THE POWER OF COMMUNITY & CRAFT Founders Sicgmone Kludje (left) and Vea Koranteng (right)
With the pandemic sparking a knitting revival, the founders of Black Girl Knit Club, tell us why it’s the hobby you never knew you needed
“Our motivation for starting Black Girl Knit Club (BGKC), came from following the social media hashtag #diverseknitty. At the time different knitwear designers and makers were calling for more diversity within the craft community. The reason why was due to visibility. We as friends wanted to create a safe and inclusive space for black women and female creatives like ourselves, to gather, share stories and inspire one other through craft skills, and more importantly, develop creativity whilst equipping the next generation with a new skill. We started in January 2019 and we’ve built an
KNIT A NEW STORY Viewed as a specialist craft, or perhaps a dying skill reserved for the older generation who lived in a time when making your own clothes was the norm, knitting has become much more appealing to younger audiences and brought with it an opportunity for visibility and recognition of black crafters and designers. This is certainly true for Black Girl Knit Club, whose founders, Sicgmone Kludje and Vea Koranteng, launched their platform pre-pandemic, and have been nurturing their growing community ever since.
amazing community of members who attend our monthly workshops and online tutorials. Not many people know that the origins of knitting trace back to ancient Egypt. Lorna Hamilton-Brown, a knitwear designer, educator and keen advocate of black women’s rights in the knitting industry, discusses the history in her dissertation paper, Myth: Black People Don’t Knit, and she references a piece of knitted cotton socks from Egypt dating back to 1000-1200AD. These items can be found in the V&A collections in London. SPELL
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[Sicgmone]: I hadn’t experienced much diversity within craft before we started the BGKC. I studied a degree in textiles at a London university and had never encountered a black academic for craft. However when I went to Ghana I worked with a designer called Kofi Ansah and I learnt about the craft of weaving and the long history of the kente cloth. [Vea]: I’ve always had a passion for visiting artisan and vintage shops. The garments fascinated me and this spurred me on to start my online vintage store. I felt like I had to create
