Love + Hate Knitted Cakes

Craft & Design

Becky Stern is a Content Creator at Autodesk/Instructables, and part time faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Products of Design grad program. Making and sharing are her two biggest passions, and she's created hundreds of free online DIY tutorials and videos, mostly about technology and its intersection with crafts. Find her @bekathwia on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram.

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@bekathwia

September 22nd, 2010

Curator Ele Carpenter writes about craftivsm and contemporary capitalism in this article on Axis, a contemporary art webzine:

It’s hardly surprising that people are skeptical of the political claims of craftivism when they are overwhelmed by knitted cakes at every gift shop and summer faire!

Mixed up in the revolutionary fervor of DIY craft is a revival of 1940s/50s domestic style epitomised by the fashion for knitted cake.

Instead of using collective craft to reclaim public space, knitting and baking cake has become a celebration of feminine virtue.

Now that the nostalgia for wartime ‘make do and mend’ has been redesigned for a contemporary shopping extravaganza – the knitted cake has become a symbol of the capitalist recuperation of feminist critique.

Nice mention of Maker Faire in there too!

Knitted cake above by Prudence Mapstone.