CBR18 Bingo: Craft – This book is all about a women’s history of various textile crafts, including knitting, sewing, and embroidery.
Throughout history in many cultures, art forms such as knitting, sewing, and embroidery were overlooked as women’s work, but they have also been a way for them to explore their intellectual capacities, seek economic independence, create community, process traumas, and convey messages of self-expression and political protest.
I picked up crocheting some years ago, having taught myself through watching YouTube videos and reading articles. No one in my family does much with textiles beyond some basic mending, but that’s only made me more interested in the long tradition behind these crafts.
Nehrig takes us around the world and through the centuries to explore how textile crafts have been liberating for women in many spheres of life, whether social, economic, emotional, and so on. I really enjoyed learning about different traditions of crafts in different societies, as well as the diverse ways in which women engage with it today, now that it is no longer as vitally important as a household chore. I also loved that the author included an inset of photographs of some of the art discussed – I was constantly looking them up to see more examples!
However, I did think that despite the author’s best efforts, the tone could get pretty dry and academic in places anyway. There’s also a fair bit of repetition when she discusses the more abstract benefits of engaging with textile crafts – I much preferred when she discussed more specific cases in which those benefits are demonstrated, such as the quilters of Gee’s Bend and the women of Peru who composed arpilleras to wrangle with their emotional trauma when it could not be done with words.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.
