Hands-on Approach to Knitting Culture with a Few Loose Ends

Abstract

Among the many phenomena that the corona pandemic has brought to limelight is the popularity of knitting in exceptional times. Amidst growing gaps in their stocks, many craft shops announce the arrival of a new lot of popular yarns on their social media accounts, and the knitting fever has been recurrently reported on the news. In the spring of 2021, even municipality branding campaigns started to ride on this trend, calling for designs that would materialise the municipality’s character in a woolly form (e.g. Korhonen 2021). In this regard, Anna Rauhala’s dissertation on the skill of knitting in Finland is a very timely publication. With a timeframe stretching from the late 19th century up to the 2010s, the study opens a wide perspective to the chain of decades of knitting. The reader is even informed about the earliest knitted examples from the 14th or 15th centuries in present-day south-western Finland, while the focus is more on the changes in knitting culture in Finland in the past hundred and fifty years. Rauhala’s approach to studying knitting culture puts the skill of knitting at the top, which allows different takes on the topic. This is already apparent in the introductory and methodological chapters of the book. Rauhala takes as point of departure a political satire image from 2003, in which the then president and prime minister, both female, sit each on one side of a large ball of yarn, marked with the Finnish flag, knitting a piece of a woolly scarf. Rauhala analyses this image as the illustrator’s interpretation of the women leading the country stitching together the Finnish political agenda, yet she recognises that drawing a parallel between women in political power and knitting is a possibly degrading approach, or at least an attempt of one. In this way, the author starts with problematising the cultural status of knitting, articulating the activity’s everyday connotations with the feminine, the domestic sphere and the subordinate, which clearly position knitting on the feminine side with respect to the opposition between the sexes. Rauhala points out that within the 1970s’ feminist movement, textile craftwork such as knitting and embroidery were regarded as mirroring women’s societally