With the recent release of The Book of Bill and the creator Alex Hirsch’s championing of the animation strikes, the renaissance of the 2012 cartoon Gravity Falls is upon us. Whilst it is known for its complex mysteries and humour, Mabel’s impeccable knitted wardrobe, totalling 107 jumpers across the 40 episodes, takes centre stage in my eyes and how her bubbly character, who is ‘so fun-loving that she would not be confined to one outfit’, as Hirsch noted, champions all things expressive and creative. Her captivation in ‘fabriculture’ – meaning domestic arts such as knitting, crochet and scrapbooking – displays the value of freely creating, not only as a means of self-expression but as a methodology to face reality, whether it be university or Weirdmageddon, and unwind the rapid pace of our everyday production.

Fundamentally, Gravity Falls is about the anxiety of growing up and the fear that good things must come to an end. Throughout the summer, Mabel indulges into childish antics and fantasies to distract from the daunting prospect of her life transitioning into an unfamiliar phase of adolescence. Knitting then acts as her coping mechanism where, as Kerry Lambert notes in her article DO or DIY, ‘getting hands-on with our environment may be the best thing we can do for our mental health.’ She goes on to note that ‘repetitive tasks are known to activate the serotonergic system’ whereby counting stitches works to ‘distract the knitter from anxiety-provoking thoughts’ whilst acquiring a ‘sense of accomplishment’ in completing the final product.

Fabriculture then can be used for the process of emotional regulation as Dana Sonnenschein dissects in her poem Knitting where she displays how crafting embodies the process by which we learn:

[…] to get past anger

at yourself and rejection

of what you have made, interwoven—

past impatience, past grief, even past pride

 

to focus on the deconstruction

as if you were knitting

the space between things

back together, and you must

know the knot intimately

to undo it

Fabriculture, therefore, acts as one of Gravity Falls’ threads about rediscovering childhood curiosity and adventure as a way of unearthing self-hood. Mabel’s scrapbook in particular functions as a preserver of memory in acting as the stimuli for Stan’s memories to reappear, allowing both Stan and Ford to accomplish their childhood dream of building the Stan’ O War. Gravity Falls therefore removes the viewer from an existential framework of time, rather reworking the viewer to not hold on to the loss of the summer but instead highlighting the uplifting notion that it will come around next year, that we have the time to move towards our desired projects one stitch at a time.

In choosing to encourage the focus on childhood whimsy and desires as a means of personal expression, as opposed to repetitive commercial labour, both Gravity Falls and fabriculture unite ultimately in challenging the capitalist need of hyperproduction. Historically, domestic crafts have been utilised as a mode of ‘quiet activism’, as Fiona Harvey coined, in championing individualised fashion, as most explicitly seen in the hippie movement, that enables us to wear our hearts on our sleeves and incite change through our everyday making. In contemporary society fabriculture as a political tool has evolved into a mode of ‘Craftivism’, as discussed in the article Fabricating Activism: Craft-Work, Popular Culture, Gender, that has given rise to groups like ‘the S/he Collective’ and ‘Revolutionary Knitting Circle’. One of their most famous protests involves them organising ‘knit-the-park’ events where they craft around pedestrian objects geared towards re-development, like fence railings and lampposts, in order to emphasise public spaces should champion a space for community as opposed to a capitalist venture.

The creator of Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch, has also been using his art as part of The Animation Guild’s #standwithanimation strikes, fighting against the threat of, as the Animation magazine reports, ‘AI-related job disruption, rampant layoffs and the long-standing issue of outsourcing, which all contribute to job security concerns among the Guild’s membership.’ As the founder of craftivist.org, Betsy Greer, exemplifies then fabriculture and art more generally display the value in ‘making your own creativity a force to be reckoned with’ as we establish an embodied form of community against the devaluing of individual labour. 

This is all to say that even after a decade since the series aired, Mabel still remains a sustainable iconic queen. Her character’s embodiment of joy and expression through her hot glue gun and knitting needles has encouraged an entire generation of viewers to forge more personal connections with our garments as something more than a commodity, but instead an artistic practice as we turn our media-saturated childhoods into media-literate action. She shows us then that fabriculture holds a huge power in working to grant us a taste of mindfulness and connection, where we can preserve our time for causes that are important us.