Handmade tales: women and domestic crafts

Handmade Tales: Women and Domestic Crafts considered how domestic crafts can be a space to channel different life experiences. It focussed on the practices of the ‘amateur’ rather than the ‘professional designer-maker/artist’, for whom the making of things in their ‘quieter moments’ for others or themselves is part of the autobiography of both the maker and the receiver. In order to demonstrate the cultural influences that have contributed to the vast practice that is domestic crafts in Britain, the show included a range of cultures and age groups from different strata of society from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.