Stitchcrafts

[louiselux]

So, using the theory of friendlist knows all, and in the interests of research for my job: does anyone have any idea about the general growing or fading popularity of stitchcrafts (not including knitting)? By stitchcrafts I mean crosstitch, tapestry and needlepoint. I bandy these words but I'm by no means an expert.

This market isn't well covered (or actually, at all) by market research, mostly I think because it's so fragmented. A company I'm working with maintains that it's not a healthy market but it doesn't have much to back this up with, and now I'm curious. I know knitting has had a big resurgence in the last few years and so I'm faintly surprised he said this about stitchcrafts. That said, I have no idea how much knitters overlap with people who enjoy needlepoint or crosstitch, or vice versa.

As an aside, never having thought about doing anything of this kind before, I really rather like this William Morris tulip and rose design and could imagine sitting about in the evenings sewing it.

Comments

[snowballjane.livejournal.com]

I'd think one good measure would be the sales figures for magazines such as Cross Stitcher (http://www.abc.org.uk/cgi-bin/gen5?runprog=nav/abc&noc=y).

At the Knitting and Stitching shows, there's definitely more of a buzz about knitting, and far more stalls of knitting stuff, but the embroidery stalls are thronging too.

I've been working on the same cross stitch viking ship for at least seven years now though, so it's certainly faded in popularity there.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Thank you, that's a really useful resource.

Seven years... oh dear!