Hand stitching is a labour intensive and precise craft that has accrued new meanings in the increasingly virtual cultures of a post-industrial society. This coincides with a current resurgence of popular and avant-garde interest in stitch-crafts. Recent exhibitions, e.g. Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, Museum of Art and Design, New York; The Fabric of Myth, Compton Verney, (all 2008), demonstrate that the craft is now a well-established contemporary art form. In another sphere, the popularity with stitching enthusiasts of The Knitting and Stitching Shows bears witness to a fertile terrain of creative leisure pursuits amongst a different network of practitioners. Despite sharing a common technique of stitch, these spheres are commonly viewed as distinct cultural categories.

Traditionally, research into stitch has focussed on the historical, industrial or domestic development of the craft, the socio-political factors linking sewing with women’s lives, or the maturing of embroidery as an art form. The focus in these studies largely concerns the perception of stitched crafts, artefacts or their makers in the cultural arena. They propose new positions from which to view the objects made, but do not usually consider the significance of the experience to the maker. Accounts of making stitch-crafts from the point of view of the maker are less well documented. More recently, cross-disciplinary approaches have provided insight into craft activities as an important non-economic contribution to cultural production. Material culture studies investigate how our interaction with, and making of, objects shapes our understanding of the world we inhabit. Building on this, new developments in haptics, and a revived interest in craftsmanship, making and materials, enable emphasis to be placed on the significance of embodied knowledge.