Förmedling av mönsterförlagor för stickning och virkning : Medierna, marknaden och målgruppen i Sverige vid 1800-talets mitt

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores the publication, design, dissemination and use of patterns for knitting and crochet in Sweden in the mid-nineteenth century. It investigates why the mediation of patterns for knitting and crochet changed during this period and what these changes reveal about the handicraft skills of the target group and the social context for which the patterns were produced. Manuals and fashion journals containing patterns for knitting and crochet issued in Swedish between 1840 and 1865 are both the research object and the main sources; to situate them within a transnational context, they are compared with British and German counterparts. Through object-based study of extant manuals and fashion journals and quantitative analysis of bibliographic data, the development of different ways of giving instructions and presenting patterns is explored. A discourse analysis of the prefaces and other texts that frame the handicraft patterns reveals how the publishers used contemporary attitudes towards knitting and crochet to make the patterns appeal to a certain target group. Furthermore, a selection of patterns is tested in practice, thus examining how information is transferred and which skills were expected of the end user. In the design of the publications, knitting and crochet are feminised, popularised and commodified. By linking these needlecrafts to the ideals and social practices of urban culture, the publishers transformed the patterns into modern consumer articles for fashion-conscious and respectable middle-class women. A gradual development of new ways to transfer knowledge through words and images was facilitated by the technical developments within book printing. Frequent misprints and the omission of key instructions demonstrate that a fundamental understanding of knitting and crochet was expected of the target group, in addition to tenacity and creativity. The different ways of mediating patterns for knitting and crochet that developed in the nineteenth century were formed through an interplay between practices and innovations within book printing, translation customs, the organisation of the market, shifting fashions in handicrafts and changing perceptions of the target group’s habits and taste.