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Media literacy camp this Saturday!

May 28, 2009 • Megan Griffith-Greene

There’s still space left in this incredible event happening in Toronto this weekend. And leading one workshop is our very own art director (and genius) Sheila Sampath. Full (exciting) details below from Michelle Cho from the Urban Alliance on Race Relations:

Ever wonder why we see the same kinds of images of women in the media all the time? Wanna see women in the media as being something more than just a video ho? Tired of the lack of diversity in the media? Want to see your story? Want to learn how to make your own media (video, podcasts, magazines)?

Come to the Making Noise Media Camp for Young Women!

For women 14-25
Saturday May 30
rsvp: michelle cho, 416-703-6607 x 3
michelle@urbanalliance.ca

Challenge stereotypes about women; bring your own t-shirt to silkscreen; meet other young women from around the city! Free breakfast and dinner, free TTC tokens, free childcare.

This year, we’ve started a program called Making Noise which is a media literacy initiative for young women in this city to connect the negative portrayals of women in the media with the gender violence women face on our bodies, in our neighbourhoods in our homes. We want to talk about the politics of media ownership but also give spaces for young women to create their own media, with the sole goal of launching a summer campaign against street harassment.

Summer is almost here, and rates of violence always go up in the summer…we’re tired of being hollered at the in the streets and feeling unsafe, but want more creative ways of challenging gender violence.

We’ve organized a media camp FOR THIS SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2009 to start to bring young women together to plan a summer campaign to challenge street harassment in Toronto using media they’ve created themselves. We want to talk about how violence is experienced differently by women of colour and how it is made invisible by the media or sensationalized to be soley about being because they do not fit into the “mainstream”.

i.e. Jane Creba - Her story flooded the media and was seen as this ‘bright light’ that was taken away from our city…

vs. Chantel Dunn - her murderers who are still not found…a case which got way less coverage and funding…

vs. Reena Virk, 14 year old South Asian woman that was killed by a group of seven girls and one boy. The media coverage that followed became all about girl on girl violence and not about racism.

vs. Aqsa Parvez, strangled by her father, grew up in a home with abuse issues, but the media framed it as an “honour killing” and became an attack on “fundamentalist Islam”.

We want to use popular education, pop culture and media creation to talk about how we can support each others work and build a movement together where an analysis of violence includes a critique of gender violence, including one that is critical of violence against queer folks…but in a fierce, media savvy way.

I know in some way, all of us have built spaces for young women, but we also need to make spaces for young men to talk about masculinities, gender roles, homophobia etc and how this is tied into how we experience violence different in our communities.
- DIY
The Big Embroidery Scandal of 2009

May 1, 2009 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

Similar Space Girls much? (www.dinosaursandrobots.com)

The interwebs are ablaze with activity and anger about a recent embroidery showdown. Some crafters are claiming there’s been a copyright infringement of Sublime Stitching original designs created by Jenny Hart. The perpetrator? Urban Threads.

To date no official comment has been released on either of Hart’s websites, but an incredible amount of data is being batted back and forth online. Without going into too much detail (you can find blogging here, here, here, and here) it saddens me that this kind of widespread artistic infringement happens in the indie craft world. I mean, Urban Outfitters has been accused of similar in the past, repeatedly, but you kinda hope that last time is really the last time.

To add fuel to the fire, Urban Threads has provided a rebuttal for the entire online craft world to dissect and discount as well as a letter from the big cheese meant for Jenny but published on the Urban Threads website for the whole world to see.

(more inside…)
- DIY
Spring Gardening

April 27, 2009 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

Newspaper Pots (Little House in the Suburbs)

If you live anywhere along the border like most Canadians, the idea of having to bring in your planters at night so your Petunias don’t freeze to death will be somewhat foreign. Our friends in Vancouver are celebrating spring under the cherry blossoms and Toronto seems to be at a nice 25C right now. But up here in Prince George it’s still chilly during the day and dipping below freezing at night, which means our growing season is a little short.

Often gardeners here start their seed a few months in advance, inside, under the pale light of fake sun. Gardening helpers, like these Newspaper Seedling Pots or Newspaper Seedling Packs from Little House in the Suburbs are a handy and waste-reducing way to get your garden a-growin’ before the ice has even left your flower beds. Even if you just want to plant some basil in your windowsill to dress up some summer pastas, these might be a cheap (and environmental) alternative to those kits at the grocery store. All you’ll have to do is thicken up the newspaper and make sure you put it on a plate or on a yoghurt lid and in some sunshine.
- DIY
Crafty Chica’d Earth Day

April 22, 2009 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

Chili Can Candelarias (Crafty Chica)

The may sun be settling on Earth Day in the east coast, but here in the west we’re just settling in for an evening of activity before Earth Day comes to an end. If you’re looking for a few more things to do, Crafty Chica, Kathy Cano-Murillo, has blogged about an earth-friendly craft every hour for earth day. From a mixed-media wind chime to a recycled grocery tote, or these wonderful Chili Can Candelarias, the Crafty Chica has a craft tutorial for all levels of crafty-ness! Now, get out there and reduce, reuse and recycle some crafts!
- Arts
- DIY
- Media Savvy
Radio Camp!

March 31, 2009 • Anna Leventhal

Thinking about summer plans? If you live in Montreal and are between the ages of 10 and 17, this is your chance to be the media! CKUT 90.3 FM is offering its first ever radio camp, a chance for future journalists, DJs, music enthusiasts, writers, and documentary makers to learn the ins and outs of radio. From the CKUT website:
Over a week long session campers (ages 10-13 and 14-17) will write, produce and act in a radio play, conduct interviews and create short documentaries, learn to dj and at the end of the week will produce and host a live radio show on CKUT!

