Textile Work Is Feminine - TV Tropes

"She seeks out wool and flax and weaves with skillful hands.
She puts her hands to the distaff, and her fingers ply the spindle.
She is not concerned for her household when it snows — all her charges are doubly clothed.
She makes her own coverlets; fine linen and purple are her clothing.
She makes garments and sells them, and stocks the merchants with belts.
She is clothed with strength and dignity, and laughs at the days to come."

• A mid-2000s commercial for Clorox bleach took the form of a Progressive Era Montage of laundry chores, with narration describing their timeless nature: your great-grandmother did laundry, and so did your grandmother, your mother — and "maybe even a man or two."

• +Anima: Nana Alba loves clothes and is good at sewing. She usually uses these skills when either refitting outfits for herself or making some new clothes for her friends.
• 7 Seeds has Kurumi from Team Autumn. She's a sweet girl and her duty in the team's village was to weave clothes since their own started to fall apart after they woke up in the post-apocalyptic world.
• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You: Meme's hobby is knitting, and she knits her own stuffed animals, always having some on hand to throw out if she gets too embarrassed. She even knits one out of noodles for a hotpot party.
• Angel Sanctuary: When Setsuna encourages Kato to visit Sae (who's unaware of his presence because Assiah is frozen in time), she's sewing.
• Ashita no Nadja:
  • Grandma Anna is a very skilled hat maker and seamstress. She's even enough to take what remains of a massively torn Pimped-Out Dress and sew it into another without any trouble.
  • Nadja learns how to sew and even spends a whole episode making a red dress that she needs for her dancing skits; Anna allows her to use her own sewing machine and points out this trope:

  Anna: "Many girls around your age are already very good seamstresses!"

• Boku Girl: While Tamako sucks at everything else stereotypically feminine (like cooking), she excels at sewing.
• In Bokurano, a girl named Mako "Nakama" Nakarai has quite the skill with her sewing machine. She even has a very specific goal in regards to her tailoring/sewing skills: making uniforms for the other pilots before it's her time to pilot Zearth and die as a consequence. She manages to only make some of them, but the remaining girls take up this little "task".
• A Bride's Story:
  • Tileke struggles with the embroidery she must do to become a proper wife and mother, but the other women of the family teach her that embroidery can be just as fascinating as her "tomboyish" love of hawks.
  • At one point Smith voices his amazement that the women of the community can happily spend so much of their time sewing.
• Cardcaptor Sakura, both Sakura and Tomoyo fulfill this in different ways:
  • To give thanks for comforting her after being turned down by Yukito, she spends a week making Syaoran a scarf. Similarly, in the manga, Sakura returns the favor by spending a week making him a yukata.
  • Tomoyo regularly makes and designs costumes for Sakura to fight in. She custom makes the costumes so they would fit the situation and protect Sakura from whatever the cards throw her.
• The Case Study of Vanitas: According to side materials, Amelia has impressive sewing skills since she fixes Noé's and Vanitas's clothes whenever these get damaged and makes them good as new.
• Deltora Quest: Sharn is said to be a gifted seamstress, and well able to sew magical garments such as the cloak she sews for Lief. It is something she inherited from her Toran ancestors, as Torans are well known for their talent in sewing.
• Dr. STONE: Yuzuriha was a member of the handicrafts club prior to petrification, and once she's revived she's able to create clothing in seconds. Once they rediscover hemp fibers and weaving, she single-handedly reinvents fashion.
• In Endride, while we learn Louise's father is a great scientist, her mother is a great seamstress.
• Eyeshield 21: Mamori, the team's Yamato Nadeshiko, helps with uniform repair and design for the Devil Bats. She is also skilled at cooking, likes wearing dresses and an In-Universe Dude Magnet.
• Fairy Tail: Anna Heartfilia, the ancestor of Lucy Heartfilia and the group's Team Mom, made Natsu's scarf, knitting them out of Igneel's scales.
• Georgie!: Georgie Buttman can sew, even making a dress out of Catherine and her mother's old dresses, which are too small and too low-cut respectively, and later gets a job as a seamstress to support herself and Lowell. She has an innate talent for sewing, even her father mentions that if she opened her own dress shop she would become richer than him.
• Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics:
  • In "Jorinde and Joringel", Jorinde is seen working with her spinning wheel when her boyfriend Joringel visits her with flowers.
  • Used twice in "The Six Swans". First, in a bit of Adaptation Expansion the Hot Witch transforms a magic branch into a golden needle and then sews six white capes to imbue them with the magic that transforms her stepsons into the titular swans. Then, Princess Elise puts her own sewing skills to work by sewing six shirts from starflowers to free her brothers from the wicked queen's curse. She finishes right before being burned at the stake for crimes that she never commited, and the shirts are also tied to her stake/cross; right after they save her, the swan princes wrap themselves in Elise's shirts and are released from the spell.
  • Poor Gretchen from Rumpelstilskin gets in trouble when her father, the miller, brags about how skilled she is with her spinning wheel.
• Gunslinger Girl. There's a scene where cyborg girl Henrietta is sewing up her shirt in her dorm room, while the tomboyish Rico is Gun Stripping her pistol. Subverted in that Henrietta is sewing up a bullethole in her shirt after washing all the blood out after being shot on a mission.
• Hakumei & Mikochi:
  • Mikochi worked in a fabric shop prior to the events of the manga. She's also a skilled dexter and seamstress as well as a talented designer; her entry in a fashion show came in second only to Night Snail, a highly regarded fashion designer who's Mikochi's fashion idol.
  • What she doesn't have experience with, though, is flat-out creating new clothes for a specific person, especially not stage clothing; she successfully manages it when asked in chapters 84-85, but she gets very stressed in the process.
• Subverted in Hetalia: Axis Powers. Among the girls, we see Ukraine with sewing implements... and it's only because her shirt's buttons popped out due to her huge breasts and she needs to fix it. The one seen actively embroidering is England, a man. (See the "Real Life" section for possible reasons). Additionally, Ukraine's younger brother Russia is seen knitting.
• Isabelle of Paris: Protagonist Isabelle is an ex-tomboy turned Proper Lady. One of her skills ismsewing; at one point she fixes a falling hot air balloon by climbing on the top and stitching the rip with a thread and needle.
• Kagetora: Yuki is usually a tsundere towards Kagetora, but knits a scarf for him as a Christmas present.
• Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens: Hakua is an archetypical Yamato Nadeshiko who wears a Hime Cut and is very shy, and is skilled in embroidery and making bento boxes for her loved ones.
• In Kaze no Shōjo Emily, Emily's sexist aunt insists that she take up sewing instead of writing poems, saying that reading and writing is a "waste of time", and also punishes Emily for being "unladylike".
• Kill la Kill:
  • Averted, as all of the sewing club members (who make the shows superpowered school uniforms) seem to be male and both of the Kamui were created by men, the same man, in fact.
  • That said, Nui is probably the most feminine character in the series and she's the tailor for the Big Bad, so it's not just men. She did pose as a guy, though, and apparently made the disguise herself.
• Kimi ni Todoke: Sawako is a skilled seamstress who lovingly crafts hand-made presents for friends and family. Personality wise, she's a Yamato Nadeshiko who can fall into Extreme Doormat territory from time to time.
• Konnichiwa Anne: Before Green Gables (2009): In contrast to the tomboyish Anne, Eliza Thomas (the only other daughter of the Thomases) works as a seamstress to support her family, and knows how to make lovely dresses.
• In The Laughing Salesman, the boss's Unmanly Secret is that he likes textile work. Once his knitting hobby is discovered at work, Oniyama warns him that his career would be ruined if he doesn't stop doing it in the office.
• Laura, the Prairie Girl: The Ingall women love to sew, but while Laura's mother and older sister are good at it, Laura herself leaves a lot to be desired. This is a sore spot for her as she feels inferior to them.
• Little Prince Cedie: Annie made all of Cedie's clothes. She later works from home as a seamstress after James' death.
• Love Live! School Idol Project: Knitting is one of Ayumu's hobbies, and she's one of the girliest girls in the series. She even has an arc dedicated to accepting that she's very girly, even though she thought it was embarassing at first.
• Minamoto-kun Monogatari: Chisato is a Shrinking Violet girl with a fear of men. She states that handwork helps her calm down whenever she loses her temper.
• Miss Caretaker of Sunohara-sou: Yuri Kazami sews outfits as a hobby. Aki finds out she made several girl outfits personally for him to try on.
• Mizutama Honey Boy:
  • Saigou has very dexterous fingers, and she made many of her clothes (partially because her size is impossible to find).
  • Ichika established the Home Economics club, so they all are paragons of femininity and are good at sewinh. The same goes for cooking and similar attributes.
• My Dress-Up Darling: Much of male lead Wakana Gojo's social anxiety comes from a former childhood friend calling him a freak over his love of dolls and dollmaking, and he's horrified when Marin walks in on him using the school's sewing machine out of fear that she'll think less of him for being good at it. Much of his character development comes from Marin helping helping him realize that his interests are just as valid as anyone else's.
• Nobara no Julie: Clara works as a seamstress for extra income, helped by Tania. In contrast, Johann and Karl work at a glass factory.
• Noragami: Aiha is really good at embroidery since she has been doing it as a pastime for over 50 years.
• In the final season of Ojamajo Doremi, the girls dive into textile work in order to help break the Big Bad's curses. However, the problem is while feminine Hazuki's been able to sew for at least two years, none of them know how to use a weaving loom and have to ask for tips from a professional before diving in.
• In One Piece, Nami is seemingly the only member of the Straw Hats who can sew, and she is asked to do it a couple of times by Luffy.
• ONIMAI: I'm Now Your Sister!: Miyo is the most feminine of Mahiro's peers, and she is good enough at sewing that she joins in to make uniforms for the class's maid cafe and offers to make cosplay outfits for Mahiro.
• Pandemonium Wizard Village: Anna was the one that made Zipher's coat and hat. After they get damaged, Domika tries her best to repair them, but due to the clumsiness of her claws, the result is very patchwork and rips easily. He doesn't mind the change, though.
• Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl: Johanna (Ayako in the original Japanese version) created Dawn's Grand Festival ballgown and Buneary's vest. Possibly justified by a later episode that shows her to be friends with Lila, a fashion designer.
• Raideen: Mari Sakurano is an extremely feminine girl who thinks herself of a Parental Substitute to Akira, and gifts him a pink sweater at some point. She also gifts his mother Lemuria the same thing.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena: Between tomboy Utena and Girly Girl Anthy, the latter is skilled at sewing, playing the piano and gardening. She even creates an entire sweater in a day.
• In The Rows of Cherry Trees, Yukiko Nakayama's mother's hobby is doing embroidery. It also comes off as a handy way to make quick cash, since she's skilled enough to make landscape pictures and sell them.
• In the Rurouni Kenshin prequel one-shot To Rule Flame, Yumi Komagata's best friend Hanabi is a very good seamstress and is seen sewing back the buttons of a shirt belonging to Houji Sadoshima while singing happily. After Hanabi is bloodily murdered, Houji kinda repays the favor by shooting one of the culprits dead exactly on the spot where a chest button should go.
• The Secret Garden (NHK): Helen McCoy is hired to teach Mary how to be a Proper Lady, as she's the child of the wealthy Lennox-Craven family. One of the things Mary has to learn is how to sew through a embroidery hoop, and it comprises of a large part of her homework.
• Snow White with the Red Hair: While Kiki was known to like sewing and embroidery no art of the knight doing so was produced outside of an sketch of her doing so while in a dress with very feminine hair as a child until her position as Lady Seiran started making her have to dress like a noblewoman rather than a knight more often, her stoic nature had mellowed and she got engaged, all things which brought out a feminine side of her that wasn't prevalent for the first several volumes.
• Spy X Family: Played for Laughs. Yor subverts the anime stereotype of kind and elegant ladies also being skilled at sewing and fixing dolls for children in Short Mission 5, wherein she tries to patch up the Agent Penguinman doll that Bond mauled and scratched-up in jealousy... Emphasis on tries, when the result ended up looking like one of her regular clean-up "operations."
• Steins;Gate: In the movie, Makise sews the sleeve of Okabe's lab coat and gives him a spare, while denying that she bought the spare lab coat for him.
• The Story of Perrine: Perrine knows how to sew and sometimes makes her own clothes. She even makes traditional Indian clothes for her mother during the theater arc.
• Tokyo Ghoul: Tsumugi Yamagata. Her work is noted to be far more delicate and elaborate compared to the masks Uta makes, often making use of embroidery.
• Tokyo Mew Mew: Episode 34 shows that Cute Clumsy Girl Lettuce is gifted in making handmade stuffed dolls.
• Twin Star Exorcists: Miku Zeze learned to make stuffed animals so her child would play with them, but she never managed to get pregnant.
• Urusei Yatsura: Before Nozomi passed away during winter, she knitted a scarf, a wool hat, mittens, and leg warmers for Ataru. She then makes him wear them all for their date in the middle of summer.
• Wonderful Pretty Cure!: Sewing, embroidery, and handicrafts are Mayu's hobbies with her being very talented and dedicated in her work. She has an old-fashioned sewing machine in her room, which she uses to make outfits for Yuki and Komugi.
• Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches:
  • Nene was a member of the handicrafts club in her first year, though it isn't known if she actually liked sewing, or if she solely joined because Himekawa persuaded her and/or because she wanted to get closer to Yamada.
  • Subverted with Nancy. She is actually really bad at sewing, but still plays the trope straight as she joined the club to become good at it.
• Yankee JK KuzuHana-chan: Technically speaking tailors are seen as a male-oriented job, but Saotome gender inverts the trope with his calm and girly personality.

