Re-Creating Historic Modern Hand Knitting: Working with a Community of Practice

This article explores the benefits of academic collaboration with the community of practice. It employs experimental history methodology, a collaboration between historians, curators and volunteer knitters, in order to gain knowledge about design and making practices in two examples of historic hand knitting from the modern period. The first project investigated nineteenth-century printed knitting patterns purporting to be Shetland lace. The second focused on the ready-to-wear garments designed between the 1960s and 1990s by Margaret Klein for the Bernat Klein label. This approach to research, utilizing the knowledge and skills of the knitting community, brings benefits to all parties in the form of specialized research insights with wider application for researchers, curators and practitioners. It goes some way toward reclaiming a craft with domestic connotations, inserting it in conversations about cultural heritage as well as the economic value of women’s expertise.