The week of Monday 23 – Sunday 29 September 2024 saw the inaugural Leek Textile Week, organised by League of Artisans. Around 50 events — exhibitions, workshops, art trail of commissioned works, film showings — filled the town and brought its textile heritage back into the present day.

I ran a poetry workshop called ‘Weaving Words’ in which we talked about the close connections between texts and textiles and the words we used to describe them — spinning a yarn, embroidering the truth, I’ve lost my thread, what a web of lies, a twist in the tale… We talked about our relationships to fabric; we read poems and ancient stories about working with cloth and used them as inspiration to write about our own experiences. At the end we got crafty making a woven piece with words and colour. It was a very full room and a fabulously mixed group of ages and experiences but everyone was willing not only to have a go at the ideas I presented them with but also to share their work. I’m always amazed by the fantastic pieces that come out of workshops. A wonderful evening.

My second contribution to the week was ‘Pockets of History’, a workshop I’ve run before (for the New Macclesfield School of Art). It’s inspired by this book. We talked about women’s historical pockets — separate from their clothing, tied around their waist, under their skirts, on long tapes — and how they were treasured, as evidenced by the beautiful decoration embroidered on to many of them and how they were handed down between women, mother to daughter, or between friends. For many women they would have been their only private space in a world where nothing belonged to them. We then created our own pockets to keep special objects and secrets in.