Last month, two days after Donald Trump tweeted that NASA should be focussing on “Mars (of which the Moon is a part),” Macy Weymar, a sophomore at McGill University, embroidered his words onto a linen napkin with blue thread. That afternoon, Macy’s mother, the textile artist Diana Weymar, was on a ladder at Lingua Franca, a boutique in downtown Manhattan, pinning hundreds of other hand-stitched Trump quotations to the wall for the first New York exhibition of the Tiny Pricks Project. She held up her fingers, which were bandaged from pinpricks. “It’s like I’m putting the finishing touches on the hem of a giant dress,” she said.
Weymar, who is petite and scholarly, with blond hair and large brown eyes, founded the Tiny Pricks Project last year. Her first piece was a floral seat cushion from her grandmother’s house, onto which she stitched “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS” in yellow thread. Since then, she’s stitched four hundred and fifty Trump quotations onto different pieces of fabric. After she opened the project to the public, she began receiving stacks of embroidered Trump quotations by mail, on handkerchiefs (“Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”) and doilies (“Total disaster”) and Mickey Mouse paraphernalia (“Freaking Idiots”). She has them pressed and photographed, and then posts them to Instagram, where she has thirteen thousand followers. Weymar stitches a Trump quotation nearly every day—in meetings, on airplanes, while watching movies with her children (she wears a headlamp). “I basically feel like I’m wasting time if I’m not stitching,” she said. “The goal is to have two thousand and twenty by 2020.”
At Lingua Franca, Weymar bounced around with straight pins in her mouth, securing pieces to the walls. She had turned fifty a few days earlier, and was wearing flip-flops and a striped shirt under a blue pullover. “This makes me so happy, I can’t tell you,” she said. “I woke up this morning, and I thought, How early can I come in? People are just at home, frustrated. They can’t talk about politics anymore. This project is like a treasure hunt. You find the quote that really resonates for you. Like, where were you the moment you heard him say this, and you thought, Oh, no, no, no, no. That’s not possible. That he’s our President. That he’s our President. In that sense, I think of it as a memorial, too—like when you see the Vietnam Memorial, the multitudes is what hits you.”
It generally takes about three weeks for a quotation to metastasize into thread. Weymar considers her Instagram account a gallery that she curates. “You want a balance between the really funny, stupid ones”—she pointed to a striped napkin that read “My fingers are long & beautiful”—“and the more serious, like ‘They’re animals.’ ”
Lingua Franca’s owner, Rachelle Hruska MacPherson, found Weymar, who lives in British Columbia, on Instagram, and asked her to fly to New York for a meeting. “I felt like it was a community of people who care,” MacPherson said. She was wearing a navy sweater, from her shop, embroidered with the words “Give a damn.” (Others spell out “I miss Barack” and “Bad hombre.”) “It’s like the silent resisters. You don’t have to have a bombastic feed on Twitter. You can just pick up a needle and have a powerful statement.”
Weymar nodded. “I have nothing against decorative stitching, but it’s so subversive when it’s political. It’s that old, bent-headed woman sitting stitching, and what is she really thinking? She’s probably really pissed off.”
“We call it the stitch ’n’ bitch,” MacPherson said.
Weymar continued, “If you think about the care that goes into embroidering, and the waiting, and the sitting with the words—it means you have to be present. We’re just trying to get people to stay involved.”
The next night, Weymar, in heels and one of MacPherson’s “Give a damn” sweaters, presided over the opening. A member of the Resistance Revival Chorus, an activist choir, wearing a white halter top and a heart-shaped Pride sticker, introduced the group. “We believe that joy is an act of resistance,” she announced. They started to sing: “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me. The world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away.”
Leah Annitto, a teacher from New Jersey, had stitched “I am a self-made woman” onto a handkerchief cut into the shape of a T-shirt, beneath an Ivanka clothing tag. (“It’s just so ridiculous,” she said.) Montserrat Vargas, an artist from Chile, had made five of the pieces in the show, including “Crooked Hillary” out of French knots. (“Very hard to do.”) How did she feel while making them? “Angry,” she said. And afterward? “Complete relief.” ♦
