Patchwork Pride Pennant
The biggest new project afoot is the Patchwork Pride Pennant, which we are going to hang at Morningside-High Park Presbyterian Church in time for Pride 2024. If you’ve been following along here, you’ll know that I put up three Rainbow Yarn Bomb installations last year for Pride, and two of them (one at Morningside-High Park Presbyterian Church, one at Todmorden Mills) were vandalized and stolen—a giant disappointment. The one that succeeded in staying up was located at Crieff Hills Retreat Centre.
There was wonderful support after the theft of the two yarn bombs. Lisa Easley, a knitter who lives in Georgia, reached out via my website and offered to re-crochet one of the yarn bombs herself, providing the yarn and all the work involved. I am thrilled about this and look forward to sharing her work when she sends it. We plan to place it on the same tree that hosted our original yarn bomb, just further up – past where the trunk splits into two big vertical branches. We are hoping that no one will be able to do it mischief there. A massive thank you to Lisa for her support—and her crocheting. It’s a lot of crocheting.
Crieff Hills has asked for another Rainbow Yarn Bomb this summer, so I’m excited about that.
And at Morningside-High Park, fellow knitter and congregant Sandy Takeda and I have decided to try something new: what we’re calling a Patchwork Pride Pennant, made of knitted 6” squares, all the colours of the rainbow—something we can hang on the building up high so unhelpful interlopers can’t easily reach it. We’ve put out the call and have an amazing number of knitters who have reached out to knit squares. Would you like to join us?
Here's the very straight forward pattern:
Feel free to leave the tails on the squares — we can use them to help sew them together. We need all the squares delivered by Saturday June 8th, 2024 so we can assemble the pennant at a Pennant Party the next day, Sunday June 9th. Lunch will be provided. We will definitely need some assistance — so if you can drop by Morningside-High Park Church, 4 Morningside Avenue, Toronto, M6C 1C2 at 12:00 noon, we would welcome the help!
You can either deliver your squares to the church, or you can hand them off to me directly May 18-19 at the Knit City Toronto marketplace, Westin Harbour Castle, 1 Harbour Square. The ever-wonderful Christopher Walker and Jamie Godin of Cabin Boy Knits have invited me to hang out at their booth and have volunteered to be a drop-off location for Patchwork Pride Pennant squares. The more, the merrier. If neither of those options works for you, please reach out to me via www.kirkdunn.com, and we’ll figure something out.
And if you’re at Knit City, please do stop by the Cabin Boy Knits booth, whether you have Patchwork Pride Pennant squares or not. Their hand-dyed yarns are to die for.
The Knitting Pilgrim at Brantford’s Sanderson Centre and Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton
Most recently, we performed The Knitting Pilgrim at Brantford’s Sanderson Centre (April 17) and Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton (April 20).
We had a lovely time. Here’s a testimonial I received via my website the day after our show at the Sanderson Centre which moved me:
And here I am, pre-show, at Central Presbyterian.
We welcomed our new projection operator, Hussein Esmail, to the show. Hussein joined me at our last two shows and was a complete natural. In fact, the IATSE crew of The Sanderson Centre couldn’t believe that he had only ever run the show once before that performance. If you’ve seen the show you’ll know that it has a TON of projections (and if you haven’t seen it, a list of shows both past and upcoming, is on my website here). I am eternally grateful to the projection operators who work on KP with us. They save my butt on a regular basis and do the things I cannot do. In other words, I take care of the talking and the knitting—they take care of everything else that happens on stage, including lighting, sound, and the live knit cam.
Pacific Contact
Last week, Claire and I attended the Pacific Contact artist-presenter conference in Kelowna, BC. Here I am working on my Star of Bethlehem wrister pattern on the airplane over… I am still trying to finish it and get it onto Ravelry. Any day now, I swear.
Claire tells the full story of our time in BC in her newsletter (we are now a house of newsletters—one more thing on the pile!)—and if you’re not signed up to her newsletter, give it a go—it’s great (you can sign up here). I can safely say this from experience—not that I’m biased at all.
I’ll just say that we had a great time, I enjoyed the BC craft beer, we saw a ton of great showcases and booked Knitting Pilgrim shows for our BC tour in April 2025, which we’re very excited about.
The Knitting Pilgrim Talks
Claire and I continue to release The Knitting Pilgrim Talks episodes on YouTube and podcasts everywhere you find what you like to listen to.
Pushed Aside: Women and LGBTV in Christianity Pt. 2
In episode 123 of The Knitting Pilgrim Talks, I speak with Rev. Daniel Brereton of St. John’s Dixie Anglican Church about the section of the “Stitched Glass” Christian tapestry depicting a female figure reaching up to the figure of Christ, yet being pushed aside. In the background are pink triangles, representing the LGBTQ+ community and their similar experience of being ostracized by the church. Rev. Brereton talks about the link between women’s rights, gay rights, and their essential threat to the patriarchy of a capitalist society that would rather focus on the biblically insignificant issue of gender rather than the bible’s fundamental message prohibiting idolatry, greed, and the misuse of money.
“It’s not a coincidence that gay rights always follow on the heels of women’s rights. Until women are acknowledged as equal, you can’t even start talking about differences in sexual and gender identity.” – Rev. Daniel Brereton
Episode 123 is available on YouTube here: KPT 123: Pushed Aside: Women and LGBTQ in Christianity Pt. 2
Or, all of the podcast places, like KPT on Spotify, if you’d rather listen than watch.
If you have any questions about any of my projects, would like to book a talk, workshop, The Knitting Pilgrim or Spycraft, please reach out to me at kirkdunn.com.