, even when other arenas were closed to them.
In American history, needle arts always have been interwoven with race, gender and class issues, from the homespun goods that empowered colonists to spurn heavily taxed imported textiles to the women’s sewing circles that fanned the flames of anti-slavery sentiment, and beyond to the very pink protest hat of today.
But even if you just want to make something beautiful or keep someone warm, Corcoran says, the needle is a powerful tool for good.
