Bulletproof Baby Gear

I got outed on the elevator the other day. A co-worker spotted knitting needles in my bag.

I rarely have a chance to knit these days, and compensate by indulging in the next best thing: looking at weird knitted art online.

Listening to this week’s show, I remembered an odd, thought-provoking site that can add to Jeremy Deller’s ‘Conversations about Iraq .’ Artist Dave Cole has a series entitled ‘Kevlar Baby Clothes’, which features exactly that: baby clothes created from bullet-proof vests discarded from the war in Iraq.

Cole’s work often juxtaposes the harsh realities of our world against the sentiments of childhood: a hand-knit, porcelain baby blanket (made from an ‘Extreme Temperature Refractory Ceramic Textile’); a teddy bear knit with fiber glass; an AK-47 that appears to be made from bubble gum. But something about the Kevlar onesie put a lump in my throat. I am knitting for a little man who will be here this January. I can only hope he’ll have to look up what Kevlar and suicide bombs mean when he grows up.

Dave Cole Kevlar Snowsuit, 2008

(You might also want to see Cole knit a HUGE American flag here.)