Finished!

Well, we made it to the festival on the 9th June which was a real success. We managed, after much debate, a cheese and onion pasty and several hundred cable ties, to get the Stitch and Tell Gallery displayed in a great position with large windows behind, giving it large amount of light (check out the photos here http://www.flickr.com/photos/8185243@N02/540690653/. We continued on the day to make more squares which we hung there are then, until we ran out of room.

I'd like to say a really big thanks to everyone who took part. Don't forget you will recieve your square in the post at some point. I'd also like to say thanks to Clare for her support and ideas, to Ruth for helping in the workshops sessions, to Tim for putting up with all the sawdust and carrying things around for me, Gossypium for providing us with lots of gorgeous fairtrade organic cotton (http://www.gossypium.co.uk/), and Trust Greenbelt (www.greenbelt.org.uk) who made this project possible.

The workshops so far...

We've a had a good response to the workshops and here are some photos of the squares with explanations from the people who created them...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8185243@N02/tags/squares/

And here are some action shots of participants hard at work!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8185243@N02/tags/action/

What's in a workshop

I probably should explain a bit more about what the Stitch and Tell workshops involve and what we're doing.

We're aiming to create a large art work as part of the Just Enjoy Fair Trade Festival. And we want to explore different stories from people in Leicester along the way.

The art work will be built up out of decorated squares of Fair Trade cotton - and we'll also be creating an online gallery of the squares and the stories behind them.

The diagram below sums up the whole process:

We're not telling anyone what their square should include, or how it should be created. We want to welcome anyone to the workshops to be creative.

Workshop Dates...

We've got the rooms booked and the FAIRTRADE Cotton arrived this morning, so we're almost ready to go...

The free Stitch and Tell textile square workshops should be taking place on:

Wednesday 16th May from 10am~1pm
Friday 18th May from 10am~1pm
Tuesday 22nd May from 4pm~7pm
Saturday 26th May from 10am~1pm
Monday 28th May from 2pm~5pm
Wednesday 30th May from 2pm~5pm

All sessions will be in the Arts and Crafts Room (located on the second floor) at the Peepul Centre on Orchardson Avenue. (Find it on the map here / see the Peepul centre website)

All the sessions are open and you are welcome to just turn up. However, if you can, drop me an e-mail to help us plan for numbers - and so I can let you know if there are any changes to the plans.

Also drop me an e-mail if you are interested in hosting a Stitch and Tell session at another club / event / place during May 2007, and I'd be really happy to chat about whether we can organise that...

Welcome to the Blog

We've created this blog as a place for information about the Stitch and Tell project...

Stitch and Tell is a series of FREE workshops running during may 2007 in Leicester exploring story-telling through textiles...

At each of the workshops we'll be decorating fair trade fabric squares and sharing our stories. All this will go towards building up a 'Stitch and Tell Wardrobe' artwork which will be displayed at the Just Enjoy Fair Trade Festival in June...

The first workshop is in just over a week... so I'm creating the flyers at the moment and I'll put some more information here in a little while...