Welcome to The Black Urbanist Weekly. I’m Kristen Jeffers and I’m currently producing this weekly digital newsletter on my site and via email to share my thoughts, my Black, Spiritual, Southern, Working-Class, Educated, Queer, Femme thoughts on how places and communities work. Think of this as my weekly column, sitting on your proverbial print paper’s editorial page or as so many other of your favorite newsletters do, in your inbox.
This is edition number #11 and I know I promised y’all an even deeper dive into how I’ve changed my views around gentrification. That’s coming but in two weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to take this week to talk about why I’ve become enamored with crafting and also re-introduce Kristpattern, my platform and shop for my creations.
****If you were reading this on Patreon, you might not have those issues with links opening, you could ask me a question and you could even get something from the Kristpattern store for free, along with enhanced job-hunting support and you could work with me to create a special webinar for job and opportunity seekers to your organization. All these benefits start at just $1 a month. Head over to make a monthly pledge and encourage your friends to do the same. Now, on to the craft!****
On Crafting and How It’s Helped Me Make and Keep Place
It’s a hum I’ve heard since I was in the womb. A hum that’s not quite music, but from the same vein of creativity. Sometimes it’s a buzz like an exploding firework. Other times it’s a slow hum, that then shifts into a pitter-patter of the metal meeting each other and running the thinnest fibers across and interlocking with a larger woven piece of fabric.
That hum comes from the sewing machine, controlled by foot and hand by my mother, sewing together my baby clothes, waiting for me to appear in the world.
And appear I did, and not long after, I was playing with scraps while dodging the pincushion.
By age 6 I stitched yarn into plastic canvas netting to create flat “embroidered” magnets for several of the adult women in my family.
By age 10 I’d made a vest with a blue back and cute cartoon honeybees on the front with my mom’s help. It’s forever immortalized in my 5th-grade school picture.
At age 12 stitching a locker organizer in the home economics class our school managed to still have.
All the while I’d start messing with yarn and dreaming of patterns, both to manipulate fabric and around fabric, but putting it all down and going on about my life.
Fast forward to 2013, I turned to craft again, this time a skirt, as I grieved my dad.
In 2015, I realized I too could be a designer of fancy patterns that go on paper and fabric. Thanks Spoonflower! Them being another successful North Carolina-based tech company, along with their emphasis on craft captured me when I was much further away in Kansas City, hoping to make sense of home.
An example of one of those early patterns is Dabbing on Peacock. The background invokes the blue of the Carolina Panthers, who went to the Super Bowl in 2016. It honored the Royals 2015 World Series championship. The peacock, the purple peafowl to be exact, is an animal I consider a mascot.
And for the longest time, until the case broke, I had it on the back of my phone, multiple reminders of what I held dear.
And that’s what I feel like my cycles of craft are about, holding on and holding dear.
As of this year, I’ve lived in seven different jurisdictions, across several different states and metro areas. I’ve traveled and travel to so many other jurisdictions around the world. I’ve lived in all kinds of homes and gotten myself around in all kinds of modes of transport.
Yet, in my suitcase, my backpack, my gym back, my carry-on luggage, in the corner of a box–there’s always room for a skein of yarn and a crochet hook. My sewing patterns are with me. My poor IKEA sewing machine has crossed coasts and is about to get upgraded to something that can actually sew clothing.
Craft is handy. But craft is also portable, moveable and capable of helping set the tone of a place. After all, what is the built environment, but craft, done on a large scale.
I see that in Jay Pitter’s analysis of fashion+place. In Stephanie Echeveste’s call for developers to truly understand craft and what she terms placekeeping. To my high school classmate Sarah Marsom’s tiny Jane Jacobs and I.M. Pei dolls, which she uses in her public outreach sessions around historic preservation. Illana Preuss and Kimberly Hunter who have been at these tables between crafters and developers and government leaders too many times to count. The creative community and collective that’s growing around Distinctly Creative’s Goldn’ Roots.
Finally, Del Sandeen in how she too, just like I did at the top of this letter, takes it back to the roots of her craft. And pretty much every artist and creative and collective that our cities and major institutions clamor towards to make them seem hip, cool and inclusive.
