WORKSHOP 2: Patchworking shapes together
TUTOR: Mona Craven
Second of three inter-active workshops on heritage textile crafting skills. This workshop focuses on patchwork techniques – how to piece together small pieces of fabric to create new cloth.
As tutors, we bring our knowledge and practice of macramé and tatting, patchworking, and embroidery stitching to these hands-on workshop activities. In this way we all share, learn and celebrate intergenerational relationships. Tutors will discuss the cultural significance of preserving and developing these textile skills and techniques and will share the story of how they learnt these crafts from their elders. Participants will be invited to share a skill they learned from their elders with the group. Our shared discussion is the starting point for making work, with plenty of time to try out techniques demonstrated by the lead tutor, and develop and practice the familiar or new techniques explored during the session.
What you need to prepare in advance and bring with you.
Any textile work you have made or has been made by your grandmothers or elders to discuss.
Think about the textile-skills or textile things inherited from your grandmother or elder.
Bring along a very short paragraph (approx. 50 words) describing the above, or describe a textile technique you would like a twenty-first century generation to learn.
Materials and equipment supplied.
The intention is to showcase work produced in the workshop, and subsequent work that explores and develops new and old textile-skills, alongside each participant’s story in an exhibition at the Crafts Study Centre in 2026. The exhibition aims to value and celebrate the intangible cultural heritage of textile crafting skills and the significance of intergenerational relationships.
