The research team

Angharad is a researcher, designer, and maker, with a focus on knitted gloves. She designs and knits for private and commercial clients, including a London menswear designer. Her gloves have been exhibited at the Bankfield Museum in Halifax, Ruthin Craft Centre and the Welsh National Eisteddfod. She is volunteer textile archivist for the collection of the Knitting & Crochet Guild (KCG) and in that role led the successful bid to the Heritage Fund for the Collection in 100 objects project and is part of the team working to make the whole KCG collection available online. Angharad has a background in academic art and design at the University of Salford, where she headed the innovative undergraduate and postgraduate courses in design, heritage and exhibition design. Her doctoral thesis examined the relationship between design and sustainability in the Welsh textile industry. She has written and published both academically and for consumer publications. Angharad read geography with geology at the University of London. She also has a postgraduate diploma in education and a masters in in knitwear and knitted fabric design on which she has worked with clients in Japan, Europe and the USA. The Holy Hands project has enabled her to fulfil her long-time interest in liturgical gloves which are always an inspiration.

Lesley O’Connell Edwards is an independent scholar who researches the history of handknitting, on which she has presented papers and published a number of articles in academic journals and specialist publications. Her main interests include handknitting in Tudor England, especially handknitters as an occupational group, and also the production and the trade in handknitted stockings for which she works in archives and on surviving artefacts. From 2015 to 2016, she held the Pasold/Museum of London Fellowship, which she used to examine the construction of the 16th century wool stockings in the museum. She recently completed a masters’ degree in English local history at the University of Oxford, which included a dissertation on the development of the handknitted stocking industry in late 16th century Norwich. Lesley is a former librarian, with a master’s degree in librarianship, for which she wrote a thesis on the resources available for the study of handknitting in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 1990. She successfully published the Early Knitting History Group’s Bibliography of the History of Knitting before 1600 (initiated by Richard Rutt) in Bulletin du CIETA (2000). Since then, she has continued to collect bibliographical references to pre-1600 knitting, and supplies the latest listing on request: a recent version is available on the Knitting History Forum website. Lesley edited the United Kingdom’s Knitting and Crochet Guild journal, Slipknot, between 2012 and 2017. Her first degree is in religious studies and her interest in liturgical gloves was sparked by seeing the pair at New College, University of Oxford.