Rose White’s 24th Chaos Communication Congress presentation “The history of guerrilla knitting” is an incredibly fascinating tour through the history of proprietary versus open knitting; mad, subversive knitting projects; knowledge-sharing and knitting, and so on. There’re plenty of delightful slides and lots of juicy background about the way that knitting broke free of proprietary, secretive guilds, only to be locked down again by greed-heads, whence it is now being liberated by knit-hackers.
“Guerrilla knitting” has a couple of meanings in the knitting community – to some, it merely means knitting in public, while to others, it means creating public art by knitted means.Contemporary knitters feel very clever for coming up with edgy language to describe their knitting, but the truth is that for decades there have been knitters and other textile artists who are at least as punk rock as today’s needle-wielders. This talk will cover the vibrant history of contemporary knitting, with a focus on projects that will make you say, “Wow, that’s knitted?” Feel free to bring knitting projects to the talk – let’s get some public knitting going on at the conference!
(via Craft)