This could be you. (venus collective)

This is an amazing opportunity for young folks to get involved with something that, for me at least, is inspiring, exciting, edumacational, oh, fine, I’ll just go ahead and say it - life-altering. Participants will learn such skills as how to make sound effects for radio, DJ skills like scratching and beat-matching, how to interview bands and artists, how to put together a documentary or radio play, and sound-editing. Plus you’ll get to hang out with other media-enthusiasts and wave-makers, and meet musicians, DJs, journalists, and all the other usual suspects who make for a vibrant media landscape. Who knows, you could end up karaokeing I’m Too Sexy with members of Les Georges Leningrad and Lesbians on Ecstasy (see image) - anything can happen.

Sessions are one week long and run all summer, from June 29th to August 21st. To find out more information and register, go here.
- DIY
Female Merit Badge

January 30, 2009 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

Female Merit Badges (Yeager)

Embroidery artist Mary Yeager creates beautifully intricate merit badges that illustrate female “rights of passage”. Much like the badges you’d get in Brownies or Scouts that proclaim your ability to camp in the snow, build a campfire, or be a good friend, Yeager’s badges mark the different milestones women experience and pass in their life time. Her work celebrates the positive aspects of women’s rights of passage but also criticize “the myriad physical manipulations women undergo to achieve cultural ideals of beauty” (Yeager’s website).

Recently featured on CRAFT Zine, Yeager’s work will be shown in New York at Forget Me Not (Gallery Hanahou) from February 6th to 27th, 2009.
- DIY
“Handmade is love.”

December 10, 2008 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

(buyhandmade.org)

I know that we’re partially on our way into December and if you’re as good as Martha you’ve already collected those renegade pine cones and dipped them in both glue and glitter. But if not, there’s still time to make or buy handmade for the holidays.

The Buy Handmade campaign started just over a year ago and is based on one simple pledge: “I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request that others do the same for me.” By participating in this pledge the “buyer” (or maker!) makes an important move towards not only protecting the earth from further degradation, but also encourages a reconnection to the physical during these harried holidays.

(more inside…)
- DIY
The epitome of craft-blogging

December 5, 2008 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

Just when the holidays start to roll in and en masse we begin to feel like we’re rushing too much or “falling behind” the holiday bonanza (3 knitted hats down, 2 to go!!) , Embloggery has a way of saying “slow down”.

Blogger Nicole started Embloggery as a way to “to examine the implications of the fact that we now have the ability to disseminate widely something written very quickly, to a potentially very large audience”. Her blog is made of embroidered “posts” she completed throughout her day. These posts, she says, force her to think about what to include, how long they should/can be, and what the shortest words to use might be.

I love Embloggery because it implicates the role of craft, an older-school technology, with the zip-zip-zip of the interweb. The internet is the best marketing and promotional tool for independent crafters who want to share their work with the world. But the instantaneous “uploading” to blogs and crafster, as well as the seamless store-fronts of Etsy, can sometimes be a little-too all consuming and often a distraction from the physical action of crafting. I’m excited to see the evolution of Nicole’s embroidered posts as they allow us, for just one second, to remember the power of handmade.
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- Event Listings
expozine Montreal!

November 26, 2008 • Anna Leventhal

Have I mentioned how much I love Cat and Girl? Oh yes, I believe I have. The webcomic by Dorothy Gambrell never ceases to be a balm for my overcaffeinated, neurotically self-analytic, black-humoured, Babysitters-Club-loving soul.

Whoa, it's a countercultural comic about counterculture that I'm using to advertise counterculture. The mind boggleth.

Okay, but the real point of this post is to let you know that YOUR SOUL TOO can be soothed by such products of minds depraved and genius, in material form no less! Montreal’s annual zine fair, Expozine, is happening this weekend, for two whole days of photocopied, silkscreened, stapled, hand-bound, sketched out and jittery madness. 200+ tables of independent bookworks, comics, art, crafts, posters, clothes, buttons, and snacks. Plus I’ll be there tabling with Invisible Publishing, where I’ll be flogging my book, along with books by such Shameless luminaries as Stacey May Fowles and Thea Lim.

Crucial deets:

Saturday and Sunday November 29th and 30th, 12 - 6
5035 St. Dominique between St. Joseph and Laurier (Metro Laurier)
FREE ADMISSION (take that, Toronto!)
- DIY
- In My Opinion...
“because the washer and dryer don’t run on remote control!”

November 19, 2008 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

Gender-based jokes that poke “fun” at domestic chores run rampant in the dominant culture. And somehow men are always the butt of the joke. But the “modern woman” is still stuck doing the laundry because the jokes just allow us as a society to shrug off their “inability” as part of their domestic failure as men, and not as part of the actual divisions in the home when it comes to domestic chores.

When it comes to chores I prefer the barter system. It’s what you would do with a roommate, or a sibling, and does not have to be any different when you’re in a relationship that highlights socially defined gender roles. At the end of the day I hate doing the cat litter and any living partner or roommate that is willing to take the cat litter on without complaint is my hero.

Luckily for them I’m always willing to do the laundry in exchange. It also means that I can use soap I’m not allergic to, can use/make less harmful detergents, and can use alternatives to the dryer in the summer (like the laundry line).

With that in mind, I thought I would compile a list of my favourite DIY projects for the laundry so that if you got the sweet deal of laundry over litter, you can have some DIY fun too.

(more inside…)