Claire Wellesley Smith on thinking through making

Claire Wellesley-Smith sees the privilege in being able to carve out time each day to stitch as a way of sifting through her life. She has created a map of her thinking through making which unrolls like a scroll and reveals the stories of her textile journey in Shipley, near Bradford in west Yorkshire, the former heart of the wool textile industry in the United Kingdom. This stitch journal began in 2013 and records Claire’s daily practice of pausing and reflecting, perhaps only for 10 minutes or much longer when there is a lot of thought-processing to be done. Her two books, Slow Stitch and Resilient Stitch published by Batsford, are based around the stitching process which Claire absorbed almost by osmosis from her mother and grandmother who sewed for practical purposes. Claire gains wellbeing benefit from the focused activity of stitching, when the eye is drawn to a small area of cloth and a pattern is created through a generative process. “It’s an immense privilege for me to even carve 10 minutes out of my day to stitch in a kind of meaningless fashion. I'm not making something, I'm not cutting out 50 coats a day and having to stitch them together. This is absolute privilege.” On the other hand, a lot of Claire’s work is in community settings because she is passionate about providing opportunities for people to be engaged and share skills together. She believes sewing skills are massively useful because they give you agency over your own stuff, which can be a powerful thing. Claire is in the final stages of a PhD with The Open University with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It includes experiences of post-industrial textile communities, including Bradford, and projects encouraging participants to engage in slow craft-based work as a reflection of resilience of participants and place. It was so enjoyable to be with Claire stitching in her studio as part of my Churchill Fellowship study of how being hands-on with our clothes can reduce waste and enhance wellbeing. #slowstitch #slowclothing #ChurchillFellowship #makingforwellbeing #stitching #diy