POC designers & crafters

This post sort of follows on from my previous post ‘Black people do knit & the diversknitty conversation’. As I’d hoped there’s been a lot of very positive responses to the article and it’s got a lot of people not only talking but connecting with black designers, crafters, dyers & makers from across the knitting & crochet community. It’s also put the odd person’s nose out of joint with comments that the article itself is racist – well let’s just say they clearly haven’t read it.

As part of the conversation we had over on Instagram I asked how many black knitwear designers people could name and it transpired that it wasn’t as many as we’d hoped. Well in an effort to address that imbalance I invited people to comment on my post with the names of any black designers they knew and where in the world they were located. What I actually wanted to know was the names of designers who, like me work in the craft industry designing patterns for others to knit for themselves. But because my original post was vague (as no doubt, was my brain that day) what I got was a wonderful list that included a variety of creative folk ranging from hand knitwear designers & fashion designers producing high end ready to wear garments to machine knitters, crochet designer/makers and indie yarn dyers. I did promise at the time that I’d compile all this info into a list to be made available to all who are interested and to be honest it’s taken me this long because I wanted to make it easy for anyone browsing through it to link directly to their work and Instagram profiles. I’ve called the list POC designers & crafters and although originally it came about on the back of the black people do knit hashtag what the discussion did throw up was that other non white ethnicities also knit. Well after all why wouldn’t they? Just in the last week there’s been chat about how Asian knitters are also under represented so knitters like Soraya Hussein (@mahliqawire), Hansa Sinha (@hansa.sinha), Sukrita Mahon (@su.krita) and Ankita Anupurva (@yarn.and.needles) are urging other Asian knitters and those from the Asian diaspora who knit to join in the conversation with hashtags like #asiansdoknit #asianknittersofinstagram #knittersofindia and #wedotoo. Looks like this is the beginning of a growing list of talent. How fantastic!

Maxhosa by Laduma

Click here to see the POC designers & crafters list

The names are in alphabetical order by region with links to Instagram profiles, websites, Etsy shops etc. Please forgive me if I’ve spelt any names incorrectly and let me know any of the links go astray or just don’t work. Oh and I’m sorry to add this as a link here rather than as a new blog page but despite trying numerous times it just wasn’t showing up in the menu and to be honest my head just isn’t up to it today.