• The Lady of Shalott (Holman Hunt): The protagonist of the painting is a tragic maiden cursed to weave a tapestry, which is in progress — threads fly around her once the curse acts on her.
• Edward Hopper's Girl At Sewing Machine'' (1921) shows a young, brunette woman hard at work sewing something.

• My Boyfriend is a Bear: Nora sews many of her own clothes and even clothes for Bear. After she quits her job, she starts an Etsy shop, "Clothes For Your Bear."

• Sister Susie: Published during WWI, this anthology serial showcased American women doing their part for the war effort by knitting clothes for the troops overseas. The dutiful women all turn their backs on leisure activities like swimming and theater (and even some domestic activities like cooking dinner) to churn out socks and sweaters.

• In many variants of tale type ATU 425A, "The Animal (Monster) as Bridegroom" (a subtype that pertains to the tale type ATU 425, "The Search for the Lost Husband", to which Cupid And Psyche belongs), after the heroine loses her enchanted/cursed husband, she travels to the houses of three old women or witches, where she is given spinning apparatuses (e.g., a spindle, a spinning wheel, a reel, a loom, or a sewing needle). The heroine reaches the kingdom where her husband is, where he is also to be married to another woman, and takes out the spinning objects (either she uses them or simply takes them out for show).
  • The White Wolf (Lithuania) - the heroine burns her husband's wolf skin and he disappears. She then goes on a journey, meeting the Wind, the star, the Moon and the Sun, from whom she gains a magic spinning-wheel which she uses to buy a night in her husband's bed from the false bride.
  • In East of the Sun and West of the Moon (Norway), the heroine loses her husband and goes on a journey to find him. She passes by three old women, who gift her a golden apple, a golden reel and a golden spinning wheel which she uses to bribe the troll bride for a night with her husband. Later, when she finds him again, she wins the hero from the troll bride by washing his shirt clean.
  • The Daughter of the Skies (Scotland) - the heroine loses her husband and goes on a journey to find him. On the way, she meets three women who gift her a pair of shears, a needle and thread that function by themselves. She then uses the magic items to draw the attention of the false bride and buys from her three nights in her husband's quarters.
  • The Brown Bear of Norway (Ireland) - the heroine gains from her husband, in each house, a magic pair of scissors that, by cutting anything, produces the finest silk and a hand-reel that spins an infinite amount of golden thread (also a comb that drops gems and pearls from the hair when used). She then puts each of them on display, one at a time, to entice the witch's daughter into buying them, in exchange for a night outside the prince's chambers (since the prince is the human form of the titular Brown Bear of Norway).
  • Prince Hat Under the Ground (Sweden) - the heroine marries Prince Hat, betrays his trust by looking at his face with a candle and loses him. On the way to her husband, she is given textile apparatuses by troll-witches, a spinning-wheel and a loom (along with a purse that provides endless silver coins). The heroine uses the object to bribe the witch who cursed Prince Hat for three nights with her husband.
• In Joseph Jacobs' The Black Bull of Norroway, the heroine washes bloodstains out of the hero's shirt, which is the test for the bride.
• In Cinderella, Cindy has to do the work to ready her stepsisters' clothes for the ball.

  This was a new difficulty for Cinderella; for it was she who ironed her sister's linen and pleated their ruffles.

