Five years ago, nobody in their right mind (or under 30) would admit that they were into the c-word. Mentioning “craft” was tantamount to joining the Women’s Institute and starting a life of brown teapots and crocheted doilies. It certainly wasn’t a word you heard uttered by museum curators.
But that attitude is so last year. From knitting and crochet to painting furniture and accessorising lamps, craft has never been so cool — or so covetable. The ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s finely honed pieces, collected by Donna Karan, fetch four figures, as do standard lamps made from found objects by the hip East End designers Committee. Brian Eno and Zandra Rhodes are devotees of the tableware designer Carol McNicholl. Agnès B has Justine Smith’s decorative plaster dogs in her Paris atelier. Even Vanity Fair has lost its heart, devoting eight pages of its latest issue to the crafty Brit designer Cath Kidston.
And the trend is catching on big time among the young and hip. Danielle Proud, the sexy, blonde Nigella of the homemaking world, is about to launch a crafts bible called House Proud, featuring illustrations by the controversial British photographer Amelia Troubridge. And next month, Topshop launches its interiors range, which includes a selection of Proud’s lamp, cushion and cross-stitch kits, with a pick’n’mix of baubles, feathers and sequins to customise your home. There will also be chunky English ceramics, old-fashioned quilts and heart-shaped, blanket-stitched cushions that your great-aunt Gladys would be happy to show off.
Proud says that her Topshop kits are an attempt “to bring back to life the kind of fun our grannies had, sitting round nattering and making stuff”. Many of the Topshop generation don’t have the skills, but Proud says friends her age are beginning to take up “knitting and crocheting and stuff. I’m even going to give lessons at Topshop, so girls can see what a laugh it can be”.
The fad for home-spun touches is not just about fun, or transferring catwalk trends into the home, says Jenny Vaughan, whose interiors company, RE, offers “the REcycled, the REmarkable, the REscued and the REstored”. She attributes rocketing sales of crocheted toys, boiled blankets, hand-crafted crockery, embroidered linen, and cushions made from commemorative scarves to an infatuation with nostalgic images of a happy, domestic Britain of generations gone by. “There’s something comforting about owning the sorts of things your granny had. There’s a familiarity to them.”
In an era of globalisation and factory production, where millions of homes are full of mass-produced furniture from giant retailers, owning something made with love and care has become increasingly relevant — right down to the wallpaper. Take the award-winning designs of Rachel Kelly, or the elaborate wallpaper collages made by Claire Coles using paper, felt, leather and delicately appliquéd fabrics. “A couple of years ago, my friends were all customising their jackets,” says Coles. “Now they’re all into crafts, and doing stuff in their homes.
I think people like the fact that handmade stuff has a life of its own. New stuff is so sterile.”
The giant American crafts company Hobbycraft now has superstores in 25 British towns, selling kits from quilting to knitting, and an estimated 20% more professional craftspeople are in operation now than 10 years ago. Craftsmen may traditionally have been low-paid workers, but today they are more likely to be professionals. Many are graduates, including Lisa Whatmough, 37, whose fabric-covered lamps and furniture for her company, Squint, are sold at Liberty.
Subject matter is obviously varied, although a lot of the images are inspired by Britain. That isn’t to say it is all quaint thatched cottages. Hannah Dipper and Robin Farquhar, of People Always Need Plates, feature brutalist London architecture on their china, for example, and quilted textiles by Laura McCafferty show old ladies having their hair done. Helen Beard, meanwhile, decorates ceramics with urban scenes of people shopping or waiting at a bus stop in London.
Production is often still undertaken in the UK: Dipper and Farquhar make their plates at traditional potteries in Stoke-on- Trent, using old-fashioned techniques and hand screen-printing to get pure colour. Jenny Vaughan, of RE, based in Corbridge, found local women to embroider cushions simply by advertising in her local Northumberland paper. Clare Page and Harry Richardson of Committee have persuaded the wallpaper company.
Cole & Son to manufacture their latest design, featuring rubbish tips, which will be in the British Council’s My World exhibition at Experimenta Design 2005, starting in Lisbon on September 15.
Sarah Gaventa, who organises the V&A’s annual fête, says it is thanks to these artists that many British industries still exist. “We don’t make things on a commercial scale any more, so often the only people using old factories are the designers. They’re partly responsible for keeping old trades alive.”
Participating in the crafts scene may seem a safe enough pastime, yet those doing it are often motivated by strong ideological reasons. Proud sees her Topshop kits as “bringing crafts to the people”; Dipper says that her plates are “a backlash against Ikea, an attempt to make things special again”. The KnitChicks club, which holds knitting evenings called stitch’n’ bitch sessions across the UK, aims to bring knitting out of an ageist hinterland.
Katy Bevan is a curator of Knit 2 Together, at Leicester City Gallery, an exhibition that includes Susie MacMurray’s 3-D hangings of human hair and Donna Wilson’s half-cushion, half-creatures. Bevan believes that we are all hunkering down for a darker reason. “There’s a sort of make-do-and- mend spirit during this war on terror, or whatever it is,” she says. “Everyone wants to stay home now and knit socks.”
Helen Beard; 07740 304148, www.helenbeard.com. Claire Coles; 020 7242 0836. Knitchicks; www.knitchicks.co.uk. Knit 2 Together, Leicester City Art Gallery, until Saturday; 0116 223 2060, www.craftscouncil.org.uk. Experimenta Design 2005, Lisbon, September 15-October 30; www.experimentadesign.pt. Chelsea Crafts Fair, Chelsea Old Town Hall, SW3, October 11-23; 0901 331 0035 (10p/min), www.craftscouncil.org.uk/ chelsea2005
