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.

The film, Inside Job, was released in 2010 and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary that year. It is narrated by Matt Damon and written and directed by Charles Ferguson. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s an excellent primer on the root causes of the financial crisis of 2008 and a precursor to the Occupy movement.  It is presented here as the answer to the question ‘why we Occupy?’. 

 

 

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.

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.