Hello Friends!
The Patchwork Pride Project continues apace… and what a pace!
When we embarked on this project, I had a vague idea of asking the community to send in a few coloured 6” by 6” knitted or crocheted squares, and we would do something with them. I wasn’t sure what that ‘something’ was. I thought it might be another tree-sweater – a kind of patchwork pride quilt covering some upper branches of one of the big Maples on the Morningside-High Park property to replace the one that was vandalized, then stolen, last year.
Then I thought I might be a pennant: a bunch of triangles attached to a rope, which we could string up high around the building to keep them away from the hands of whoever vandalized the original yarn bomb. I explained this to Claire, who suggested instead, “how about a Pride Flag?” Great idea! And the present iteration of the Patchwork Pride Project was born.
I sketched up a design of the flag on my Stitch Painter Gold knitting software. It was 12 squares high, by 23 squares wide. That’s 276 squares. That felt like a lot. We had about 8 weeks before Pride month, and I thought we’d be lucky to make it. I enlisted Claire, and we both started knitting squares in a panic. But the response from the knitting community was great, and in no time at all we had reached our numbers. So, I went back into Stitch Painter and made the flag bigger. There are 6 stripes to the flag, and if you make one wider, you’ve got to make them all wider. The second version was 18 squares by 23 squares, or 414 squares. Oy. Claire and I panicked again and kept knitting.
Apparently other people kept knitting, too, because the squares just kept coming in. 414 was soon in the rearview mirror. I made the flag longer. 18 by 30: 540 squares. We blew by that. Oy! This is me posing with about 350 of them in our living room:
I didn’t want to widen the stripes again, because that meant adding another square to each stripe, which would put us at 24 squares wide… which would be 12 feet. So we made the flag longer again. 40 squares long. We needed 720 squares.
By Friday June 7th, the day before the deadline to drop off squares at the church, we had 719 squares. Claire and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It looked like we would make it. With a spring in my step, I went to MHP to get ready for the piecing party that weekend. My plan was to spend a bit of time laying out all the squares on the floor of the Fellowship Hall so I’d be ready for the piecing party the next day. I stepped up to the door of the church where I found the bin I’d left there for squares drop-off. It was full. Exciting. Then I let myself into the church office and found all kinds of boxes, bags and packages filled with squares piled on the desk and the chair. I couldn’t believe it. In all, 356 more squares had been delivered. I immediately called my brother Marc to join me. I knew I was going to need some help.
So the flag got bigger. In all we received 1176 squares, which is just unbelievable. We sorted everything into piles of colours and hoped the numbers would work out. The flag now measures 24 by 42 squares, for a total of 1008 squares. Here’s how it looked laid out on the floor, ready to be assembled:
Sunday June 9th arrived, and the piecing party was a big hit. The congregation of MHP was joined by members of the local, online, knitting, and LGBTQI+ communities, and we had a wonderful time sewing hundreds and hundreds of squares together. Here are a few shots of that event:
And the work continues! As the response was so strong and the flag has grown so big, it has taken us longer to assemble it than planned. We are continuing to meet at the church, day and night, sewing together squares, and then attaching them to the ripstop nylon backing that will ensure the flag retains its shape. Here is the intrepid group that got together at MHP on Monday:
We put a dent in the work… but only a dent. Most of us took strips of squares home to work on in the evening. This is how the Dunn dining room looked last night.
If anyone would like to help, we would love to have you. Please reach out to me at www.kirkdunn.com , and I can tell you when we’ll be on site working away. Snacks provided!
We’re madly sprinting toward our deadline of this Saturday, June 15th, when the Patchwork Pride Project is due to be hoisted into place at 12:00 noon on the tower of Morningside-High Park Presbyterian Church, 4 Morningside Avenue, during the community yard sale and BBQ on the church lawn. Put it in your calendars – we would love to see you there!