Crafts education collection

The crafts education collection at the Craft Museum of Finland includes materials illuminating the history and practices of education in the craft hobby, school crafts taught in elementary schools, as well as vocational education in crafts organized by various providers. The field of crafts education is broad, as there have been a large number of schools providing crafts education, not to even mention associations and organizations that have engaged in courses or informational activities. 

The crafts education collection includes collections specific to the crafts education in a given polytechnic institute, university of applied sciences, or university; materials assembled by the school crafts collection, research, and exhibition project; collections derived from vocational crafts education including the felt swatch collection of the Central Finland School of Arts and Crafts; along with materials from the Crafts Schools organized by the Finnish Crafts Organization Taito as well as crafts courses provided as part of basic education in the arts. Materials from vocational special needs education in crafts have been provided to the museum by the Kuhankoski special needs vocational school, today part of Spesia Vocational College. 

The school crafts preservation project initiated by the Craft Museum of Finland in the late 20th century has accumulated a collection of nearly 1000 objects along with associated oral histories and photographs. The collection has been further bolstered by the research project into crafts education initiated in 2001 with the support of the Ministry of Education. The preservation of school crafts continues today, covering both historical and modern objects. 

The oldest materials related to crafts education in the Craft Museum’s collections derive from the collections of the National Agency for Vocational Education. These include archival materials concerning, among other subjects, the itinerant crafts schools for men and women that once roamed Finland.     

The most extensive crafts education collections have been received by the museum as donations in the 2010s, courtesy of Kuopion Rouvasväenyhdistys and the Fredrika Wetterhoff Foundation. Kuopion Rouvasväenyhdistys (the Kuopio Ladies’ Association), an association dedicated to promoting and supporting crafts, arts, design, and culture, first initiated crafts courses in Kuopio in 1884. The association sponsored the Kuopio Academy of Design until 2002, when the academy was handed over to the Savonia University of Applied Sciences. In the early 2010s, the Kuopio Academy of Design was downsized, and as a result, it was decided in 2013 to transfer the academy’s extensive library of technical, structural, and material samples and swatches, originally intended to support teaching in its various disciplines, to the Craft Museum of Finland. A few years later, the association also gifted the museum the ethnological collection assembled by the Kuopio School of Crafts and Industrial Design (as it was then called) in 1973–1988. This collection is made up of 669 accession numbers across four metres of shelf space.

In 2013, the Fredrika Wetterhoff Foundation gifted its textile collections, originally assembled by the school from student finds and workpieces as well as individual donations as part of its own museum, to the Craft Museum of Finland. The old museum, founded in 1914, was part of the Fredrika Wetterhoff School of Crafts that first opened in 1885. The purpose of the museum was to offer a collection of historical textile model drawings for students to examine. The Wetterhoff collections include a great deal of textiles-related material: swatches, model drawings, drafts, written materials, tools, photographs, as well as complete textile works. The material in the collections is dated from the 1850s onwards. In the school, the collection was used to inspire ideas, to make observations and to suggest approaches in various subjects, as well as serving as source material for research and thesis work.