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If you could wave a magic wand and set up a museum of knitting and crocheting, what would you include? Fair Isle or yarn bombing? Bohus or math knitting? Irish lace or hyperbolic crochet? How would you organize it--profit-based or non-profit? Would it include a conference center? Classrooms? A yarn shop? Or would it be part of another museum, a historical museum, say?
Or how about something new? What would you think of an on-line museum? A searchable digitized data base of knitting and crocheting through the ages? How about a K/C swat team of experts trolling through garment collections languishing in museums all over the world, sorting through, then putting knit and crocheted garments on-line with high resolution images of the front and back?
A flight of fancy, yes, but it might not be...someday.
The idea of a knitting museum, real or virtual, is the brainchild of a knitter named (in a delightful bit of nominative determinism) Karen Kendrick-Hands.
Karen is thinking about these issues and more, and she's put together a symposium, taking place in Madison WI November 8-10, 2012, and open to anyone who has an opinion or an interest (and can come up with the registration fee, or is willing to volunteer in lieu of fee). Karen's ideas have been found worthy of support by TNNA, which gave her a grant to run this symposium and by the Wisconsin Historical Society, which is a co-host and site-provider. Some VIPs from the world of knitting and textiles have also been attracted to the idea--Trisha Malcolm (Vogue Knitting) as well as Jack Blumenthal (Lion Brand Yarn) will be part of the panel discussion, along with with museum and textile experts. A keynote speaker will be Susan Strawn (author, Knitting America).
Are you interested? Here's the link for further info, and thanks to Karen for taking the lead on this exciting project. Maybe one day knitting and crocheting will have their own museum. And maybe it's not so fanciful after all: if the quilters can do it, why can't we?
PS: If interested, hurry. Registration closes soon.