Where buildings in one place can be gentrified, transit systems can be restricted, vehicles can run out of gas and even craft and art can be co-opted and appropriated—craft and creativity still rise from these ashes, ready to remake and rebuild and affirm and empower.
It’s that community and comfort around craft everywhere I’ve been that’s gotten me picking up my hooks again—this time to finish things and not just leave them lingering at 75% finished. Crafty folks, you know what I mean!
With that being said, I am relaunching my craft site Kristpattern with a weekly newsletter of its own. If you subscribe, you can learn more about my crafting process, and you can even purchase a scarf! With every scarf you buy, you can get one of the motivational cards I designed for Les, with her words of motivation—built from years of working on the front lines of transit and advocating for every member of our community to have adequate transit. Plus, you can put money both into my pockets and my home state’s economy by purchasing one of my prints on fabric or paper from Spoonflower. For now I’m keeping it simple and just doing a newsletter, private commissions and tracking my progress on Instagram, but look for a full relaunch of the Kristpattern site in the coming weeks.
Even if you don’t spend a dime, take a moment as we go into this season of giving and consumerism and think of how craft influences not just your urbanism, but your life.
Other Things on My Mind
We are at a point where seeing people like these two (gainfully employed, but still homeless because the rent is too high) women take over functioning, but somehow still vacant homes, especially when the means of obtaining them legally are unnecessarily complicated at best and cruel at worst, should not shock people. The homes above are in Oakland and downstate in Los Angeles, there are more vacant homes than homeless people. This program, and similar ones that help tenants become owners of their buildings wants to be helpful, but I’m skeptical this will be enough and even they aren’t sure if the effects will be lasting. Plus, it’s only three buildings in LA.
The crisis of trans deaths, namely black trans women is absolutely an urbanist issue. I’m going to say what I said on Twitter in honor of last Wednesday’s Trans Day of Remembrance here:
These folks can’t even fathom going outside without potential danger. If you aren’t thinking about how this affects any of your urbanism— from transportation, housing, healthcare, workforce, and placekeeping—start.
And one more thing for orgs/cities/firms— hire trans and gender-non-conforming folks. Pay them well. Promote them and train them and nurture them. Let them be prime on your projects. Don’t let your equity plan only be external or be up to existing “cultural fit”.
I really do admire the rise of worker collaboratives, and I am still very grateful Baltimore’s Red Emmas allowed me to have a birthday lecture there almost two years ago. I also like how Baltimore magazine reported the good and bad in a way that still highlights the benefits of this kind of arrangement. I am in fact working on a station by station analysis of Metro.
Enjoyed learning the brief history of this particular station in DC by tweet.
Before You Go
—Check out the job board. Additionally, as I work on improving the public job board, I’ve seen your clicks and I’ve added two new Patreon levels—Opportunity Seeker and Opportunity Maker. Opportunity Seeker allows you to get one resume/cover letter/portfolio/proposal critique and I’ll be sending out the email version of the jobs update to those of you who pledge at this level. You’ll also be able to take the web version of my course How to Communicate in the Modern World, for free. Opportunity Maker allows you to place your job listing at the top of those Opportunity Seeker emails and your firm/agency/organization can hold exclusive webinars with the Opportunity Seekers—which you can treat like similar events on college campuses or at conferences—but virtual! Head over to Patreon and check those out.
— Sign up for the Kristpattern email list. The holidays are here, folks. And these are great black queer woman-owned gifts you can give this season!
— Let me come and talk to you about killing your civic-inferiority complex before the holidays or in 2020 or beyond. Book me for a lecture, workshop or both. Also Les, my wonderful life partner and sales director is great at hyping you up, making you laugh and helping you or your organization make radical changes in your life and health. Book her too. And listen to my wonderful podcast mentee’s The Crossroads Podcast, which also discusses environmental issues from a black woman’s perspective.
—Finally, even if you aren’t in the job or opportunity market or have jobs and opportunities to post, I’ve refreshed all my Patreon levels. Just $1 a month ensures you don’t miss this newsletter, even if social media and Mailchimp try to make that happen. $5 allows you to ask me one question a month that I will research and answer in-depth and make part of a permanent Q&A, $10 gives you first dibs when the podcast relaunches and when we start doing live events again.$20 grants you digital copies of all my future books. $50 gets you something free out of the Kristpattern store. Learn more and pledge!
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