“I came to knitting — and by extension fiber arts — as a teenager when I stumbled across a tattered copy of a Learn to Knit booklet at the local Salvation Army. I was drawn to the idea of creating something with my hands, but the practical aspect of creating clothes, seemed in sharp contrast to my burgeoning feminist ideals. Publically, I eschewed the idea of traditional women’s work, while privately I sweated and swore over every dropped stitch, and misshapen garment.
It wasn’t until I read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities that I was able to reconcile the two. I found a feminist hero in the villianous knitter Madame Defarge. The ringleader of the tricoteuses, she spends the French Revolution perched by the side of the guillotine, tirelessly knitting the names of aristocrats to be executed. It was at that moment I fell in love with steganographic textiles, and the long history of women using traditional crafts as means of subversive rebellion.”
Below are Meghan Udell’s favorite books that inspire her work, available to purchase individually or as a set.
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