Alexandria Masse crochets her birth control sheet into activist tapestry

Alexandria Masse’s Birth Control Tapestry has reached Part 21, and the update puts the scale of the piece, and the labor behind it, right in front of viewers. Masse has been crocheting her birth control information sheet word for word since January 2025, turning medical text into a 12ft by 6.75ft tapestry that she says used 70 balls of yarn by 10.5 months into the project.

That size matters in a way a screenshot never could. On her website, Masse frames the work as a comment on freedom, bodily autonomy, informed consent, and women’s rights fought for over years, while her portfolio says it is “crocheted out of millions of small stitches and red sacrifices,” “deeper than a list of side effects,” and “built on a history of suffering.” The stitching makes the document slow, visible, and physical, so the language of contraception is no longer flat text on a page but a surface that records time, repetition, and strain.

The crochet itself is the point. Masse’s project does not just reproduce the sheet; it forces the viewer to confront how much work sits inside language that often arrives as dense, impersonal, and easy to skim. Word-for-word stitching changes the relationship between reader and text, because every line of medical copy has to be made by hand, loop by loop, with the scale of the finished piece mirroring the weight of the information it contains.

Masse’s Part 21 update also landed at a personal turning point, as she said she was moving cities and saying goodbye to her studio. That shift only sharpens the reading of Birth Control Tapestry as textile documentation, a work that is not trying to hide process but foregrounds it. Her press page lists 2025 coverage from CBC Radio, The Straits Times, and The (Un)Ethical Consumer Podcast, while The Female Body described the piece as a massive crochet installation about bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and informed consent.

Masse’s broader practice, as she describes it, is about “pushing the boundaries of crochet,” “elevating soft sculpture,” and documenting the process online. With Part 21 now in the mix, Birth Control Tapestry keeps doing what crochet does best when it is pushed past decoration: it makes labor visible, and turns a birth control sheet into a political record you can measure in feet, stitches, and months.