• In The Feather of Finist the Falcon, the daughter wins the attention of the bride by washing the blood from Finist's shirt with her tears.
• In The Friendship of a Vila and of the Months, the Wicked Stepmother sends her daughter to wash white wool and her stepdaughter to wash black wool and tells her that unless she gets the wool as white as the daughter's, she can't come back.
• The Hurds: A woman who tears out knots in flax and chucks them loses her fiancee to her servant who industriously gathers them up and makes a gown of them.
• Played With in King Thrushbeard, as the princess' lack of textile prowess is not a sign of her lack of femininity, but part of a Break the Haughty journey as she's unsuited for common work. After she drives her noble suitors off with unnecessary mocking, her enraged father tells her that she'll marry the first man who visits the palace. It turns out to be a beggar, and he's reluctant to marry her because he knows she's never worked before. Sure enough, she can't weave cloth or spin thread because it makes her hands bleed, so her new husband complains at how useless she is.
• "The Lazy Spinner": The husband demands her wife to spin reels, but she tricks him in order to get out of the work.
• In Andrew Lang's "The Nettle Spinner", the cruel lord Berchard refuses to let Renelde marry unless she makes herself a wedding shift and him a shroud out of nettles, as he'll only let her marry when he dies. She does, and Berchard soon finds out that as she works on the shroud, he grows weak and sickly.
• Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "Nine Bags of Gold": The elves teach Marie how to knit, and Marie's mother is delighted at her daughter learning such an important skill apparently on her own.
• In The Princess and the Goblin, Princess Irene's grandmother, who is also royalty, is often found spinning at her spinning wheel.
• In Rumpelstiltskin and many of its variants, the girl's father brags about her incredible spinning ability and so sets off the story.
• In The Six Swans and "The Wild Swans", the Wicked Stepmother sews six magical shirts to transform her stepsons into swans. Her stepdaughter sets out to save the swan princes by sewing six shirts from starflowers and becoming an Elective Mute. She either finishes right before being executed for crimes that she never committed or is still sewing when she's about to be burned at the stake; in any way, her brothers rescue her and put on the shirts to recover their human forms and prove her innocence.
• In Snow White, the queen is sewing when she pricks her finger. She then sees a droplet of blood on her fingerpad and makes the original wish for a child who is red as blood, white as snow, and black as ebony.
• In Soria Moria Castle, when he finds the princesses, they are spinning.
• In The Spindle, the Shuttle, and the Needle, the heroine is left these items to make her living by.
• In The Storehouse Key in the Distaff, the woman brags of how much her daughter spins, and the wooer puts it to the test by hiding a key in the flax she is supposed to be spinning. When he returns, they talk of how they lost the key, and he finds it in the flax and does not speak of marrying her.
• In "The Three Aunts", the other servants claim instead that she claimed marvelous abilities to spin, weave, and sew. The heroine doesn't dare say that she can't.
• In almost every variant of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children", the king or prince spies on the only illuminated house of three sisters and overhears their conversation: all three want to marry their monarch, and either the elder sister or the elder two boast they can sew such a garment or weave such a carpet or tent with incredible qualities, which greatly interests the monarch.
  • The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird (Sicily, Italy) - the middle sister wishes to marry the keeper of the royal wardrobe and boasts she can sew clothes for the whole court with a single cloth, leaving some to spare.
  • Princess Belle-Etoile (France, literary) - Roussette promises to spin with shuttle and distaff enough thread to weave cloth to make sails for the admiral's ships, and Brunette to provide enough lace with her needle the king's palace would be filled with it.
  • The Boys with the Golden Stars (Romania) - Stana, the middle sister, boasts she would weave a shirt that would keep her future husband protected from dragons, from cold and from heat.
  • Ancilotto, King of Provino (Italy) - the sister named Lionella promises to make enough linen from a spindle of her yarn to provide shifts for the whole court.
  • The Golden-Haired Children (Turkey) - Despite not wanting to marry the Padishah, the eldest sister promises to embroider him a carpet large enough to hold all of the Padishah's men and horses; and the middle sisters weave a tent large enough to shelter all of the horses and men.
  • The Youth and the Maiden with Stars on their Foreheads and Crescents on their Breasts (Albania) - the elder sister promises to weave a carpet large enough to hold the entire army and there would be space left, and the middle sisters to weave a tent large enough to hold the entire army and there would be space left.
  • The Tale of Tsar Saltan (Russia, literary) - the middle sister promises to weave clothes for the whole world.
  • The Twins (Armenia) - the eldest sister promises to weave a tent large enough to house the entire army, with half space to spare, while the middle sister promises to weave a rug to hold the entire court and the entire people, with half space to spare.
  • The Three Sisters and their Stepmother (Georgia) - the eldest sister promises to weave a rug to hold the king's entire army.
  • The Children With the Golden Locks (Georgia) - the eldest sister promises to weave a rug to hold the king's entire army.
• The Three Spinners: The mother claims her daughter spins too much rather than admit that she does not wanna spin at all, so the queen hires her to spin flax that fill three rooms. She is helped by three woman doing the work instead, and pass it off as the daughter's doing to everyone else.
• In Tsarevich Petr and the Wizard, the three princesses are spinning copper, silver, and gold when he finds them.
• In Asbjørnsen and Moe's "The Twelve Wild Ducks", Snowy-White-and-Rosy-Red has to do the same for her twelve older brothers. She's also framed for crimes and near executed, and her brothers also take the shirts and de-enchant themselves to save her.
• In The Two Caskets, the Wicked Stepmother sets both her daughter and stepdaughter a contest in spinning — having given her daughter good flax and her stepdaughter rotten stuff.
• In Vasilissa the Beautiful, the Wicked Stepmother assigned her daughter and stepdaughter textile work. (At the end of the tale, she supports herself with her work before the tsar sees her.)

  One autumn evening the merchant's wife called the three girls to her and gave them each a task. One of her daughters she bade make a piece of lace, the other to knit a pair of hose, and to Vasilissa she gave a basket of flax to be spun. She bade each finish a certain amount.

• In Andrew Lang's The Violet Fairy Book, in "The Frog," the old woman tells her sons to test their brides with flax.

  Do as you like, but see that you choose good housewives, who will look carefully after your affairs; and, to make certain of this, take with you these three skeins of flax, and give it to them to spin. Whoever spins the best will be my favourite daughter-in-law.'

• Whuppity Stoorie revolves around a "green gentlewoman" saving a woman's pig and demanding her child. Spinning has a part in the tale because the gentlewoman is spinning when she sings of her name.

• The Accidental Warlord and His Pack: Milena loves embroidery and it was one of the few things she was able to partake in at court as an acceptable pastime for a noblewoman.
• Brainbent:
  • Rose and Kanaya both have an interest in textile arts - Rose knits, and Kanaya is a designer and seamstress.
  • Equius knits as well, although his case is more Real Men Wear Pink. (And he needs to use metal knitting needles because he tends to accidentally break plastic ones.)
• Later on in the Gensokyo 20XX series, Yukari is mentioned to be knitting or sewing from time to time. Apparently, she has hobbies, if this is any indication.
• The Star Trek: The Original Series follow-up to "Journey to Babel", All In A Day's Work by the late Johanna Cantor, has Spock's mother handling things for the families of the ambassadors on board. We find that Tellarite women are never named but are called somebody's daughter, somebody's wife, etc., but this doesn't prevent them from having a sense of importance, pride, and ego when it comes to their textile work.
• Queens of Mewni:
  • Urania, the First Queen, was the daughter of weavers and weaved her own royal outfits and those of her daughters.
  • Sky, Moon's biological mother, was able to combine her weaving abilities with her magic to make spelled armor and cloth golems. She also, notably, was the one to weave all the tapestries of the queens from Urania to her mother Diana. Fittingly, she is remembered in history as Sky the Weaver. When she found the real Book of Spells and found out Urania had been a weaver as well, she squeaked in shock.
• Suggested in the RWBY Fanfic Various Vytal Ventures with Blake, who shows she can sew in one chapter, though according to Word of God, learned from Adam, which subverts this.
• Vow of Nudity: Spectra, one of the protagonists, is the daughter of two tailors and loves sewing dresses as her primary hobby. However, her late father who's eventually revealed to be a changeling ex-bandit and a murderous bank robber strays pretty far from this trope.

• Brave: Sewing is one of the many feminine tasks that Queen Elinor tries to teach to her rebellious daughter Merida. It proves to be a Chekhov's Skill as Merida sews the tapestry she symbolically damaged in an attempt to break the spell that turned her mother into a bear.
• The Cat Returns: Haru's mother Naoko's job seems to involve textiles, since she is seen working on a patchwork design, and several bolts of fabric can be seen in her bedroom.
• Chicken Run: Babs is the most overtly feminine and most ditzy chicken on Tweedy's Farm, and is almost always seen with a pair of knitting needles.
• Cinderella: While the mice are prepping Cinderella's pink dress so that she can go to the ball, one female mouse tells Jacques to "leave the sewing to the women!" It's downplayed, though. Given that we later see a male mouse helping sew the dress, it's possible she simply didn't trust him not to screw up with the sewing, as opposed to male mice in general.
• Encanto: Mirabel, the youngest daughter of a family where magical Gifts are bestowed on five-year-old children who then begin to become responsible citizens. For some reason, Mirabel received no Gift (and this is where the story really starts), so she's lived all of her fifteen years in the nursery, where she's gotten really, really good at sewing, knitting and especially embroidery. Her clothing is covered with bright symbols of her beloved family.
• The Last: Naruto the Movie reveals that Naruto's late mother Kushina and future wife Hinata both enjoy knitting scarves.
• Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms: Weaving clothes is the trade of female Iorphs. It is likely related to their traditionally sexist society, that treats them as incubators and places restrictions on how they express themselves and dress.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Sally is the town seamstress, and female elves are seen sewing teddy bears.
• The Princess and the Frog: Tiana's mother Eudora is a seamstress.
• Tangled:
  • Rapunzel, among other activities, knits, sews, and does laundry to pass time.
  • Two of the thugs in the Snuggly Duckling are into knitting and sewing respectively.
• In Your Name, Mitsuha's grandmother Hitoha is a master of kumihimo, the Japanese art of braid making, and she passes on this skill to her granddaughters. Also, Mitsuha (while in Taki's body) uses her sewing skills to mend Miki's skirt, and Miki is impressed, saying she didn't realize that Taki had a feminine side.

• Braveheart: Briefly touched on. Edward Longshanks dispatches his daughter-in-law to occupy William Wallace's attention while he recruits troops for a sneak attack, of which he informs no one. When she returns and gives her report, Edward - somewhat dismissively - gives her permission to "return to her [your] embroidery", not suspecting that Isabelle is playing up her feminine facade after coming to sympathize with Wallace and his campaign.
• Curse of the Golden Flower: The Empress of China uses this trope as a cover for her political agenda. Her ceaseless embroidering of chrysanthemums is implied to be for the upcoming festival celebrating the flower. In fact, the thousands of stitched scarves are later worn by the army she’s recruited to oust her husband and place her eldest son on the throne.
• Demolition Man: The hero is repeatedly embarrassed that he had been trained in the fine arts of knitting and sewing while in hibernation.
• Goyokin. Magobei has left his clan to go Walking the Earth as a Rōnin, but his wife Shino is introduced working a loom like a dutiful wife should, even though for all she knows her husband is dead. The Foreign Remake involving a Mexican aristocratic family has the same scene.
• Kopps: Inverted with Benny the cop, who knits headbands for his colleagues. It's lampshaded by his neighbors.

  Mike: Shit, you fag, you're knitting!
  Benny: Why?
  Mike: My mother knits!

  • And later:

    Ramzi: My wife knits in home, are you wife?

