SEVEN SISTERS HANDWEAVERS

Seven Sisters Handweavers is a community of handweavers, formed of graduates from the Diploma in Handweaving, run by the Handweavers Studio and Gallery, London Verwood. As a group, we are committed to contemporary handweaving in all its diversity. We include weavers who weave interior fabrics while others make wearable items. Some weave artworks. We have weavers who make both practical items and woven art. Some of us teach weaving. We all design and produce our own weaving from a range of sources of inspiration and ideas, and we use many different materials including recycled and dead-stock yarns. Each weaver in the group has a strong sense of personal identity as a handweaver, and we all show, sell and share our weaving in many different contexts. For all of us, handweaving is our primary occupation.

The Diploma in Handweaving is a unique two-year course that attracts students internationally. It is aimed at weavers who want to extend the range of their weaving and develop their own practice. It is structured much as a textile degree with a series of projects, meaning we have each had experience of designing and planning a wide range of different fabrics and woven items for various different purposes. Hosted by Handweavers, until May 2025 based on Seven Sisters Road, London, it is taught through workshops from a range of weaving tutors. Seven Sisters Handweavers come from a many different backgrounds, including a doctor, an academic, a civil servant, a graduate in textiles working as a designer and a professional industrial weaver. We all took our first steps in weaving in widely different contexts. We currently represent four three cohorts of graduates from the Handweavers Studio Diploma: 2017, 2019, and 2021 and 2024.

Collectively we have organised three two exhibitions. The first was in 2022, ‘Edge to Edge. Weavers on Borders and Margins’. In this themed show, we sometimes treated our theme as a technical question. We also engaged with the metaphors and symbols of boundaries and margins. It opened at Handweavers and then toured to Køng Museums Væve- og Spindeskole, Denmark. Our second exhibition in 2024, ‘Crossing the warp - thread by thread’, at Whitchurch Silk Mill, Hampshire celebrated handweaving as a complement to the power looms at Whitchurch. Here we emphasised our distinctive individualities as independent weavers. We also ran to two public events at Whitchurch. In 2025 we showed our exhibition ‘Making Connections’ at the Borders Textile Towerhouse on Hawick, Scotland and we are looking forward to our next exhibition at Verdant Works Museum in Dundee, opening in autumn 2026.