I just can’t seem to avoid the craft at the moment.

Current thesis word count: 24,017

The refusal at work in these DIY communities is not only a refusal of the affluent Western individual’s interpelletation as the consumer of inauthentic, technologised and mass-produced artifacts; it is also avowedly a recuperation of everyday domestic labour and productive leisure – knitting, sewing – from their undervalued status in contemporary regimes of cultural value. However, these practices are very often recuperated for hipness via the (sometimes post-feminist) differentiation of ‘indie craft’ from the middlebrow aesthetic of the mainstream ‘craft store’.