• Made in Dagenham: About the Ford sewing machinists' strike of 1968, where the overwhelmingly female workers making the car seats downed tools in protest at discriminatory pay between the sexes.
• The Miseducation of Cameron Post: According to the Cure Your Gays camp, the "reason" behind one of the boys' sexuality is that he bonded with his mother over crafts too much.
• The Perils of Pauline (1947): In "The Sewing Machine Song", the character laments having to spend long hours working in a textile factory when she'd rather be doing something else.
• Phantom Thread: Played with. Although the workforce in Reynolds Woodcock's fashion house is all female, he is occasionally shown working on garments himself, rather than just designing.
• Sightseers: Tina, one half of an Outlaw Couple, knits. She turns out to have been knitting a bra and crotchless knickers. Kinky!
• Suffragette: This trope is, as befitting the time, played completely straight. Almost all the protagonists who are shown working are laundering clothes (the one exception being a woman who works in her husband's pharmacy)... a not only time-consuming and boring but also very hard and dangerous job. The protagonist's mother died in a work accident. Most women take their infants to work regardless, as they need the money.

• In a Mohist text calling for everyone to rise early and go to bed late to get their work done, the women are to spend their time on textile work — spinning, weaving, and preparing cloth.
• 1066 and All That credits Richard Arkwright with the invention of the "Spinning Jenny, or unmarried textile working girl," who was made obsolete by the later discovery of mules.
• Anne of Green Gables:
  • Miss Cornelia shows her tender side by her relentless sewing — even at Thanksgiving — clothing for poor children.
  • A man, sulking in silence, is finally galvanized to speak when his wife says he crochets beautifully.
• The Ark: In this Margot Benary-Isbert story, Mother takes up sewing, quickly, in order to make money, and Andrea's best friend Lenchen is marvelous at sewing.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: Textile work is generally the kind of work left to women. For both commoners and nobles.
  • Lutz's mother, Karla, weaves fabric, while Effa works as a dyer (but is also a skilled seamstress), and Tuuli becomes a seamstress apprentice after her baptism, with her goal to become as good as Benno's sister, Corinna, one day. Myne is told that women who can cook and sew are viewed as beautiful, as it's a very useful and attractive skill to have in a family.
  • Noblewomen are also expected to embroider clothes, though they only do this for their significant other and their children usually. In the first half of Part 4, Rozemyne asks her female retainers to help her embroider Schwartz and Weiss' new protective clothes.
• In Barbara Vine's Asta's Book, Asta is a self-willed, strong-minded young Danish woman, but in some ways, she's very conventional and she takes pride in the fact that she sews and embroiders beautifully. She's an expert on drawn thread work and petit point. Toward the end of her very long life, she's taken on the project of embroidering her daughter's monogram on every piece of linen she owns.
• Axtara: Banking and Finance: Princess Mia of Elnacier says that her mother tried to teach her and her sisters needlepoint because back in the queen's homeland of Nuveria, that's just what women did with each other on social occasions. Mia never caught on, and she ruefully recounts how often she would accidentally prick her fingers; she says she was much better at the less girly field of tanning. Axtara admits that she wouldn't be able to do needlework even if she wanted because of her Cumbersome Claws.
• The Belgariad: Polgara mends while sitting around even though she could magically repair the clothing much quicker.
• A Bouquet of Czech Folktales:
  • The heroine of "The Golden Spinning Wheel" is a hard-working girl who likes spinning. Her step-sister takes her place as a bride of a nobleman. She longs to have the golden spinning wheel from the title, which reveals what she did to her sister. Her husband finds out what she did.
  • The heroine of "Wedding Shirts" is waiting for her lover who went abroad. He told her to spin, weave, and sew their wedding shirts and her bottom drawer until he comes back.
• Brave New World: Girls are brainwashed to stop them from doing textile work themselves, in order to make them spend money to support the economy.
• A Brother's Price: Features a broad inversion of most gender roles. As men, Jerin Whistler and Cullen Moorland are expected to have an interest in fashions, textiles, embroidery, and so on, but while they're both proficient at these things, neither has a love of it. Some female characters — tailors — have an interest, but others don't think about it at all.
• Castle in the Air: The final reason the soldier cites for wanting to marry Princess Beatrice is that she can probably darn socks. She assures him that she can.
• The Tyrolean and German girls in the Chalet School books are big on sewing, periods are set aside for mending clothes, and being able to sew and mend is considered an important ability for a potential wife and homemaker. More tomboyish or rebellious girls, such as Cornelia and Joey, hate sewing, and Joey's efforts drive Gisela to distraction in the early books. Several girls in the Hobbies Club do various crafts as their hobbies.
• In The Chronicles of Prydain, embroidering tapestries is one of the skills Eilonwy is expected to learn as a lady. Like with most of her lessons, she's not too fond of it. She does make a banner for Taran, but her comments on how well it went when she tried to put a picture of Taran in would suggest that she's not exactly great at it.
• Chivalric Romance: In various forms of the Constance cycle, Constance is said to support herself in Rome by her needlework, until her husband's pilgrimage leads to their reunion.
• Circleverse: The world has many kinds of magic worked through crafts. Two characters are "stitch witches" who work through, and enjoy working with, thread and cloth. All of the main four, including the boy Briar (though he uses cotton and flax since his magic is with plants), learn to spin fibers into thread, but it's primarily shown around the two women whose magic is worked through it.
• Classroom of the Elite: Kokoro Inogashira is a girly and demure girl whose hobby is sewing.
• Cleopatras Moon: In keeping with Ancient Roman values, all the women in Octavianus' household are expected to spin wool, weave fabric, and sew; and Octavianus claims (falsely) only to wear clothes made by them as part of his Just the First Citizen act. The Egyptian princess forcibly adopted into the house is appalled by the Stay in the Kitchen attitude and avoids learning to spin as a small act of rebellion.
• In Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, Dr. Dunworthy, trying to scare Kivrin off the Middle Ages, pointed out that she would have to learn to spin — with a spindle, not a spinning wheel, which hadn't been invented yet.
• Played with in Dragon Bones: Ward finds new clothes in his room, and notes that his Cloudcuckoolander mother is the only person in the castle who would have the necessary skills to do that kind of embroidery. However, it turns out it was actually Oreg, their house ghost/servant/slave who did it. With magic. But he also likes to do it by hand, as he has a lot of time to pass.
• Creel, the heroine of Dragonskin Slippers is a talented embroideress, who spearheads a fashion trend for stain-glass patterned gowns.
• The Draka: The serf Rakhsana knits and embroiders, while Draka women never do such things.
• Earth's Children's Clan of the Cave Bear: Making clothes - not textiles, but out of animal skins - cleaning, etc. is women's work. In the Clan, males and females have different Genetic Memory such that women can't hunt and men can't cook/make clothes/etc.
• Emma:
  • Emma isn't in handiwork a lot, but she says she may make carpetwork when she's older.
  • English Rose Jane Fairfax sews very well, among her other numerous accomplishments. She's said to be making stuff for her aunt and grandma.
  • In Northanger Abbey, one particular friend of Miss Thorpe's, a Miss Andrews, is netting herself the sweetest cloak Catherine could conceive.
• In Alethea Kontis's Enchanted, "loving and giving" Friday is always sewing clothes for the poor.
• In the Five Children and It sequel Phoenix and the Carpet, Team Mom Althea uses her sewing skills to repair the titular carpet.
• In Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novel For The Emperor, one of the insults the former 301st (all male) throws at the former 296th (all female) is that they were doing needlework as rear echelon soldiers.
• The Four Loves (Lewis): C. S. Lewis recounts the story of a Mrs. Fidget, who included both knitting and sewing among her wifely and maternal virtues. Which meant the others in the family had to wear the things. (Her death caused them to donate a lot of them.)
• Freckles:
  • Angel speaks at length about clothes mothers make for newborns.

    People that can afford anything at all, always buy white for little new babies — linen and lace, and the very finest things to be had. There's a young woman living near us who cut up her wedding clothes to have fine things for her baby. Mothers who love and want their babies don't buy little rough, ready-made things, and they don't run up what they make on an old sewing machine. They make fine seams, and tucks, and put on lace and trimming by hand. They sit and stitch, and stitch little, even stitches, every one just as careful. Their eyes shine and their faces glow. When they have to quit to do something else, they look sorry and fold up their work so particularly. There isn't much worth knowing about your mother that those little clothes won't tell. I can see her putting the little stitches into them and smiling with shining eyes over your coming. Freckles, I'll wager you a dollar those little clothes of yours are just alive with the dearest, tiny handmade stitches.

  • Later, she can assure him that his mother must have loved him on this ground

    No little clothes were ever whiter. I never in all my life saw such dainty, fine, little stitches; and as for loving you, no boy's mother ever loved him more!

