Ruth Singer creates an archive of stories, a podcast and an ebook for Gawthorpe Textiles Collection about textile making during lockdown.

I’ve been busy sharing my finished Textiles in Lockdown commission all over the internet and I have forgotten to share it on my own blog! The podcast and ebook are now available for free online, all the links are here. It has been a really amazing project to create and develop. I have got to talk to textile makers about their work, which is probably one my favourite things to do. I loved making the podcast – interviewing people by Zoom was great! But then choosing just a couple of minutes from an hour long conversation was hard. I’m really inspired to think about making a podcast of my own one of these days, if I can work out how to find the time.

The ebook came out much larger than I intended – It was supposed to be about 30-40 pages to support the podcast but so much amazing material was shared by over 300 contributors that I needed to expand it to fit as much as possible. I know I had to leave some people’s words and images out and I feel bad about that but otherwise it would have been too big. All the contributions form a digital archive in the museum at Gawthorpe Textiles Collection to be used by future researchers.

It has been a real honour to hear and share such personal and powerful stories of how textiles have helped so many people through such a difficult year. I’ve had such warm feedback too from both contributors and textile organisations, I’m really proud of this project. If you catch this in time, I will be talking live on the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection Facebook page today (28th October) at 7pm. Please join me then if you can.

I’m so looking forward to this as I contributed in a small way to Ruth’s research that is so important to document.

Jo Hague