Yesterday’s day of Hand Darning at Shavington-cum-Gresty Village Hall was everything a workshop day should be – a wonderful group of students, slow stitching and, with temperatures soaring outside, a beautifully cool space to work in.
We began by working through a series of foundational stitch blocks and as the day progressed, so did the confidence in the room. By the afternoon we had moved into experimental crosshatching – one of my favourite areas of darning – where the rules begin to loosen and the real creative exploration begins. The results were beautiful and, I think, genuinely surprising to the students themselves.
Hand darning is often thought of as a purely practical skill – a way of mending and making do. But spend a day with a needle, a thread and a blank piece of cloth, and you begin to see it very differently. It is patient, meditative and endlessly inventive.
Thank you to every one of my students for their curiosity, enthusiasm and wonderful company yesterday. I hope the stitch blocks we worked through together find their way into your future projects.