• Goblin Slayer: Cow Girl's spotlight chapter in volume 12 centers on her teaching Padfoot Waitress how to sew and deciding to make new sweaters for herself, her uncle, and Goblin Slayer for the Yule season.
• Harry Potter: Mostly played straight, with Molly Weasley and Hermione Granger showing proficiency in magic-aided knitting, and Sybil Trelawney and Minerva McGonagall referenced as enjoying needlework. Certain male characters also participate, with Rubeus Hagrid shown knitting on the train to London in Philosopher’s Stone, and Albus Dumbledore saying that he enjoys knitting patterns in Half-Blood Prince.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar novel Take a Thief, Skif is mocked by the other boy Trainees for being in the laundry/mending chore section at the Collegium — he'd learned to do it as a thief, as dirty and/or damaged clothing is easier to take without being noticed, and cleaning and mending it before taking it to the fence improves the resale value substantially for zero risk — until he points out that this means he's the only boy in a room full of girls, at which point he is suspected of secret genius.
• In Rick Riordan's The Heroes of Olympus novel The Mark of Athena, Annabeth is put to the test at weaving as she follows the titular mark.
• Early on in High School D×D, Issei is stressing out the night before a very important dodgeball game and decides to calm his nerves by... embroidering headbands for his team. The girls on the team are shocked that Issei, a very stereotypical teenage male horndog goofball, does enough of such a feminine skill to be so good at it. It's an early hint that there's a lot more to Issei than his behavior and narration let on.
• In The House of the Spirits, Clara's older sister Rosa spends almost all of her time sewing a massive and very complicated tapestry, which worries her mother Nivea as she fears it's all that she will ever be able to do well. The tapestry is left unfinished when she's fatally poisoned in an attempt on her father Severo's life.
• In Ice Crown, when the inn maid gives Roane clothes, she mentions they are not a lady's, being her own seaming.
• The Iliad: Andromache is working on clothing for Hector when she is told of his death.
• INVADERS of the ROKUJYOUMA!?: The school's Knitting Club consists solely of the Delicate and Sickly Harumi and male protagonist Koutarou, the latter of whom laments that people probably think he just joined to find a girlfriend. When Harumi's graduation approaches, Koutarou asks one of his female friends to join the club as a figurehead president, believing that first-year girls wouldn't want to join a Knitting Club run by a guy (especially not one with a face as scary as his).
• I Swear I Won't Bother You Again!: Violette learned how to sew in her prison cell in the original timeline and plans to become a nun after graduating from the academy and work as a seamstress. However, since sewing is considered a servant skill in high society, Violette keeps this skill a secret in the new timeline. In the manga, she is able to use her skills to fix Prince Claudia’s cape after it gets accidentally torn.
• Jane Eyre:
  • When Bessie visits adult Jane, she asks about her schooling, and her last question is whether she can work on muslin and canvas. Jane can, and Bessie pronounces her to be quite a lady.
  • At Lowood school, pupils had to sew and repair their uniforms themselves. Jane later mentions they had bad needles and thread.
  • Mrs. Fairfax, a housekeeper at Thorfield, often knits.
• In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, when the society had to be disbanded, many of the theoretical magicians became nuisances, having nothing to do — and bothered their female relations at their needlework.
• Little House on the Prairie: Both Ma and Laura hate sewing, but are still skilled, efficient seamstresses due to this trope (worth noting that the only jobs available to a woman at that time would be teaching and sewing, so they have to take those jobs if they want any chance to make money). At one point, she gets a job helping a woman in town sew shirts for all the bachelors who don't have a wife to do it for them, and the woman comments that Laura beats her sewing buttonholes. The narration explains that Laura hates sewing buttonholes so much, she's learned to do it quickly. The day Pa buys Ma a sewing machine is almost the happiest we ever see her, and when Laura gets innovative with muslin sheets, Ma, normally a traditionalist, only comments, "Our grandmothers would turn in their graves, but after all, these are modern times." By contrast, Laura's sister Mary does seem to enjoy sewing, enough that she learns to do hems and the like by touch after losing her sight.
• Demonstrated in both Ann Clark's 1943 Little Navajo Bluebird and Margaret Phelps' 1944 Chia and the Lambs, both about Navajo girls learning traditional female occupations including sheep herding, preparing wool, and weaving. Both are pretty much Truth in Television although Bluebird has more realism while Chia tends to be Fair for Its Day and strays into Tonto Talk.
• Little Women: When Professor Bhaer comes calling on her family, Jo sits down with her sewing. Other chapters reveal her to be not just a seamstress (IE one who sews clothes together) but a dressmaker, cutting out and fitting dresses for her sisters as adults. That was a much rarer skill than plain sewing- most women didn't do it for themselves, instead going to a professional. And she seems to enjoy it, getting very annoyed when Amy drags her away from making a gown to go calling on their friends.
• Inverted in Stephen King's The Long Walk: Ray Garraty teaches his girlfriend how to knit. Also, the mill workers in "Graveyard Shift" work in a textile mill (an example of Write What You Know, as King himself worked in a textile mill in high school).
• In Mansfield Park, Fanny and Lady Bertram often do some needlework. Lady Bertram's work is not very useful, nor is it pretty. The ladies also often sew for their neighbourhood charity.
• In Daddy-Long-Legs sequel My Dear Enemy, Sallie expects this trope. She is surprised to learn that Dr. Robin McRae is rather skilled at knitting. He explains that he learned to do it as a teenager in his native Scotland.
• Nory Ryans Song: Nory is a poor seamstress and makes a mess of the shawl she tries to stitch. In contrast, Anna is talented at sewing, which comes up twice: she gives Nory a shawl she sewed, which Nory sells to Lord Cunningham's wife for coins to buy food and get Maggie's package from the post office, and in the end she fixes Nory's ruined shawl and gives it to her to wear for her journey to America.
• In Oak Hill, Elaine is the sewer. Even Maris borrows a needle from her to do some.
• In John Hemry's Paul Sinclair's Burden of Proof, Carl talks of how Paul and Jen have settled down since they started to date; he expects Jen to knit and cook and stuff.
• In Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, Alicia was always better at sewing than Kate, as well as at general femininity.
• Mary Renault tells this anecdote about Alexander the Great in The Persian Boy: When the Greek army invaded Persia and captured most of the royal family, Alexander brought the royal ladies some yarn for weaving. Only slaves did this in Persia, and when he was informed, he apologized and said his mother and sisters did this all the time and he had wanted to give his hostages something to do. The Queen Mother became his friend after this. This is based on real events, like much of Renault's work; it's in Quintus Curtius. Though how seriously to take anything Curtius said about Alexander is a matter of some debate among historians.
• In John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Mr. Brisk woos Mercy because she is always sewing until he learns she is sewing not for profit but for the poor.
• In Plato's account, he, arguing that you have to trust experts, points out that a woman's authority is greater than a man's in textile work.
• Pride and Prejudice:
  • Mr. Bingley casually mentions that all ladies are accomplished, meaning that they all do needlework like knitting bags and similar things.
  • Elizabeth is sewing when Mr. Darcy asked her father for his permission for them to marry. He needed to speak with her and pretended to be admiring her work.
• The Princesses Of Westfalin: Jessica Day George's Princess of the Midnight Ball plays this: hero Galen is an active knitter, much to the surprise of the women. One comments that they had knitted, and knitted, and knitted for the soldiers, and Galen has to tell her that none of it ever reached him. he actually uses his skills to make the charms that defeat the King Under Stone. He notes that it's a useful skill for a soldier: it helps pass the time and the ability to make a nice warm pair of socks comes in handy.
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, in the Back Story, Eramus had once insulted Miranda by saying her lack of womanly talents showed a deficiency of character, and Theo thrashed him for it. Miranda learned the skill and embroidered a unicorn for Theo. In the current day of the story, he still has it.
• In The Red Tent, Jacob's wives are all seen working on textiles in some capacity. Zilpah and Bilhah are said to be especially good at it. Bilhah tells Dinah a "Just So" Story about how women learned spinning and weaving from a goddess named Enhenduanna, and Bilhah's "personal goddess" is Uttu, also associated with weaving. After Bilhah receives a beating for her affair with Reuben, a major tip-off that something in her has changed is that the thread she spins gradually becomes thinner and thinner before she runs away.
• Re:Zero: Petra, one of the maids, wanted to be a seamstress at the capital. In Arc 4, she makes a handmade handkerchief for Subaru.
• In Hobby Webb's Rose And The Magicians Mask, Miss Fell uses knitting in magic at one point to save Mr. Fountain's life. Later, she examines Rose and critically observes that as a man, Mr. Fountain is not teaching her what a proper young lady and magician should know; she should know how to embroider, both for propriety and because she will find it useful.
• Plutarch: In Sayings of Spartan Women, this is inverted when an Ionian woman showed off her valuable weaving, and a Spartan woman pointed to her four sons, well-behaved: "Such should be the employments of the good and honourable woman, and it is over these that she should be elated and boastful." (For context: Freeborn Spartan women and men were all staunchly Idle Rich, and they viewed essentially all production-related jobs as "peasant labor.")
• In Seesaw Girl, due to the traditions of seventeenth century Korea, Jade Blossom is learning how to embroider from her female relatives, who all spend their days sewing and stitching needlework. Her mother is mentioned to be a highly skilled embroiderer, and on her aunt Graceful Willow's wedding day, Jade gives her a silk drawstring pouch she made herself as a gift. Later, Jade's mother allows her to start work on an embroidery screen for her future wedding dowry.
• The Ship That Sailed to Mars: Many fairy craftsmen are called upon to build the titular sailing ship, but the making of the sails is relegated to fairy women. They're described unflatteringly as "two or three old crones" who "wove the sails of thread of swansdown, and ornamented them with colours strung from peacocks' tails."
• Silas Marner (subtitled "The Weaver of Raveloe"): Inverted. Silas makes beautiful linen, really loves his work and you can hear his loom going day and night.
• In Solstice Wood, the Fiber Guild is all female. Iris explains it's a sewing circle, really. They actually work textile magic to contain the Fair Folk.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Feminine Sansa can embroider beautifully, and tomboyish Arya is always avoiding it. In an ironic reference to the pastime she hated so much, when she's given a sword she names it "Needle".
• A Tale of Two Cities: Features Madame Defarge and her fellow female revolutionaries during the Reign of Terror, who sit beside the guillotine and encode the names of the executed into their sewing patterns. This is based on the real-life tricoteuses who famously knitted beside the guillotine so casually.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime:
  • Shuna shows off her femininity by showing her skill in weaving silk on a loom. Shuna is made responsible for clothing everyone in their fledgling village and had already woven several rolls of silk.
  • Haruna is a girly goblin who's in charge of sewing clothes for the rest of the tribe. She later becomes Shuna's apprentice and gets better at the craft, learning how to create silk and textiles.
• In Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child, the Rothmer women are in charge of laundry and mending clothes.
• Tinker's Wolf Who Rules: Tinker thinks about how wives do the laundry and even have discussions about how to get grass stains out.
• In Tolkien's Legendarium's works, all the mentioned textile workers are women. Vairë (the title of one of the Valier) means "weaver"; and Luthien, Galadriel, and Arwen are all accomplished weavers. As with other elven crafts, there is a magical element to their work (Luthien's cloak is the most explicitly magical, as she is by far the most powerful). Much more significantly, Fëanor's mother Miriel is said to be highly skilled in sewing, embroidery and "other skills requiring finesse", even by the standards of the highly artistic Noldor. She ends up working for the aforementioned Vairë, weaving the stories of the House of Finwë, which is what the Legendarium basically is (the only story that has nothing to do with a member of Finwë's extended family is The Hobbit). In one story, Tolkien tells of a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon lord who becomes stranded on Tol Eressëa and writes down the stories that Tolkien claims to have "translated" based off of Miriel's tapestries and the recollections of the elves living on that island. So, the "real version" of Tolkien's Legendarium, is actually the work of Miriel, but we have to be content with the written version since we can't go to Valinor.
• Tortall Universe:
  • Song of the Lioness has a few female mages working with thread and string. Alanna, who crossdressed for years to become a knight, learns to do this, and some normal spinning as relaxation.
    • One of Alanna's more downplayed awesome moments come from her male mage student proclaiming this trope in a sexist manner. Alanna immediately proves him wrong with the thread magic.
  • Kel is surprised to learn that Raoul is a skilled seamster in Protector of the Small, but as a bachelor knight, he's the only one who would be sewing his clothes.
  • In Beka Cooper, Beka's younger sisters are both being trained in sewing by Lady Teodorie, and Beka is quite good herself. She is surprised to learn in Bloodhound not that Goodwin sews (which is a standard skill for a medieval woman) but that she embroiders.
• Subverted in The Wheel of Time. Most female protagonists are Aes Sedai, and when Aes Sedai speak of "weaving", they're really talking about magic and/or casting spells — for example, a fire spell is referred to as a 'fire weave'.
• Alex's mother in When Women Were Dragons conforms very closely with middle-class American 1950s femininity. Part of her femininity is expressed in her careful sewing, knitting, and decorative knotwork. The knots in particular are also relevant to her mathematical work and family tradition.
• In Wise Child, both Wise Child's mentor Juniper and mother Maeve have weaving looms in their homes, and Wise Child singles out spinning and weaving (and textile work in general) as something she hates doing because it's "what girls do". Juniper also sews a dress for Wise Child to wear at Beltane.
• In With a Tangled Skein, Niobe is a skilled weaver. Her textile skills come in handy when she becomes an Aspect of Fate.
• In Xenophon's account, he depicts Socrates explaining to a man that he could get his female relatives in his household to do textile work, and support them on proceeds. He also has him point out that where spinning wool is in question, the women are the authorities and so are treated as such.

