How to... make a feminist banner | 9.1.08

With such a huge array of feminist activism flourishing all over the country, there has never been a better time to design and make your own feminist banner. Whether you want to make your group's presence felt at the forthcoming Million Women Rise march or you want everyone to know exactly who you are when you're standing around on the street collecting signatures for your latest campaign, a banner is the perfect way to do it.

Your banner can be made in whatever medium you like, but the most effective involves either painting or appliquéing on to fabric. Painting is quite possibly quicker and depending on your skill level, more effective, but you will need a large (how large will depend on the size of the banner), flat, clean surface on which to lay the fabric you're going to paint on to. Having designed the look of your banner on paper you then need to transfer it onto the fabric using pencil or dressmaker's chalk and then you can start to paint, although not forgetting to place sheets of newspaper or a piece of cardboard under the fabric to stop any paint going through to the surface beneath. Fabric paints are most effective and are available in a huge range of gorgeous colours (including sparkly, neon and glow-in-the-dark) from your nearest haberdashery or craft shop. A downside of painted banners is the possibility of the paint running if it rains, but it is possible to buy waterproofing treatments to paint over your design to protect it.

However, when it comes to banners, I must confess to harbouring a degree of favouritism towards appliqué ones. Time-consuming and technically challenging they may be but they carry on a long tradition of lovingly crafted artwork in the style of trade unions and earlier feminist activism. Plus, your initial expenditure of time and money has the potential to be repaid many times over, because if you create an all-purpose design for your banner it can be used for any and every feminist, or indeed non-feminist, occasion you wish.

Before you do anything else, you need to decide what you want your banner to look like: How big? What colour scheme? What message?

The design is limited only by your creativity and confidence in your skill to make it, but it's worth bearing in mind that you want it to be easy to read from a distance so try sticking to a limited colour scheme, perhaps the colours of your group logo or the colours associated with a specific campaign (e.g. pink for Abortion Rights), and keep your design bold and minimal as too much information is distracting not to mention difficult to appliqué.

The banner I made for Reclaim the Night 2007 (and for all the exciting things to come) was relatively simple, consisting of the name of the group (East Midland Feminists) and our logo, all in purple, green and black on a white/cream background, resonating with the colour schemes associated with the End Violence Against Women movement as well as the feminist and Suffragette movements more generally. Make no mistake; the banner I made is far from ideal. For a start it's made from two charity-shop curtains sewn together because it was cheaper than buying several metres of medium-weight cotton/linen fabric. Also, it goes slightly wonky towards the end which is largely a result of trying to finish at 1 o'clock on the morning of the march after drinking half a bottle of wine. It would have been finished much sooner had my sewing machine not died halfway through, forcing me to blanket-stitch the remainder by hand. But never mind, learn from my mistakes!

So enough of the waffle, on with the process!

Step 1:
Having designed your banner on paper you need to buy (or scrounge) your materials. A rough guide of what you'll need is as follows:

• A length of fabric in your chosen background colour
• A selection of fabric pieces in your remaining chosen colours
• An array of matching (or if you wish, contrasting) cotton threads
• Newspaper
• Felt tips
• Sewing needle
• Paper scissors
• Sharp dressmaking scissors (It's always best to keep a pair of scissors solely for cutting fabric as using them on things such as paper blunts the blades and makes it much more difficult to get a clean cut on fabric.)
• Pins
• An iron
• An ironing board
• A sewing machine with spools and appropriate width needles for the fabric you're sewing (i.e. fine needles for lightweight fabric, thicker needles (90/14 is usually best) for normal fabric)
• Or, if you're hand sewing, sharp darning needles and a selection of tapestry threads in appropriate colours

Step 2:
Before you do anything, hem your background fabric to prevent fraying. This will involve threading your sewing machine up in the appropriate colour and sewing a hemming all four sides. You can do this by folding the edge of the fabric over to the back by about an inch and ironing to crease before sewing a straight line through the middle.

If you're going for the old curtain trick that I used you'll probably find that your hems have already been sewn for you so you'll just need to sew the two curtains together down the middle to create a seam. Also, remember to iron all your fabric to get rid of any creases that can make the whole process more difficult.

Step 3:
Begin by drawing out the separate letters or elements of your design onto pieces of newspaper with felt-tip pen, cutting them out with your paper scissors and pinning them to your background fabric. You may find this easier to do if you can hang your fabric up somewhere that allows you to work with the whole thing. If the weather is fine (and not too windy) try a washing line. I resorted to trapping the fabric between doors which while not ideal seemed to work well enough.Play around with the size and shape of your paper templates until you've cut out the whole design and worked it so that it fits onto your background.

Step 4:
Now you need to remove your paper templates from your background fabric and place them on the corresponding coloured-fabric that you design dictates. Start at the edges, pinning the templates to fabric in such a way that you waste as little fabric as possible. Also, it's better to use too many pins than too few as it makes it easier to keep to the template as you cut around it.

Step 5:
Using your sharp dressmaking scissors, begin to cut around the templates on your fabric. You might find it easier to cut roughly around each shape first to detach it from the rest of the fabric before you start cutting properly as it means there is less fabric to handle. Repeat this with all your templates.

