Table Of ContentCraft and the Creative Economy
Also by Susan Luckman
LOCATING CULTURAL WORK: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and
Remote Creativity
SONIC SYNERGIES: Music, Technology, Community, Identity ( co-editor )
Craft and the Creative
Economy
Susan Luckman
University of South Australia, Australia
© Susan Luckman 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-39964-9
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-48586-4 ISBN 978-1-137-39968-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137399687
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
This book is dedicated to the makers,
in particular the makers who helped ‘make’ me:
Edith and Keith Nash
Jillian and Graeme Luckman
This(cid:3)page(cid:3)intentionally(cid:3)left(cid:3)blank
Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Preface: My Own Craft Journey i x
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction – Craft and the Contemporary Cultural
Economy: The Renaissance of the Handmade 1
1 Craft Revival: The Post-Etsy Handmade Economy 12
2 Crafts as Creative Industry 45
3 Material Authenticity and the Renaissance of the
Handmade: The Aura of the Analogue (or ‘The
Enchantment of Making’) 68
4 Craft Micro-Enterprise, Gender and Work–Life
Relationships 87
5 ‘Self-Making’ and Marketing the Crafty Self 112
6 C raft Work and ‘The Good Life’: Creative
Economic Possibilities 129
Conclusion – Craft Micro-Economies: More Than
‘Cool Capitalism’ 152
Appendix 157
Notes 164
Bibliography 171
Index 184
vii
List of Illustrations
Figures
P.1 Wool flannel being woven at London Cloth Co xii
I.1 Bowerbird: Adelaide’s design market 3
1.1 Yarnbomb Shiraz label 14
1.2 Designers/Makers monthly market, Old Spitalfields
Market, London 16
1.3 The Selvedge Winter Fair 2013 22
1.4 Yarn bombing, North Terrace, Adelaide, Australia, 2013 33
1.5 Yarn bombing the dreaming spires, Oxford, UK, 2013 34
1.6 Flier for 2013’s Yorkshire Handmade & Vintage Fair 40
2.1 The contemporary craft economy continuum 55
2.2 UK craft selling channels 59
3.1 Handmade in Britain, http://www.handmadeinbritain.co.uk 71
3.2 Retail Shop – JamFactory, Adelaide 82
6.1 Blue Caravan online [ethical] design market,
http://www.bluecaravan.net 149
Tables
4.1 Country breakdown of 2013 Etsy Featured Shop profiles 99
4.2 US state breakdown of 2013 Etsy Featured Shop profiles 100
viii
Preface: My Own Craft Journey
In so many ways, writing this book has been something of a home-
coming for me. Both my mother and grandmother were skilled makers,
in particular knitters and seamstresses. My grandmother in fact worked
professionally in a small tailoring studio in a building on Bourke Street
in Melbourne. My abiding memory of going in to work with her is of
the old iron cage lift in her building with its retractable metal grid doors.
We had to negotiate these when heading to the nearby multi-floor fabric
store (which had a tiny but comparatively modern solid metal door to
its lift). This would have been in the 1970s; at this stage only residual
tailoring on this scale was occurring and Nana was also soon to close up
shop. But once, many similar small tailoring businesses would have oper-
ated in this part of Melbourne and indeed in comparable cities around
the world, where traces of them remain in street and precinct names,
if not remnant small enterprises themselves. Perhaps the last indica-
tion to most Melbournians that behind the shop-fronts and next to the
white-collar offices such activity had been buzzing was the lingering,
resolutely un-gentrified presence at the top of Bourke Street, near the
Parliament Building and next to the iconic coffee bar Pellegrinis, of the
Job Warehouse fabric store. The store, which finally closed its doors in
2012 after 60 years of selling, was owned by the Zeimer family, in partic-
ular brothers Jacob and Max Zeimer, who came to Australia from Poland
in 1948 having survived the atrocities of the Holocaust. The shop-front
was a high-profile jumbled aberration in what was otherwise a busy and
increasingly renovated part of town.
With my grandmother being such a skilled tailor, and no huge family
income coming in, it was logical that a significant portion of my own
and my sister’s wardrobe was handmade. Every now and then we would
get a significant batch of new clothes, the making of which would
require a fitting session once the basic outfits had been worked up from
tape measurements. One of my strongest childhood memories is of one
of these sessions. It must have been a cold day in winter, so Nana was
getting us to come in and try on each piece of clothing in front of the
fire. To this day I can still remember the familiar feel of the gigantic, at
least to my child’s sensibility, and very cold steel dressmaking scissors on
my skin as she deftly trimmed off excess fabric to create the perfect seam
line to match up sleeve to shoulder. Nana was not only professionally
ix
