Creativity and the everyday: unravel – a festival of knitting

The paper examines the way everyday forms of creativity, design and making support the development of human capacity and potential, and at the level of society, brings into view modern consumption practices that offer subtle resistance to the idea that communities consume passively (or are spectators) of the cultural scene. The paper discusses Unravel: A Festival of Knitting as a case-study and as a context for understanding the event on the one hand as ubiquitous: events and festivals have become a common phenomenon for leisure and consumption activity through which our identities are styled, and as an instance of transformation where a social model presides producing an alternative mode of consumption. The paper provides
an exploration of creativity as integral to everyday life and by implication, questions models of cultural consumption based on spectatorship where the knowledge and
skills of making and creativity remains with professionals.

The paper explores the conceptual basis of the model used for Unravel round four nodes: the festival as a place to exchange knowledge and develop skill; the festival
as a significant node in a creative social network; the festival as a space for the celebration of individual creativity and the festival as supporting the economic
sustainability of practitioners. I argue that in developing a social model for the festival the curators have invested in a string of values around participation, creativity (in this instance the making of knitted things) and enterprise that are modelled on the values of the organisation. While the paper is therefore interested in exploring a particular
cultural model that has participation as the focus, it is also an inquiry into the making of things per se, what making contributes to well-being and its relevance to modern social and cultural life.

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