“Back in 2017, I made a ton of pussyhats,” Catherine Paul told me. “I just knitted pink hats like there was no tomorrow.”

At the time, Paul appreciated “the way that craft could be part of a demonstration of affiliation and belief,” the artist, writer, and longtime knitter told me.

Soon the pussyhat became a symbol of something else: a brand of feminism attuned to the concerns of a subset of middle-class, mostly white American women, and nobody else. By 2024, the hats, and the 2017 Women’s March at which many demonstrators wore them, were being held up as examples of ineffective protest. More than that, the hats came to be seen as cringe — not just exclusionary, but also kind of embarrassing.

Paul, for example, has been knitting red “Melt the ICE” hats, from a pattern sold by Minneapolis yarn shop Needle & Skein. Friends and acquaintances are begging her for the headwear, just as they did nearly 10 years ago.

Before I started reporting this story, I thought the rise of knitted and quilted protest under Trump 2.0 might be a sign of the left reembracing cringe — of a softening toward forms of political action once deemed uncool and annoying (and, not coincidentally, feminine). But in talking to artists and scholars about craftivism right now, I’ve come to think the explanation for its popularity is both more complicated and simpler.

“The news is so ugly all the time, you can’t really find peace,” Needle & Skein owner Gilah Mashaal told me. “So what do you do? You find people and you do things with those people. And since we’re crafters, that’s what we’re doing.”

As thousands of ICE agents swarmed Minneapolis earlier this year, “my regular knitters were all feeling kind of desperate and unsure of what we could do,” Mashaal said. Employee Paul Neary had the idea to create a pattern inspired by Norwegian anti-Nazi hats called “nisselue.”

Neary posted the pattern for the “Melt the ICE” hat on knitting website Ravelry in January, charging $5 per download, with all proceeds going to immigrant aid agencies. As Mashaal recalls, the Needle & Skein team thought, “maybe we’ll raise a couple thousand dollars.”

But the pattern quickly rocketed to the top of Ravelry’s most-popular list, where it’s stayed ever since. People from 44 countries have purchased it, generating at least $720,000 for immigrant aid groups, Mashaal told me.

Meanwhile, at this year’s QuiltCon, billed as the largest modern quilting event in the world, anti-ICE quilts grabbed attention, bearing messages like, “Our government abducted hundreds of people based on race while I made this.” Anti-ICE quilts are also blowing up on Reddit, where one user recently shared a quilt reading, “Japanese American families remember: We were taken from our communities too.”

Beyond the needle and thread, nail artists are showing off “FUCK ICE” manicures. And anti-ICE artwork is cropping up on shirts, stickers, and other accoutrements of daily life. When Nadia Brown’s students at Georgetown University open up their textbooks, she sees anti-ICE bookmarks inside, the government professor told me.

Using handicrafts to send a message is far from new. Leading up to the American Revolution, women in the American colonies boycotted British textiles and staged spinning bees “in which they spun wool and flax yarn to make cloth called homespun,” Shirley Wajda, a curator and historian of material culture, told me in an email.

Story quilts — visual narratives sewn in fabric — have been popular in Black communities for generations. “During slavery, when African Americans were not allowed to learn how to read and write, it was an easy way to tell stories,” Carolyn Mazloomi, an artist and curator, told me.

Such art forms never left the American landscape — artists like Faith Ringgold have brought story quilts, often with political and social themes, to the walls of museums and the pages of beloved children’s books.

But political crafting gained a new level of media attention — and notoriety — in the wake of Trump’s first election. Photos of the 2017 Women’s March were a sea of pink, as demonstrators donned headwear knitted in response to Donald Trump’s comments about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But the march soon became controversial — though the Washington, DC, event boasted high-profile speakers who were women of color, most attendees were white. Many women of color felt pushed out of the march and the larger movement that — kind of — grew up around it.

Organizer ShiShi Rose, for example, worked on the first march and wrote a widely read Facebook post calling on white would-be marchers to pay attention to the experiences of Americans of color. In return, she got death threats, from which she said the Women’s March organization did little to shield her.

The pink hats became, for some, a symbol of this exclusion, even their color and shape appearing to represent white, cis women’s anatomy (knitters have since said the hats were supposed to look like cat ears, not vulvas).

When Trump was elected a second time, even some who marched enthusiastically in 2017 began to wonder if their efforts had been for nought. Meanwhile, concerns that started with women of color were appropriated first by liberal white men and then by conservatives, until questions about a movement’s racial inclusivity became a kind of all-purpose derision. As my colleague Constance Grady has written, “who wanted to be like those awful women with the pink hats? Everyone knew they were cringey and unfashionable, complaining over nothing.”

Given all this, it’s been a surprise to see the return of knitted headwear. But for Brown, today’s anti-ICE art- and craftworks aren’t cringe in the same way. Unlike 10 years ago, “there’s a very specific outrage around what’s happening now with ICE, and there are direct calls for policies that would make immigration more functional,” she said. The Women’s March was far less specific and targeted.

What’s more, anti-ICE art spans demographics. When it comes to stickers and other paraphernalia, “I see older people wearing them,” Brown said. “My college students are wearing them of every ethnicity, of every race. People are just outraged.”

In trying to represent the anger of all women nationwide, the Women’s March was doomed, on a certain level, to fail. The resistance against ICE in 2026, however, is famously hyperlocal, and craftivism is no exception.

Pussyhats were about “fighting against and showing our distaste for the man that the country elected,” Mashaal said. With Melt the ICE hats, “we’re raising money to help our friends and neighbors.”

Neighborliness is emerging as a key value in the resistance to ICE. “What authoritarian regimes want to do is make people suspicious of their neighbors,” Brown said. Crafting, by contrast, brings neighbors together over a shared activity that helps them get past their fears and suspicions: “Building community in a way that gets you out of your head and working with your hands is an effective tool.”

No protest is immune to criticism, and some have argued that the Melt the ICE hats are little more than performative virtue-signaling, especially if people knit them without paying for the pattern.

“Yes, knitting a hat is performative,” Mashaal said. “But it’s also a way to show your anger, fear, frustration, rage, care.”

I started this story thinking it was about the state of feminized forms of activism in 2026. I’m ending it thinking that a lot of the questions opened up by the Women’s March — whether it’s even possible to have a truly inclusive “women’s movement” in America, for example — haven’t been answered yet. Maybe now is not the time to answer them. Maybe now is the time for something smaller-scale — the size, say, of a pair of knitting needles or a sewing machine.

In addition to her Melt the ICE hats, Paul recently completed a quilt that reads, “Fuck it we ball.” “I wanted that persistence, a reminder of the way that craft can help us persist,” she told me.

Wajda, the historian and author, is thinking about the coming spring. “Pussyhats and Melt the ICE hats have one thing in common: They are winter wear,” she told me. “Now I’m thinking about what would a craftivist create for warm weather protests!”

Mazloomi, the artist and curator, has been working for the last several years on a series of quilts about African American history, with a concentration on the civil rights era. “The stories have disappeared from the news, disappeared from museums and art centers, and I don’t want to see that happen,” she said.

Quilts remind people of “home and grandma,” Mazloomi said. “It’s a soft cushion for difficult stories.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.