Knitting in the News
Yarn for a new age
from The Denver Post
They're knitting boots and Joey Ramone dolls, crocheting cowboy hats and retro purses. Young urban hipsters, passionately plying these handicrafts, are transforming traditional women's work into the stuff of modern day politics and culture.
"It made its way from people in living rooms at stitch 'n' bitch (meetings) to the contemporary art world, big exhibitions like 'Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting' in New York," says Elissa Auther, a Denver fiber-arts scholar.
Auther wrote her doctoral dissertation on feminists and the craft movement of the '70s. She says that revival declined along with '60s counterculture.
"But youth culture had new visibility in the '90s," she says, "and one thing they happened to embrace was do-it-yourself, and a very noncommercial attitude toward leisure time."
Now the needle is off the dial: 12.2 million women under the age of 34 knit or crochet, according to the Craft Yarn Council of America.
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