What Handicraft argues

This is the hexagonal gallery of Handicraft — the applied art of the hand: the disciplined making of useful and beautiful things in thread, cloth, and letter. It is the shelf of the pattern book and the workshop manual — needlework, lace, knitting, crochet, dressmaking, and the shaping of the written character.
It gathers the great instructors of the domestic and decorative crafts, from the Renaissance lace-pattern books of Vinciolo and Vecellio to the Victorian and Edwardian manuals of Dillmont, Lambert, and Gaugain, the commercial pattern houses of Butterick, Weldon, and Priscilla, and Edward Johnston’s revival of formal lettering. Each is a record of technique passed hand to hand and made reproducible in print.
Every card carries an authentic public-domain likeness of its author where one survives, or a scan of a public-domain edition where none does; all the works are in the public domain.

Primary works in Handicraft (12)

Engineering — Handicraft and engineering spring from one impulse — the making of things by rule and method. The pattern draft and the lettering grid are craft’s engineering: construction, proportion, and technique made teachable and exact.
Economics — The needle trades and the paper-pattern industry formed an economy of their own — the home dressmaker, the penny manual, the commercial pattern house — placing production in countless hands and threading craft into commerce.