Of all the places to be overrun by politics, a community of knitters might be the one you’d least expect. Nevertheless, a popular knitting website shooed away supporters of President Trump last summer.
“We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry,” read a post on the website. “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”
This isn’t some fringe left-wing group engaging in virtue-signaling. It’s real exclusion. The website boasts hundreds of thousands of active users, and knitting enthusiast Pam Mausar says it’s now “hard to knit without using Ravelry.” She’s been using the website to find patterns and share projects since it was founded more than a dozen years ago. But now, she’s fed up.
Mausar says that Ravelry, in keeping with its Trump ban, took down a Trump 2020 hat she knit for her son-in-law. That’s when she decided to start her own website.
At Freedom Knits, users are encouraged to post patterns of whatever they want, whether that means supporting Trump, Joe Biden, or no one at all. Its tag line? “Where artistic freedom is respected.”
Any pattern is welcome on the platform, even if it’s not popular. Mausar, an Indiana native, says she’s embarrassed by the pink pussy hats worn by feminist activists, but she wouldn’t mind seeing them on her site.
“If you want to post a pussy hat on my site, you’re welcome to,” she explains over the phone. “Hence the name Freedom Knits.”
Since founding the site in November, Mausar has gained some 800 users on Freedom Knits, she says. A few of them mention Ravelry as a reason they’re happy to have found a website more inclusive of various political opinions. One even used the hashtag #walkawayfromravelry. “So glad to have found you!” another wrote.
“It’s not a political site,” Mausar says. “That’s what Ravelry is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a knitting site.”
On both knitting sites, plenty of subgroups have sprung up around different interests, from audiobooks to cats to, of course, politics. So Ravelry’s Trump ban isn’t about avoiding partisanship. It’s about silencing the opposing side. “They’re not trying to not have controversy,” Mausar said.
Luckily, though the Ravelry drama might sound like evidence of some greater trend in the knitting world, Mausar says it’s not that politicized yet: “Knitters, as a general rule, we just want to knit.”
With Freedom Knits, her goal is to let everyone keep on knitting on. “I’m trying to bring us all back to being able to knit happily without the censorship,” she says. “That’s about it.”