• Rosey Grier, an actor and American football player, would poke fun at himself on television appearances in The '70s, as his reveal of his favorite hobby being needlepoint was in stark contrast to his macho/tough persona.
• All in the Family: Mike takes up macrame, and Archie mocks him for having yet another girly pastime.

  Mike: Don't say it.
  Archie: There's nothing to say, "Florence." ... Will you stop doing that? Some friend of mine might come walking through the door and find out I got a fruitcake for a son-in-law.

• Blake's 7: Subverted in the episode "Power", involving a planet where both sexes are at war; the leader of the male faction is showing sewing in his hut, instead of his (abducted) wife doing this chore.
• In Coronation Street one of the biggest employers in the area is Underworld a lingerie factory and all of its machinists are women except for Sean Tully who is a stereotypical Camp Gay. There are male workers beside him but they are the co-owner and the stockroomist / delivery driver.
• Doctor Who:
  • The First Doctor companion Barbara does dressmaking as a hobby, but neither Susan nor Vicki can sew despite them both being interested in materials and always making a beeline for dress fabric in any settings where it's available (such as "The Keys of Marinus" and "The Romans"). In "The Chase", Vicki actually charges in on Barbara making her a dress while seeking attention, causing her to slice through the fabric and ruin it.
  • In "The Androids of Tara", Strella is working on an embroidery frame in her cell, and she and Romana are mildly discussing the work when the Doctor finds them.
  • In "The King's Demons", the lady of the castle embroiders while talking with her husband.
• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman:
  • When Dr. Quinn expects a baby, she's said to have improved a lot at sewing. She made a christening robe for the baby as a present.
  • Mrs. Quinn, Dr. Mike's mother, knitted a comforter or blanket for the baby.
  • Emma, Matthew's girlfriend, is an impressive seamstress. She's eventually hired by a singer to sew dresses for her.
  • Many women sew their own dresses and they have gatherings from time to time to sit together and sew or knit.
• Subverted in Flight of the Conchords, in which the Conchords brainstorm "things that women like." Jemaine suggests weaving, but Bret responds that weaving is a man's game, noting that he, his father, and his grandfather all weave. (Slightly off-topic: Later, Bret suggests women's rights, and Jemaine says that that is a man's thing, noting that his father is a women's rights activist who would never allow his wife to become engaged in such activism.)
• Game of Thrones: The Establishing Character Moment for the two Stark daughters — Sansa Stark is praised for her needlework, while Arya Stark runs out of the classroom to take part in archery. Sansa is also shown to be a proficient embroiderer, furrier, and leatherworker and is responsible for making her own clothes as well as items for other characters. Later Arya is given a sword which she names Needle in acknowledgement of her desire to be a great warrior instead. Subverted in Season Four when Littlefinger points out to Sansa Stark that she has matured and is no longer The Ingenue... at the time Sansa is sewing what is later revealed to be her Evil Costume Switch.
• In Gilmore Girls, Lorelai is very skilled at sewing. She makes impressive costumes for various town festivals and she frequently changes her or Rory's dress.
• Cindy on Good Girls Revolt enjoys making clothes herself, and says the same about Bea, though it doesn't appear to be the case when Bea actually shows up at the magazine.
• The Great British Sewing Bee manages to avert the trope by having a few male contestants (and at least one male judge) in the series, however it's played straight in that there's still always a much greater ratio of women to men.
• Home Improvement:
  • In an early episode, Brad joins a sewing class purely in order to meet girls. Unfortunately, this backfires on him; his classmates find out what he's doing and join the class too, meaning it winds up being a class full of guys and he's still stuck sewing.

    Tim: Brad, I'd love to help you, but I've got a drawer full of socks that need darning!

  • Later on, the idea winds up being subverted when Brad is seen working on his project at home while dealing with Randy and Mark teasing him. Al, who is watching the boys as Tim and Jill are out, tells them that he actually had to learn how to sew when he was in the Navy as it is considered an important skill for servicemen.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Madeleine Éparvier is a dressmaker who owns a boutique in Paris where she sells women's clothing that she has designed and created herself.
• In Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, one of the bullies is ashamed to tell anyone that he's in the sewing club and very good at it, though eventually gets tired of hiding his secret. Not that anyone cared.
• In Odd Squad, Olive reveals herself to be quite the seamstress, managing to make a Burly Bears basketball outfit and a Burly Bears soccer outfit. Ironically, despite being a girl, she's far from feminine and is instead a Tomboy.
  • In "A Case of the Sing-Alongs", Ms. O is shown weaving purple string through a needle at one point, hinting that she may also have some skill in sewing.
  • Inverted in the case of Oscar, who is male. He is a very capable tailor and has a sewing kit handy for whatever fashion-related thing might come up.
  • Also inverted for O'Q, Precinct 13579's personal tailor introduced in Season 2, who is also male and works in the Tailoring department of Odd Squad. His job, as well as the job of those in the department, is to design and alter the uniforms of agents in every department, from Investigation to Science.
• In Once Upon a Time (2011), Rumpelstiltskin (mentioned above) teaches Cora how to spin thread into gold.
• In Oshin, one of the businesses that the protagonist Shin "Oshin" Tanemura takes up is a textile and clothes-making one handled by her and her husband Ryuuzo. Among other things, she's seen using a Western sewing machine and teaching the local male Old Retainer how to sew manually so he can help her out.
• RuPaul's Drag Race: Every season will feature at least one challenge where contestants have to make an outfit from scratch (as opposed to the outfits they bring from home). This harkens back to Ru’s early days, when drag was very underground and queens had to make their outfits at their venues.Although the show has been on since 2008, there’s always at least one queen who claims she just doesn’t sew. While it’s still not common for the best seamstress of the cast to be the victor, sewing is still a fundamental skill to be a successful competitor.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Mudd's Women", sewing is one skill that ought to be considered above looks.

  Eve: Is this the kind of wife you want, Ben? Not someone to help you, not a wife to cook and sew and cry and need, but this kind. Selfish, vain, useless. Is this what you really want?

• In Xena: Warrior Princess, embroidery is one of Xena's many skills.

