Crafting at Home and Online: Rethinking the value of domestic life through blogs and social media

Personal blogging and social media feeds are at the forefront of a renewed interest in do it yourself (DIY) craft culture where users chronicle their practices such as knitting, embroidery and crochet, moving these skills out of the private domain and into the public arena. These bloggers are part of a ‘new domesticity’ movement that is gaining momentum online as women share and congregate around a highly visible representation of their home life. Through their craft blogging, the women negotiate the dominant discourses of neoliberalism and postfeminism that prioritise values of consumption, entrepreneurship, and self-help over building communities. They develop their own language of influence on social media platforms grounded in the daily rituals of the home to build relationships and connections sitting outside the formal economy. As a result, they force a rethink of the cultural value of domestic life. My digital ethnographic study follows the online lives of six established Australian domestic craft bloggers and their audiences over 5 years between 2014 to 2019. The research traces the emergence of an online community that is committed to depicting their homemade way of life across multiple digital platforms and demonstrating the value of their pursuits, connecting them into the wider new domesticity movement. By challenging popular feminist and postfeminist accounts that prioritise the success of the individual, this research demonstrates that domestic craft bloggers actively reject the individualistic pro-consumption norms that are prevalent on social media, instead using their own stories to engage other women in a new collective incarnation of domesticity that is sustained through dialogic engagement with crafting, creating, and making in the public realm