In her own words:
The blanket was knit on the occasion of a project I was invited to do at Los Angeles Nomadic Division. For the blanket, I wanted to evoke the character of Madame Defarge in "Tale of Two Cities." Because a lot of my work involves knitting, and much of it is political, I have been asked about this character a lot, so for this project I thought I'd just go with it.
The border of the blanket is the lyrics to the song "Fuck Your Amerika" by 7 Seconds. I first heard that song when I was high school, and it's really stuck with me. Inside of that border is another rectangle of red and white and then inside of that is a gray stripe that says "Today we invoke the first amendment, tomorrow the second" which I saw quoted in the newspaper as being on a sign at a Tea Party Rally. So it's this idea that the American rights are being talked about by one constituency as an entitlement while the lyrics are much more questioning. In the center of the blanket are names of people that I and friends of mine can't stand. I put out a call asking for names and people wrote me back with everyone from Bush to ex-boyfriends. I wanted to make a blanket that was a collective effort, naming an "enemy" together and strengthening this idea by knitting it, as did Defarge.
It's intentional that the 7 Seconds lyrics is in the red, white, and blue part of the blanket while the so-called "real americans" get shafted into the gray area.
At the evening project (http://www.nomadicdivision.org/programs/nomadicnights/lautner/default.html)
people drew on a large piece of knitting graph paper, creating their ideas for a new blanket of enemies. This blanket was there as inspiration.
A friend of mine called this the "Blanket of Death" but that seems a bit too voodoo for me. I like to think of it more simply as a snapshot of the time I made it, who was in the news, who was on people's minds. It's important to me that there are personal enemies as well as political adversaries.
The most common name people wanted put on the blanket was Sarah Palin.