• The Bible:
  • Delilah weaves Samson's hair into the web of her loom. Even ladies of her high social class took pride in doing such work.
  • The Book of Proverbs example quoted above sings the praises of a woman who runs a textile business as well as taking care of her family. It's often used by some sects in the modern age to demonstrate "a woman's place", but it was actually written to encourage men to appreciate what their wives were doing. Indeed, the woman in the poem is portrayed as strong and capable, and her husband boasts about her to his friends and colleagues.
  • Dorcas (or Tabitha) from Acts 9 makes clothing for widows and the poor.
  • Lydia from Acts 16 is a dealer in purple cloth, and she appears to specialize in the dyeing process.
• Chinese Mythology:
  • A fox woman is often incompetent at the vital skill of needlework.
  • The Tanabata legend (and all its variants across East Asia, known on its site by its Japanese variant) has Orihime the Weaver Princess, a great spinner and seamstress who spends almost all the time in textile work. After she marries Hikoboshi the Cow Herder, they both neglect their duties and Orihime's father Tentei punishes them by turning them into literally Star-Crossed Lovers.
• Classical Mythology:
  • The Three Fates spin, measure, and cut thread in their determination of lives.
  • A young woman named Arachne claimed she was better at weaving than the goddess Athena, who is so pissed off (since yanno, Pride is one of the worse sins a human could ever commit) that she comes round to challenge Arachne to a contest or "weave-off". When Arachne loses she's so upset she hangs herself, so Athena turns her into a spider. In other versions, Athena was still upset but wanted to give Arachne a last chance before she damned herself and did so under the disguise of an old woman, but Arachne was so arrogant that she blew Athena's warnings off and then came the challenge with the same disastrous results. In another version of the story, the victor was unclear, but Athena curses Arachne because the latter's weaving was blasphemous/insulting to the Olympians (some versions say that the weaving was critical of the gods' entitledness/rampant sexual misconduct). Other versions say that Arachne's weaving was indeed better, but that she was a Sore Winner, and/or Athena was a Sore Loser, so Athena cursed her.
  • Princess Philomela of Athens wove a tapestry with pictures showing the Trauma Conga Line that had happened to her — her older sister Procne's husband, King Thereus of Thracia, had raped her, cut out her tongue, and locked her away. She then gave the tapestry to a servant as a gift for the queen, which let Procne know about Philomela's Break the Cutie process. It went From Bad to Worse immediately afterwards.
  • One of the times Hercules was enslaved, he was made to learn how to spin yarn. It was intended to be humiliating, but he found out that he liked it and was good at it.
  • In The Achilleid, Thetis speaks about Hercules' time sewing and working with wool as if doing so was just as feminine as Jupiter literally turning into a woman.
• The Odyssey: Penelope, wife of Odysseus and a symbol of monogamy, puts off her suitors with her weaving — not, for once, clothes, but a funeral shroud to be used at her father-in-law's funeral (he is, in fact, still alive). She tears it apart every night and starts again in the morning.
  • During the Roman kingdom, once the men bet about their wives, back at Rome, and return to find all of them but Lucretia were partying; she was weaving with her maids. This was the point at which Sextus Tarquinius resolved to rape her, which drove poor Lucretia to kill herself. The citizens of Rome did not take that kindly.
• In medieval legend, Emperor Constantine's mother Helena supported herself and her son with her humble needlework until her son's grace and charm caused his royal father to notice him, his identity was revealed, and the couple were reunited.

• The traditional Irish folksong "The Spinning Wheel" tells the story of a girl spinning and her grandmother knitting. The girl has to wait for her grandmother to fall asleep so she can leave her work and go meet her boyfriend.

• The Chinese poem The Ballad of Mulan starts with Mulan weaving while lamenting that her father was too old to serve in the army and her brother was too young to take his place, which prompted her to do just that. There are deleted scenes from the Disney film that depicted her working at a loom, most likely as a reference to the original ballad.
• In the poem The Lady of Shalott, the heroine is a lady who is eternally weaving, by night and day, the reflections of what she sees outside on her loom.
• In William Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, Lucrece, following the legend, is spinning while other women are reveling.

  During which siege the principal men of the army meeting one evening at the tent of Sextus Tarquinius, the king's son, in their discourses after supper, every one commended the virtues of his own wife; among whom Collatinus extolled the incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia. In that pleasant humour they all posted to Rome; and intending, by their secret and sudden arrival, to make trial of that which every one had before avouched, only Collatinus finds his wife, though it were late in the night, spinning amongst her maids: the other ladies were all found dancing and revelling, or in several disports.

• In Carousel, Julie and her friends all work weaving at the mill. Not in Liliom, the play on which the musical was based.
• In the play Dancing at Lughnasa a couple of the women earn money by handknitting gloves. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue the narrator mentions that when the textile factory opened up and ruined the handmade market, one got a job there and hated it but worked there until the day she died.
• In Dorothy L. Sayers' The Emperor Constantine, Fausta brought her sewing to her first meeting with Helena. Maximian comments on it after discussing how she had been his housekeeper since her mother's death.
• In Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, female lead Senta is introduced when a bunch of other girls in her village, under the direction of their Team Mom Mary, are using their spins to get some textile materials ready for use, but Senta herself is slacking off. She then scares the shit out of her companions as she switches from singing with them a local tune about spinning ("Summ und brumm, du gutes Rädchen", transl. as "Whirl and whirl, good wheel") to telling them the story of the Dutchman.
• The title character in Lysistrata has a long speech in which she compares the management of a state to the preparation of wool for weaving, to make the point that women have a stake in the way the government is run. This is arguably Played for Laughs; the point is that the current government of Athens is doing an even worse job than women would.
• Mariana Pineda by Federico García Lorca:
  • The title character embroidering a liberal slogan on a flag is an important plot point. Needlework also gets mentioned several times during the play as Foreshadowing. The heroine of the ballad that Mariana's children sing in the second act is shown embroideiring; several characters also comment positively on Mariana's sewing skill.
  • Averted in the conversation between Mariana and the police chief Pedrosa, where Pedrosa mentions that embroidering is the hobby of the Spanish king.

• Fire Emblem has more than one example:
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, Ninja Maid Cherche is pretty good at sewing and likes taking charge of anything related to keep the group's clothes well-maintained. The other two who are skilled at needlepoint, however, are Gerome and Gaius. Unsurprisingly, Gerome is Cherche's Kid from the Future. And Gaius can be his father, if the player hooks him up with Cherche.
    • In the Female Avatar's support chain with her potential boyfriend Priam, she repays him for helping her train by both cleaning his training gear and washing/sewing his cape. The discovery flusters the Hell out of him.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates, the support chain between Camilla and Hinoka shows that Camilla is pretty good at sewing and knitting, and in the C one she says she repaired the Avatar's cape with her own hands. She then offers to teach Hinoka how to sew in an attempt to bond with her, and Hinoka accepts even when it takes her a while to start doing it well.
    • Oboro is the daughter of a famous deceased tailor and not only she's very fashionable, but she's damn good at sewing and knows a lot about clothing. Her dream is to have her own kimono shop, she offers Hayato to repair his clothes when she sees him fidgeting in front of her in their S support, she also chooses Takumi's clothes for special occasions, an official art piece has her sewing, and at least two of her potential children, Rhajat and Gaius' expy Asugi, have inherited her sewing talents.
    • In the Second Generation group, Forrest zigzags this since he's a guy who can sew extremely well... but he's also a very, VERY girly guy.
    • If the Crown of Nibelung manga is to be believed, the Female Avatar is a pretty decent seamstress too.
• Galaxy Angel: Starting from Moonlit Lovers, Vanilla learns to knit from Dr. Kera in order to be better girlfriend material for Tact, making a sweater for him as a gift. He later returns the favor by making a pair of mittens for her.
• In June's Journey, it is a nod to June's general tomboy persona that she insists the only sewing she can do successfully is medical sutures (she is a trained nurse).
• In one of the credits illustrations of The King of Fighters '98, Kyo's girlfriend Yuki is seen sewing his school jacket◊.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The sailcloth that Link uses throughout Skyward Sword was sewn by Zelda. Exploring her room also shows that she knows how to knit.
  • In Breath of the Wild's expansion DLC "The Champions' Ballad", the light-blue Non-Uniform Uniform outfits worn by the Champions are said to have all been sewn by Princess Zelda. Considering the high defense stats that Link's Champion's Tunic has, it's also made with very durable and high-quality material on top of being well-sewn.
• Gemma from Ninja Pizza Girl makes her own clothes out of scavenged materials. This becomes a plot point in one chapter, and in-game you can dress Gemma up in different outfits that you "buy" with recycled items that you pick up on your runs.
• Played with in Persona 4. Kanji Tatsumi enjoys doing textile work and is very talented in doing it, since his mother is the owner of the local textile shop. However, because of this trope, he has trouble when dealing with girls, as well as lacking confidence in his manliness. Obviously, his social link then revolves around this and him dealing with all of this.
• In Shepherd's Crossing 2, the marriage customs of the town state that a woman who wishes to propose to a man must knit him a handmade blanket. If you're playing as a female PC and wish to complete the Romance Sidequest, you must shear, spin, and knit lots of wool in order to get married.

• A scene from Kaho Nagira's path in Crescendo (JP) has her sewing a shirt.◊
• Lauren from Double Homework is good at anything related to clothes, including mending and modifying.
• Very justified in the case of Mira Kagami in Tokimeki Memorial: She is from a poor household, so she learned to sew as a way to help her mother take care of her siblings. If the Player Character lets Mira borrow his coat under some special circumstances ^note , she will repair it before returning it.

• Earthsong: Gender-Inverted. The one tailor on the titular planet is an anthropomorphic spider man who maintains a careful Truce Zone between two warring factions of (mostly) Action Girls. His love of swishy fabrics and haute couture notwithstanding, his Let's Get Dangerous! moments are brutal.
• Kanaya from Homestuck has an interest in sewing and is one of the more feminine trolls. She's made Tavros a Tinkerbull plush, Vriska her Fairy Dress, and has apparently collaborated on a few of Rose's outfits.
• Wooden Rose: Lillian is a demure Proper Lady who is devoted to her family, and is introduced working on some embroidery. Nessa, her younger sister, teases her a little about it by telling her she's always sewing and should go out to town more often. Her talent for sewing later proves vital to saving Eric from bleeding out over a stab wound.

