Current Exhibit

Tending to Our Knitting: Traditions and Trends

Based on the collection of Jacqueline Fee, author of The Sweater Workshop, this exhibition will feature an array of historical knitted home goods and garments. From 19th-century baby bonnets to 20th-century fashionable sweaters, from knitting sheaths to red, white, and blue patriotic World War I knitting needles, we will explore the role knitters played in producing domestic items for the home as well as the important public roles they played in providing soldier’s necessities during wartime. 

Jacqueline Fee published the first edition of The Sweater Workshop in 1983; a second edition was published in 2002. It was written for creative knitters who didn’t want to have to follow a pattern blindly and instead wanted to be able to master the techniques that would allow them to design their own seamless sweaters. Along with Elizabeth Zimmerman’s publications, such as Knitting Without Tears (1971), Fee’s book was an important part of the movement away from producing garments as a series of flat pieces to be sewn together and towards custom designed sweaters knit in the round.