Stitched Up?: The Contemporary Language and Representation of Domestic Crafting / The Wolf in Knitted Sheep’s Clothing: The Visual Commodification of Making

In the past 8 years a new breed of ‘crafting’ books and magazines have flooded the market: extremely seductive tomes filled with pretty, ‘vintage’ styled imagery of beautiful interiors littered with pretty ‘fun’ but also pretty useless home crafted projects; Felted macaroons, knitted apple covers, crocheted beach huts…are all photographed in suitably ‘shabby chic’ aspirational homes. On the surface this proliferation of attractive imagery of the end result of domestic craft endeavours suggests a shift in status for hobby culture in mainstream culture. However is this really so?

This paper positions these publications, through visual analysis, as a part of a resurgence if not an amplification of patriarchal, white middle class, conservative discourse simply sold in a seductive new package. Instead of empowering women through making they promote the return of the 1950s housewife with time and money to waste as a new/old ideal of appropriate femininity.

Further more it questions the purpose of these books and argues that they operate as a Marxist joke: the commodification of ‘production’ that encourages the visual consumption of making rather than actual making and that they culturally operate as white middle class female pornography- the fetishisation and objectification of labour from a detached scopophilic perspective.

Instead of offering alternative careers and thus independence through making skills during a global financial crises of which, arguably women have directly or indirectly been the biggest victims, they offer an ideological plaster on a gaping wound.

This was both a lecture and interactive workshop session.

• Organisation