"Du vet att du vill klappa!"

Stickbloggar, garnkärlek och taktila texter

Abstract

The Internet has provided knitters with new means to communicate with each other, and thousands of knitting blogs now display and discuss yarn, textile items and knitting projects. This paper discusses the apparent paradox of knitting blogs, and the relation between tactile, material experiences and online narratives and communication. Knitting is carried out, experienced and above all enjoyed through the knitter's body and its sensations; yet by blogging about one's craft it is translated into visual, digital representations online. How can the knitting blogs' photographies and texts communicate the crucial tactile and material qualities of much adored textile items? How can the blogs' readers interpret texts about a practice which ought to be experienced by the body, in order to be fully graspable? I argue that although the material items are translated and "textualized" — from matter to language, from touch to text and from analogue to digital — the audience's own knitting skills provide it with the capacity to "feel" the yarn's texture and softness just by looking and reading. Thus the writers' and readers' bodily competences can transform the Internet from a seemingly solely visual media to an arena for tactile texts and shared embodied practices of material culture.