About
LEEK TEXTILE WEEK
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, women’s pockets were separate from their clothing —pouch-like bags tied on under their clothes and accessed through slits in their petticoats and skirts. Historians have researched the objects women carried in these pockets, which were in some cases the only things they owned apart from their clothes — the tools they needed for their work, money, small keepsakes. Women slept with their pockets under their pillow to keep their things safe in shared houses or in marriages where they didn’t legally own anything. We can see how women valued their pockets by how they decorated them, mended them and left them to female family and friends in their wills.
You don’t need to be an expert! There will be time to complete a pocket with a simple decoration during the workshop or you can plan something more complex to finish off at home. There will be a sewing machine for sewing the pockets together.
About your workshop lead: The workshop will be led by Dr Ailsa Holland (@ailsaholland), poet and historian, who learned sewing and embroidery from her mum while growing up in North Staffordshire. Ailsa has led poetry and textiles workshops for Macclesfield Barnaby Festival, the Silk Museum and the New Macclesfield School of Art. She has what she describes as a varied practice, writing and publishing poetry through her company Moormaid Press (@moormaidpress), and also performance, visual work, feminist history and other kinds of activism. She is the author of ‘On This Day She’ and ‘The Bodleian and The Bottle Ovens’.
£30.00 per person