• Generator (Jade Sinclair) has become an impressive seamstress in the Whateley Universe. This is important as part of her character development because Jade was born Jared Reilley. She is probably the most feminine member of Team Kimba. She also has a power that is ideally suited to sewing and knitting.

• The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: Jane Bennet works in the fashion industry, often with fabric. In her first appearance, she brings Lizzie a blouse that she fixed for her.
• In No Evil Kajortoq is probably the most feminine of the spirits and she spends a lot of time sewing and weaving. She even enchants some of her work, like the poppy-embroidered ponchos that keep the cold-blooded spirits warm in winter and some saddle-blankets that she promises the jackalope salesman will make the jackalopes that wear them equal to his best animal (too bad for him that he tries to hoist off an unruly beast as "his best animal" in exchange for them).
• Welcome to Sanditon: Ladies of Sanditon organize a craft night once a week, and the first thing they did when Gigi arrived was some weird knitted potholder.

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: In The Warriors of Kyoshi, Katara is mending a tear in Sokka's pants, but when he starts spouting sexist rhetoric about girls being better at sewing than boys, she puts on a contrary smile and throws the garment back in his face, unfinished.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: In Momma's Little Ed, Edd is shown mending curtains at his mother's request, which causes Eddy to suppress his obvious laughter and call the task "girl stuff".
• Ewoks: In the second season, when all the characters are implied to be studying to become something, Latara is a "hoodmaker apprentice". This is later mentioned in her introduction card for the Shadows of Endor comic, with a mention that she designed her unusual hood by herself. link◊
• Gravity Falls: Mabel Pines is very much a Girly Girl and knitting cute, colorful sweaters is one of her hobbies. She can be seen periodically working on new sweaters throughout the series.
• Il Était Une Fois...: The The Roaring '20s episode has Pierre as a mechanic/car builder and his girlfriend Pierrette as a seamstress and fashion designer.
• The Loud House: Leni is an aspiring fashion designer who makes most of her own clothing and one of the most feminine of the Loud sisters.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Rarity is considerably the most feminine of the mane 6. She designs and sews her own fashions.
  • Even the second place for the most feminine, Fluttershy, turns out to have "freaky knowledge" about sewing.
    • In the micro-series comics, Fluttershy has an 'Extreme Knitting' hobby, which she treats as a Guilty Pleasure. Her cottage has a secret room behind a bookcase, full of objects such as 'cups' for chickens to sit on, parasprites, butterflies, birds, books, dragons... every single one of them made through knitting.
• Averted in The Owl House, where the only two characters who are ever shown with an affinity for sewing are Darius and Hunter, neither of whom are ever treated as being unmanly for it. Then again, most forms of discrimination flat out don't exist on the Boiling Isles, so the idea of traditional gender roles is probably a foreign concept.
• The Simpsons: There's an episode where Marge tells Lisa about a quilt that her female ancestors have contributed to for decades. Marge added a patch that said "Keep On Truckin'" but she didn't understand what it meant.
• South Park: In one episode the boys all take shop & the girls all take home ec. (Kenny manages to get himself placed in the Home Ec class because there's a lower risk of getting killed there.)

  Mr. Adler: Now, does anybody know why you're in shop class?
  Stan: Because we had to choose between this and Home Ec, and we didn't wanna be sissies?

• Work It Out Wombats!: In "Gift For a Fish," Ellie, a woman, knits a hammock for the baby fish.

• In ancient Rome, the women of the family would come out to the central courtyard to do their textile work as the patron of the family dealt with clients. (By being thus visible, they were demonstrating that the family had nothing to hide.)
  • "She worked wool" is found inscribed on many a Roman woman's tombstone as a sort of shorthand for old fashioned feminine virtue. Especially if she were from a high enough social class that she would have slave-girls to do that work.
• Zigzagged in certain parts of the Arab World and India: there, most of the process of making new clothes — particularly weaving — has always been men's work among city people; weavers generally made cloth for themselves as well as to sell; tailors would generally buy cloth from weavers to make their own clothes as well as taking a fee for mending clothes and making new garments out of cloth third parties had bought from weavers. However, laundry was still women's work, as were minor repairs. And in the countryside, duties shifted to the women (as the men had to tend to crops and livestock) — although to what degree depended on how far away you were from town (a farmer relatively close to a fairly large urban center might purchase new cloth and clothing in town, but have his wife do repairs).
• A major historical exception to this is Britain, particularly England, as the textile industry was one of the largest in the country for hundreds of years. Male English artisans were famous across Europe for their high-quality textiles for centuries, and the continuous British attempts to increase the quality and quantity of textile output led in part to the Industrial Revolution, with English inventors inventing the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the water frame, the spinning mule, and finally, the power loom in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Lord Speaker in the House of Lords still sits on a stuffed-wool cushion called the Woolsack, as a symbol of the importance of the British wool trade. The Woolsack dates back to the 14th century.
• In pre-industrial Britain and elsewhere in Europe, weaving was an activity typically performed in private homes rather than dedicated workshops, and the weavers were often male. This is probably why "Weaver" is a fairly common surname in English: it would be a trade handed down from father to son.^note  Not for nothing is the oldest Livery Company in London the Worshipful Company of Weavers. Similar things can be said about spinners and tailors (again "Spinner" and "Tailor" and variants are common surnames).
  • And, ironically enough, Taylor is now a popular female name.
  • Part of the reason weaving can be either feminine or masculine is because most men had larger reaches than women and therefore could make larger bolts of cloth on a given loom, which was a BIG bonus in preindustrial societies; another reason is that the task is actually very physical and needs a LOT of upper-body strength and endurance, especially once the looms started scaling up and getting more (and heavier) moving parts.
• Spinsters were almost always women, and the modern use of the word to mean "woman who has never been married" (with the implication she's reached an undesirable age) does derive from the fact that they were usually women who'd failed to marry and had to support themselves (and as single women had little legal status, they didn't have many options. It's also never seen as a surname as women couldn't pass on their names and spinsters would generally be childless anyway). The actual assembly of clothes, right up until the sewing machine in the late 19th century, usually depended on the gender the clothes were intended for — tailoring was a respected profession, but ladies wouldn't like to think a man had handled their "smallclothes"! (And women of all walks of life made simple garments, like shirts, at home.) Furthermore, 'Webster' — also a common name — means a specifically female weaver.
• In Elizabethan England, more knitters were men, as they had to be in a guild. This was related to sumptuary laws, as only nobility were allowed to wear certain types of knits (gloves and stockings). When Elizabeth found this out, she changed the laws to allow more common people to have employment options.
• Opus Anglicanum; embroideries created by mostly male artisans which were highly treasured throughout Christendom. The most famous example of such needlework would be the Bayeaux Tapestry.
• A common inversion: Soldiers all over the world are taught how to sew as part of Basic Training. As a soldier, one is responsible for the care and maintenance of one's gear, and that includes the uniform.
• Another modern inversion: knitting and other needlework is sometimes used as anger management training by occupational therapists...in prisons.
• In pagan Scandinavian graves, textile implements are found mostly in women's graves — cooking items were also more common in women's graves, but not by nearly so large a proportion.
• In some Nordic cultures, the work of textile production was divided among men and women, each carrying out their own assigned stages of the process. Mostly this was to make efficient use of every available pair of hands during the long months when both men and women were isolated in their homes by deep snow, with nothing better to do.
• A learned young woman was presented at the court of James I and praised for her knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He asked, "Can she spin?"
• An aversion can be found in the history of Swaledale in North Yorkshire, where both lead mining and knitting were forms of income. There are indications that as well as women knitting, male lead miners would also knit to supplement their income, according to stories even doing it on the way to work.
• This is being subverted more and more often in recent years as the textile arts inch ever closer to nonexistence. While the majority of spinners, weavers, knitters, and tailors/seamstresses are female, the number of men who actively engage in these arts and work to master it is steadily increasing. The art of drop spinning, for example, has reached a point of such obscurity that a man seen using a drop spindle is more likely to be viewed on the level of "eccentric master of an ancient art" than "a guy who does girl stuff."
• There are also plenty of Men Who Knit. Guys even made their own "pussy hats" to wear as allies during the 2016-17 women's marches. In recent Olympic Games you can see male athletes and coaches — Antti Koskinen, Roope Tonteri and Tom Daley among them — knitting to de-stress.
• Navajo weaving both plays this straight and inverts it. The popular image of a Navajo weaver is female, but that was partially imposed by the standards of incoming Christian Anglos. Gender roles don't work that way in Navajo culture, so male weavers are perfectly acceptable. The weaving tradition is much more nuanced and complex than Anglos are led to believe. Anglo culture values Navajo weaving as art and/or skilled craft, and many books have been written about the history and designs, but its spiritual significance has been glossed over as a cute fairy tale about spiders. Thousands of women and men who created these textiles were glossed over as non-working housewives or retirees weaving as a leisure activity. In reality, the money earned kept families and communities alive. The work was usually sold to a trading post, which often bought textiles by weight, then put a huge markup on it for the Anglo market, the creators receiving smaller and smaller percentages. Today, Indian-run fair trade co-ops^note  help weavers sell their creations directly rather than through an intermediary and educate the public, recontextualizing the work in terms of its spiritual significance as well as to the livelihood of the Dine people.