Around OWS I’m pretty easy to spot. I’m the ‘guy in the box‘, and in too many ways I’ve been in a box of sorts since the beginnings of Occupy. At Zuccotti Park, I created a succession of signs, boxes and a teepee that  saw me spend 48 straight days in the park, painting, or building, or being filmed, or something – all in a one-man-band communication matrix that has now spread to the Fiber Arts working group and the Internet. This blog is my latest Fiber Optics creation.

But this week, on the way to the Union Square event, I stopped at a street corner and met a young graphic design student who had taken notice of the box I was carrying, folded in a rolling cart. His name is Ogoby Asencio and he and I had a beginning conversation that revealed our mutual love of typography and pointed to both our professional beginnings as graphic designers. Ogoby began as a graffiti artist and I put myself through university working in professional sign companies, learning the craft there. The rest as they say, is of course, history. Instant friends were made – years apart but common by design.

Ogoby asked me what I was doing on 14th street with a curious sign collage and I told him I was on the way to an OWS event at Union Square. Then he beamed:) “Man, I’ve been designing a typeface based on lettering used by protesters at OWS”, he said. “Could I photograph your box and include the fonts in my development of a typeface for my master’s thesis on OWS type?”. Damn, I thought, a few weeks ago my blog, aHBiNYC, was assigned as recommended reading to a class at Columbia Law School for a segment on OWS, and now I’m referenced for a design school MA program. I’d better savour this obscurity while it lasts:)

Check out Ogoby’s blog on the Occupy Typeface. He’s got great ideas and the start of some truly original designs. His stencil font is on the left and there’s plenty more on the site. We’ve invited Ogoby to join Fiber Arts and hope to collaborate on some totally new fonts as the American Spring approaches. Outreach can take many forms, from the seemingly simple knitting of a hat, to the more than deliberate stroking of a brush in complete creative disobedience. What’s important though is that the message gets out there in any form, many forms – and all about reform. That’s the spirit that has kept us all together in this, our occupied winter of discontent.

     I would like to offer MY OPINION on tax cuts for the rich as it implies trickle down to jobs.  I would call this theory unfounded and so far very unsuccessful.  In other words, bullshit.  You wanna know who creates jobs? 

     I do.  Yes, I am a job creator.  And on top of that I do it in more ways than one.  If I have enough money (through, oh let’s say tax cuts to the poor and middle class) then I will buy stuff.  When I buy stuff, someone has to make that stuff so I create a job.  I like to buy my stuff from American produced goods so I create American jobs. 

     Another way I create jobs is to teach people how to do jobs in my chosen field or with my expert skill set.  Oh wait, you say.  Doesn’t that create competition?  I say, so what.  I make a unique one of a kind product so even if they make something similar to mine, it is not the same and let the consumer chose what they like the best.  That is what I consider capitalism and there is nothing wrong with that.

     In the same way, you are a job creator, she is a job creator and he is a job creator.  So lets all go out there and create some jobs today! 

 

Okay folks, lets go….

Frozen extended digits no more with the new ergonomically designed “Occu-finger” from #OWS Fiber Arts. Knitted to help you keep exactly one finger sheltered from the elements at all times, the Occu-finger works on any digit, whether you’re showing your disdain for the NYPD or simply pointing out some of New York’s finer tourist attractions to a friend. Knitted in a variety of colours to match any outfit, the Fiber Arts Occu-finger is as at home on the runway as it is on the freeway for fashion minded activists the world over.

And what better venue to unveil our newest models than at this weekend’s Occupy Town Square III at Tompkins Square Park from 11am to 5pm on Sunday. Fiber Arts will be there with knitting by Marsha and Karen, Hearts by Patricia, Paper Cranes by Raven and Signpainting by David. Join us this weekend and flip a bird, be it a paper crane or an Occu-finger at your favourite target.

Ask around OWS about Edward David Heath II and you won’t hear a thing. Ask about Raven and you’ll hear everything. Everything good. Since the beginning of OWS in Zuccotti park Raven Bluefeather, a Unitarian Minister and Native American Shaman has charmed those who have met him including the media here on the left at TotallyCoolPix.com.  Also a member of TechOps working group, Raven shows his skillz in design, building and codeing sites and other digital media on his site, Raven2099. A towering figure, always in black with his signature cowboy hat, Raven has defined the prototypical Occupier with his passion, devotion and longevity. But with #OWS Fiber Arts Raven has once again reinvented himself – this time as a master maker of 1000 paper cranes. Working at Charlotte’s Place over the past few weeks he and a few close friends managed to fold 1000 for another friend to fulfill a Japanese proverb – one that grants a person a wish, should they have folded for them 1000 origami cranes. And as paper is a fiber as well as wool or any other variety, we’re more than happy to have Raven as a member of the group. Say hi when you see him. He’s the gentlest giant around.

