Woven

This year’s WOVEN in Kirklees festival focused on sustainability across all strands of its programme with attention to growing and using natural dyes, and to celebrating stitch with Mission to Mend and sewing challenges.

With over 100 events in Kirklees the festival hopes that people will be inspired to make different choices about what they buy and how they care for their garments.

Growing Colour Together is more than project – it is a movement to get more people involved in growing and dyeing using plant based matter.

The fashion industry uses high levels of chemicals and water in the colouring of our clothing and WOVEN wants people to slow down, take time to think about colour, how you make colour, how it is ok for colour to fade and change, and how to enjoy the process of colour throughout natural dyeing.

We have lots of resources on the website to help you make a start with what plants to grow, and when, and how to turn those plants and many more into stains and dyes.

Growing colour together project

A great way to get to know the project is to watch our award winning documentary introduction film:

The Growing Colour Together film has been supported by The Space.

As part of the 2023 festival, Growing Colour Together was also an artist in residency programme in which 7 artists worked across 3 areas in Kirklees to support the development of Colour Gardens and to make beautiful new works of art for each area, using natural dyes.

Films for each of these projects can be found here.

WOVEN in Kirklees Festival 2023

If you would like to get a flavour of the 2023 festival here is the WOVEN official festival film with a number of highlight films:

YOUTUBE PLAYLIST

Mission to Mend

2023 saw a revitalisation of ‘Make Do and Mend’ with a contemporary twist! Visible mending, spinning and repair took to the road across Kirklees to talk about the history of mend, through to exploring about the need to care for clothing to save the planet.

Watch the Mission to Mend film here

Try your hand at 5 simple challenges with your family:

Every Child Challenge is a way to support every family in Kirklees to have a go at stitching to mend.

CLICK HERE

INTERWOVEN – EXCLUSIVE

If you followed WOVEN at Yarndale in 2022 you will have seen the films and soundscapes created as part of INTERWOVEN – an ongoing programme capturing stories of migration and the textile industry.

In 2022 WOVEN and the community in Dewsbury, North Kirklees developed a new iteration of the story with a focus on Shoddy and Mungo, a re-cycling practice that was synonymous with the area.

EXCLUSIVELY you can be the first to watch the documentary film of how we made the project and the people who made the stories come to life.