2025 is the year of the Craft Night

The radical power of crafting together

In my circles, the New Years resolution has been fully eclipsed by the less/more list¹ and its cousin, the out/in list. These formats have less of the diet culture baggage of resolutions and offer a more holistic² framework for considering the year ahead.

Unsurprisingly, themes emerged in the lists that popped up on my Instagram, Substack etc. the first week of January. Folks want to spend less time on social media and more time seeing their friends and connecting with their community. Less drinking, more time outside. Less shopping, less scrolling, more reading books. Less self-criticism, more grace. All good ones! I also want these things. But there was a specific item that kept popping up that I don’t remember seeing so much of last year. In: craft nights. More: craft nights.

Craft night is IN

I realize it is not at all weird or striking that I saw so many mentions of craft nights. I’m a pretty heavy crafter, after all. I sew, I embroider, I collage, and I’m open to dabbling in new crafts, too. I come from a family of crafters and I follow many crafters online. My algorithm is heavily primed to serve me craft content. And yet! In addition to 2025 being my year of the craft night, I’d argue that it speaks to a number of larger cultural struggles and desires of our current moment. In particular, the overlapping but not quite congruent conversations on the loneliness epidemic, the childcare crisis, acute parental stress, digital saturation, and the loss of third spaces (if we can even handle third spaces). And blaring above those conversations, with the volume cranked up as high as it will go, the urgency and chaos of the first few weeks of the second Trump administration. Amidst all that, here is why we need craft night now more than ever:

1. Craft night is highly communal and yet socially flexible. Gatherings organized around making crafts can be suitable for both close friends and new acquaintances, for introverts and extroverts, and for folks with various kinds of neurodivergence. Having a knitting or embroidery project to focus on relieves the pressure of constant eye contact, and it’s expected that participants will drop in and out of the conversation as they encounter a task requiring more concentration. Crafting together IRL, whether on a shared project or individual ones, is both physically and socially grounding.

2. Craft night is not a booze-centered event. It can include alcohol, yes, but doesn’t require it, and is perfectly enjoyable without it. As many reconsider their relationship with alcohol, or leave it behind altogether, the craft night stands out as an activity that doesn’t feel like just another excuse to go drinking. And crafting and heavy intoxication tend to be incompatible. It’s too easy to lose count of your stitches when you’re hammered, after all.

3. Craft night is non-competitive. Unlike board game night and bar trivia (which I do also enjoy), there are no winners and losers at craft night. Attendees need not have similar skill levels in their craft of choice. The experienced can help the inexperienced, and all can complement one another’s works in progress. Complements, in my opinion, are one of the top features of craft night. In December, I attended a craft night held by my friend Bonnie—six women sitting around a kitchen table making Christmas ornaments and tiny foods out of polymer clay. We did not all know each other, and the conversation drifted between light topics (pets, holiday plans) and heavier ones (national politics, creepy dating stories). But throughout, we LAVISHED praise on each other’s lumpy creations. I think everyone left feeling the warm glow of camaraderie, and the satisfaction of having created something, even if that something was a polymer clay pickle.

4. Craft night is a natural site of political organizing. Craft is, and always has been, inherently political. It’s a topic far, far too vast for a single bullet point. From Chilean Arpilleras to suffragette protest dresses to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, crafters can produce sneaky and startling acts of resistance wrapped in an unassuming blanket of domesticity. And sewing and knitting circles, with their complex gender, class, and racial history, foster whisper networks and the quiet dissemination of information. Of course, this doesn’t mean that most makers are explicitly producing resistance objects or engaged in direct action when they craft. And political crafts have nuanced legacies. The AIDS Memorial Quilt was criticized for centering white gay men, and was seen by some as a de-fanged exercise in respectability politics. And in these horrible early days of Trump 2.0, I find myself looking back (mostly with cringe) at the complex legacy of the pussyhat. But whether or not your craft night centers political speech directly, it by nature contains the seeds of collective resistance.

5. Craft night is fun! This is in no way antithetical to the political power of craft. This is a both/and situation, and the fact that participants find crafting fun and relaxing helps keep people open and engaged.

   

   Three Women. Emil Orlik, 1905

I’m under no illusion that craft night alone is going to solve the childcare crisis, stop ICE raids, or ensure that trans kids can access medical care. But crafting with others builds strong community. “Investing in community” and “focusing locally” have been major themes in progressive and leftist circles in the wake of last November’s election. At best, this is a necessary call to build strong relationships and continue the fight where we can without succumbing to despair at the national and international news. As Ayana Elizabeth Johnson wrote in Rolling Stone this week on the climate crisis in particular:

Focusing on change in your own city or state often leads to deep and rewarding connections with the environment and communities that surround you. In many cases, it’s easier to get traction for local than national efforts, and the impact of your work can be gratifyingly tangible and direct.

But at worst, calls for community can be vague platitudes, ripe for exclusion and insularity. As Raksha Vasudevan wrote in her newsletter Stranger Ties:

Yet, missing in all these conversations are satisfying answers to the most basic of questions: what exactly do we mean by “community”? How do you build it? Who is left out (because every “in” group necessitates an “out” group)? Is every community a good thing? Is there a hierarchy? What if you don’t like its leaders? Can you leave a community or is that frowned upon, similar to how family estrangement continues to be stigmatized?

These questions may seem too large for the lowly craft night, and yet I would argue that they are exactly what we should think about when we gather for crafting, or for anything else. In the slack group for my local fiber arts group, whose casual weekly knit nights I recently began attending again, posts announce the creation of a local queer protection pod, as well as a fabric sale fundraiser with proceeds going towards “LA wildfire relief, ACLU, racial justice, and reproductive rights organizations.” These pop up alongside threads about which bar to meet at this week and offers to give away spare circular needles. Crafting is politics and crafting is everyday life, and those are the same thing.

So, if you can, go to a craft night. Make a polymer clay pickle or knit a scarf or sew a protest banner. Chat with friends and strangers and have a little snack. Craft night is IN. See where it takes you.

1. The way I was originally introduced to these lists was as the brainchild of illustrator Julia Rothman.

2. Y’all I just looked this word up to check if “wholistic” is interchangeable with “holistic” (it pretty much is, but it’s less common), and I learned via the Merriam Webster website that “holistic” was coined in the 1920s by a South African statesmen who was named, I kid you not, Jan Christian Smuts. I’m not immature, you are.