 

 

To make things easier for fellow OWS bloggers to get their blogs working well with social media, increasing readership and spam free comment moderation, the Fiber Arts group has partnered with TechOps to install three new plugins that will make your blog more user friendly and easier to manage.  Check these out:

ShareThis is a handy little plugin that helps you share on Twitter, Facebook and over 120 other social networking sites from just a few simple buttons. Now, no more need to add a button for every site you want and clutter up your posts. ShareThis is more simple than the ‘really simple’ plugin and it’s elegant by design. And the 120 other sites it connects to? Just remember that in China, Facebook is not #1, Baidu is – so if you want people all over the world to share your stuff, this gives them a way to do that. See it in action at the bottom of this post.

Disqus is a comment moderation system that is lightweight, elegant and prevents spam from ever entering your mailbox. No need to enable Akismet with the WordPress comment system and Disqus gives you lovely charts, graphs and easy comment sharing on FB & Twitter. To eliminate spam Disqus does a commenter vetting that requires human interaction (capcha) so bots can’t touch you. Give us a comment here and see how it works – but say something nice because Disqus also gives blog moderators the option to edit or mark comments as spam and ban the sender forever. You can even use it on your mother-in-law.

Outbrain is a plugin that provides your readers with more suggestions for further reading at the end of every one of your posts. Whether from your blog, or others, Outbrain scans and matches keywords, tags and categories to make intelligent recommendations to your readers on similar subject matter – and it does it with picture thumbnails and headlines to make those suggestions really sexy. In short, Outbrain helps to increase the amount of time your readers spend with your content, thereby getting your message across by cross-selling it. See it below.

Give these plugins a try. Our thanks go out to Drew, Jake and Pea at TechOps for helping us get these up on our site and available to all other OWS blogs as we speak. And you thought #OWS Fiber Arts was just for knitting wool? Try these fiber optic mittens on for size.

 

And welcome Patricia, because with her, she brings the lovely recycled sweater hearts you see here and in our new header above. Patricia will be with #OWS Fiber Arts this Saturday, 11 February, at West Park Church at W. 86th and Amsterdam to both offer hearts (and love) to the crowd but also to give instruction on how to make your own, using re-purposed materials and a bit of ingenuity. Patricia also runs the blog and real brick and mortar basement of SustainableStudio here in the city. Check it out. As an added bonus, I’m going to send an email to Bloomberg right now, cause I think he needs to show OWS a whole lot more love and one of these would look just smashing on one of his stuffy old Brooks Brothers lapels.

Widowed at a very young age and raising her family as a single mom, Karin Hofmann is no stranger to difficult times. But when she came to ask herself what she could do for the Occupy cause the answer was easy – come every day and knit for the next generation. Still paying off her student loans from too many years ago, at 69, Ms. Hofmann has felt our country’s financial crisis first hand but now finds hope in a newer generation. “The change isn’t going to come fast enough for me”, she says, “but I feel very confident, after a month (here in Zuccotti Park), that these kids – so kind, so generous, so smart – are smart enough that they’ll figure it out…they’ll figure out how to fix it.” Inspired by the energy of the Occupiers and the growing group of knitters, she became a founding member of #OWS Fiber Arts working group and continues to spread her love of the movement at Charlotte’s place and Zuccotti Park when the weather permits.
Seen most recently at the Occupy Town Square event at Washington Square, she continues, “That’s the paradigm shift – we all work together – and these kids, they know how to take care of each other – it’s inspiring”. As one of the first to broaden the generation range of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Karin Hofmann has helped to show America that working together towards a greater common goal can happen, even if it’s just one stitch at a time.

On a sunny day in September, 2011, Marsha Spencer saw an opportunity, an opportunity to use her skill to help a social movement she felt had value. That movement was the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and involving herself amidst the then, rather young crowd, Ms. Spencer began a movement of her own – a movement to, stitch by stitch, bring old and young, rich and poor and the haves and the have-nots together by knitting warm clothes for the soon to be winter warriors of OWS.

A hat here, a mitten there, little did Marsha Spencer know that those would be the beginning of the #OWS Fiber Arts working group and a commitment to bringing America back to its heritage, stitch by stitch.