ABSTRACT
This chapter digs into questions of craft and technological production through the lens of those participating in a decade-old knitting guild located in San Francisco, California. It draws on eighteen months of interventionalist ethnographic research to explore questions of belonging in and through claims to technological progress. In describing the guild, the chapter consider how people already doing craft, those participating in an established community of practice (Lave 1991), respond to the emergence of digital technology. It examines responses to Spyn, a system the author developed for annotating knit artifacts with digital records. The chapter explores boundaries of digital production vis-à-vis claims to craft: how knitters selectively take up and defy technological production to reaffirm craft values. Knitting provides a means of tackling a highly gendered activity that is challenged by a shifting discourse around handwork practice.
