MEDIA RELEASES

Susan Strawn, assistant professor of apparel design and merchandising at Dominican University, will present a slide lecture on the history of American knitting on Sunday, November 18 at 3:00 p.m. in the lecture hall of Parmer Hall, 7900 W. Division Street, River Forest. Strawn will discuss and show slides from her recently published book Knitting America.

Knitting, which is currently experiencing a huge surge in popularity, has been interwoven through the fabric of American history, from colonial times when hand knitting served as a practical staple of survival to the 1940s when it offered women on the homefront a way of staying connected with the soldiers overseas and through the 1970s when it provided an outlet for women’s flourishing self-expression.

In Knitting America, Strawn, documents how knitting has reflected America’s economic developments, social movements, and cultural trends. Focusing particularly on the significant contributions knitters have made during periods of war, the book features American Red Cross posters and advertisements encouraging women to take up their needles to support the war effort in the 1910s, the cover of a 1941 Life magazine depicting a woman knitting for the boys overseas and a New York Times article announcing the launch of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Knit for Defense tea party at the Waldorf Astoria. She also covers current charitable knitting programs for soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as for the homeless, the sick and the troubled.

Strawn also explores the burgeoning cyber-world of knitting enthusiasts who communicate around the world via websites and blogs and credits the enormously popular “Stitch ‘N Bitch” books with kickstarting the hip knitting parties that are the rage from coast to coast.

Beautifully illustrated with rarely seen archival photographs, vintage posters and historic knitting patterns, including an 1865 pattern for knitting Union Army socks and directions for making fingerless wristlets for World War I soldiers and a World War II Navy sweater, the book is a scholar’s look at a subject not typically given the credit it is due.

For more information on this free program, please contact Jessica Mackinnon, director of public relations, at (708) 524-6289.