Art and design in the psychedelic era has been characterised variously as the 'politics of ecstasy' (Grunenberg 2005: 11); or as the harnessing of 'hip consumerism' by corporate marketeers (Frank 1997). In relation to the conference theme of gender, generations and work, this paper will examine the design, production and circulation of screen printed textile home sewing kits and fabrics in folkloric or historical styles in Britain in the 1960s-early 1970s using evidence derived from archival textile research and oral history. At both production and consumption ends of enterprises (such as Clothkits) we can see a blurring between domestic unwaged aspects of home textile production and commercial outworking (Burman 1999), where both designers and purchasers could work from their kitchen tables. In contrast to the more sensational and celebrated aspects of male-oriented ‘counter-cultural’ graphic design of this era, these activities remain almost invisible, although in the era of second-wave feminism they coincide with a shift in women’s growing consciousness of their own involvement in the formalization of gender differences through house work such as needlework (Oakley 1974; Parker 1984). While home dressmaking kits may seem a long way from militant feminism, this paper will argue that new cultural values that were fashioned by anonymous designers and amateur dressmakers in this era of 'self-sufficiency'. I examine this through an interdisciplinary combination of dress history, print culture investigation and feminist studies of women’s active readership of magazines—ranging from Woman to Spare Rib—in this period.