Step 6:
Now you have all of your pieces cut out you can remove the paper templates and pins, but be careful to remember which is the back and front of each piece. Try marking the back of each with a pencil or dressmaker's chalk as a reminder. Also, don't mix up the order because it just gets confusing!

You now need to begin to attach your fabric pieces to your background, and the easiest way to do this is to tack them on first. Start by pinning them to the background in the appropriate place and then using your sewing needle and a length of contrasting coloured cotton thread (this makes it easier to see later when you want to remove it), use a basic running stitch to secure the two pieces of fabric. Once this is done you can remove the pins.

Step 7:
Having temporarily fixed your design to your background, you now need to secure it more permanently using either a zigzag stitch in cotton thread on your sewing machine, or if you're hand-stitching, a blanket stitch in tapestry thread (in which case there is a nice tutorial here). It's entirely up to you whether you want to use a thread that matches, complements or contrasts with the colour of fabric you've used, but if you're not too confident about the neatness of your stitches it's usually wise to stick to a matching colour so that any mistakes are harder to see.

How long it takes to sew all your pieces on will depend largely on how quick you are at sewing, how many times you need to change to a different coloured thread and how complicated your design is. But don't forget, hand-stitching is always going to take a lot longer so don't leave it until the night before like I did. Hand-sewing will most likely also result in stabbing yourself in the finger a lot so you may wish to invest in a thimble if you can work with them. Personally I hate the things and would rather settle for a sore finger, but they can be helpful.

Step 8:
Once you've finished with the sewing, you're just about done. All that's left to do is remove the tacks you used to secure the fabric together - this is easy enough to do with scissors or a stitch-picker if you have one - and then admire your handiwork.

Additional extras:

Do Something. Change Everything | 6.12.07

Thirty-odd years ago in the dark and distant past that was the 1970s my mother, along with countless other women, began to boycott WHSmith for refusing to stock Spare Rib on the basis that its content was 'overtly sexual' in nature. In my mother's case she's still boycotting them although I get the feeling it's more out of habit than anything else…

I recount this little anecdote not to validate my feminist pedigree but because it serves as an interesting counterpoint to some of my own activism. WHSmith, you see, are one of a number of retailers whose predilection for stocking pornographic material that degrades and objectifies women makes them the focus of campaigns by EMFems.

In every one of their stores you are confronted with an array of artificially enhanced breasts staring out at you (that's right, breasts have eyes!) from the covers of FHM, Nuts, Zoo, the Daily Star and all of the other 'quality' publications and tabloid rags that make their money by pedalling a distinctly misogynistic and racist brand of 'lifestyle' publishing.

No longer are WHSmith worried about the sexual content of their magazines, in fact they see it as so little of a problem that they are entirely happy to display them in full view of any passing 8 year old despite reassuring several members of EMFems in written communication that such titles should be displayed out of reach of children on the top shelf. Although perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise when you consider that this is a company that enthusiastically promotes a hardcore porn brand to children - shiny pink Playboy pencil-case anyone?

Contrary to what WHSmith would love to have us believe, porn is not a 'lifestyle' product. Porn is a degrading and exploitative medium that is in the business of buying and selling women's bodies for profit while promoting a reductive, plastic ideal of female sexuality which constructs women as less than human. It's enough to make you want to scream. And scream we did. Repeatedly. But after the screaming (and possibly a cup of tea and some cake) comes the fight.

So what can you do about the sickening normalisation of pornography that WHSmith et al are promoting? At EMFems we've tried a variety of methods, with varying degrees of success although unfortunately when it comes to huge national companies like WHSmith whatever you do is unlikely to make them mend their ways, such is the power of the free-market economy - don't you just love it! That's not to say you shouldn't try though, because while you may not change the world, just changing one person's mind can make a difference (plus there's a lovely view from up here on the moral high-ground).

How about a letter-writing campaign? Get as many people as you can to write or email the company's head office expressing your dissatisfaction and concern as a 'valued customer'. So what if you've never spent a penny there in your life? How will they know!?

Or for the slightly more bold some lovely direct-action (of the non-violent variety of course, there's not much you can do from inside a prison cell) in the form of a demonstration outside the shop (placards and banners at the ready!) should get your objections noticed by the retailer and the public and it gives you the perfect opportunity to enlighten to random people in the street and get them to sign the handy petition you've made up.

For something a little more low-key subtle acts of subversion are simple and discreet. Try hiding the offending material behind other items or in another part of the shop. Or just turn all the magazines around so you can't see the front covers. Stickering is always fun too and easy enough to do without anyone caring too much - either print or write your message onto sticky labels and stick them to as many lad's mags/Playboy pencil-cases as you can find. Or take it on step further and tap the guy reading a porn magazine next to you on the shoulder and say "Hi, can I just give you something to think about?" and sticker his magazine. If you sticker says something along the lines of "What if she was your daughter/sister?" so much the better.

Your activism doesn't have to be huge and confrontational but it does have to be something. Work out what you're comfortable doing and do it repeatedly.

EMFems haven't managed to get WHSmith to stop pushing pornography onto children or to realise that it is offensive to half of their customers but we're not done yet. There are plenty more stickers in the world and we plan to use them.

l

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