Category: News

The Star Project Award 2024

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Star Project Award text, brightly coloured embroidery and thread
Star Project Award

                                          “Patchworking Motherhood”

We’re thrilled to announce that the project was launched on Monday 14 October.

I met Fiona Wilkinson, lead occupational therapist for the Dorset perinatal community health team, at a wild swimming group in Studland, Dorset. Our shared interests in early motherhood, mental health, and my desire to bring textiles practice into this space, sparked the idea to apply for the STAR project award together.

Planning the project, from a simple idea to a proposal for an 8 week course, was incredibly rewarding. By working through the numbers on a spreadsheet, considering amount of participants, number of sessions, cost of materials, room hire, staffing and other costs, we were able to calculate and adjust the plan until we reached a viable project within the funding available. This led us to make decisions on where to focus the funds, and where we might save money, for example borrowing instead of buying.

Since this project is aimed at Dorset Perinatal Mental Health clients, offering the course free of charge was a priority. We also recognised the challenge of balancing caring for young children with engaging in textile craft. So, we budgeted for additional staff to help with children during sessions.

In planning the project, we reflected on whether an outcome was necessary. Creating a finished item is often the assumed goal of a textiles course, however, in my experience, a focus on end result can sometimes interfere with in-the-moment making. I want participants to engage intuitively with the process whilst letting go of expectation. However, we also recognised the value of completing a personal patchwork to keep as a memento of this time.

Our aim is to create a non-judgemental, safe and welcoming space where participants will be invited to focus on themselves for the time that they are with us. This will include plenty of tea, coffee, and maybe even cake! We will encourage a light-hearted and instinctive no rules approach to piecing and stitching, whilst supporting participants to work to their own interest and pace to complete a textiles piece that will feel meaningful to them within the timeframe.

Participants are very welcome to bring any fabrics they would like to use for their patchwork, although this isn’t necessary as we have gathered together a large supply of materials and plenty of embroidery threads for them to rummage through and select from.

I look forward to reporting back once the project is well underway, and would like thank the Textile Study Group for their generous award and for selecting our project, Patchworking Motherhood.

Emma McGinn

This warm and welcoming room as it was set up ready and waiting for the mothers with their children to arrive.

Return to Star Project Award on the TSG website for more information about the award and an application form.

Fragile Forms-Deconstructed

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Fragile Forms-Deconstructed

TSG member Jean Draper talks about our recent Continuing Professional Development workshop with Amanda Clayton:

The weekend was doubly important to me because, due to illness and Covid, it was my first face to face meeting with the group for a long time. There had been zoom meetings which, though good, are only a substitute for real contact with friends and colleagues.

Fragile Forms – Deconstructed. With Amanda Clayton

The workshop began on Friday evening with a very informative talk by Mandy in which she outlined her development as an artist from an early age through to the present day. It was very pleasing to hear her mention and acknowledge family members, teachers, other artists and colleagues who influenced her. I was specially interested to learn of her collaborations with medical and academic people to research and provide information on health issues to others, including NHS consultants. The resulting work was published in medical/academic journals.

Amanda Clayton, Loss. Photography: Dawn Jutton



Using the natural forms of our choice as starting points, and using a variety of white and neutral materials, on Saturday our work began with a series of fairly brief, but challenging, ‘tasks’ set by Mandy. Beginning with observation and representation and moving towards abstraction, each task was carefully structured and supported by a full explanation and an informative hand-out which included a possible visual vocabulary. We were encouraged, as we worked with delicate materials, to record our ideas in photographs and notes and to consider the relevance to our personal experience and skills. Each day every member had individual tutorial time with Mandy.

We were treated to an amazing display of Mandy’s beautiful, obsessively hand-stitched work, numerous samples and a huge variety of threads and fabrics to supplement our own. Throughout Mandy generously shared her methods and use of materials.


Jean Draper.

Shelley Rhodes, TSG member, workshop investigation

Summer School 2025

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Summer School 2025

The theme for our 2025 Summer School is Materiality.

This is a residential summer school tutored by Textile Study Group members and open to everyone with workshops led by Textile Study Group members Alice Fox, Sue Green and Mandy Pattullo. 

Summer school is held each July at Hillscourt Hotel, Rose Hill, Rednal, Birmingham B45 8RS.
Monday 14 – Thursday 17 July 2025.

The three workshops will use materiality as the springboard for the creative process. It will be an opportunity to play with materials gathered, explore the touch and feel of old fabrics and experiment with deconstruction and reconstruction ideas.

Alice Fox
Mandy Pattullo

Your experienced and inspirational tutors will guide and support you in developing your ideas and creating a fun and exciting experience. Choose from the following three workshops:

Here and Now with Alice Fox: The detail that surrounds us can be fascinating, if we just allow ourselves to take it in. This course aims to open our eyes to what is around us, finding the potential in the ordinary. Led by the place and the material available, an experimental approach is encouraged. With a focus on objects and marks collected on short walks from the studio we will explore different techniques, making use of what we find and exploring ways of developing visual ideas on paper and cloth. This will be a chance to explore some alternative approaches to mapping, developing individual personal records of place.

Unmaking-Remaking with Sue Green: This course will explore the concept of ‘unmaking’ using cloth to retell new narratives. Experimental print and stitch processes will be explored responding to traces and memory.

Students should bring along an item of cloth or clothing with a personal connection but not something precious as it will be taken apart to reveal the hidden stories within and used to print from.

Outcomes will be facilitated through individual discussion and will form a series of samples to further develop independently.

Textile Collage with Mandy Pattullo: This gentle hand stitching course encourages you to bring together your own stash of old fabrics, lace and garments, that may be flawed through wear and tear, and transform them through textile collage techniques to find in them a new beauty.

Together we will deconstruct, layer and rearrange materials to create patchworked surfaces, which will be enhanced with stitch. You will develop a personal stitch language which might be based on pattern making with traditional stitches, refer to stitch conventions of other cultures or invent new ways to draw with stitch on to fabric.

Full details are all available on our website and bookings open on 14th October.

Sue Green, hand stitch
Sue Green, print and hand stitch

The Star Project selected for the 2024 Award

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Star Project Award text, brightly coloured embroidery and thread

“Patchworking Motherhood“ proposed by Emma McGinn

In collaboration with Fiona Wilkinson, lead occupational therapist for the Dorset perinatal community health team, Emma McGinn will be sharing her own experience of the transition to motherhood as being transformative with up to ten mothers approaching discharge at the perinatal unit in Dorset.

The project will run over eight weeks in two-hour sessions. Through craft-based textiles the idea that Matrescence “like a patchwork creates lots of disparate pieces that need rearranging and stitching back together one seam at a time” will be explored while each mother will be making a small blanket of her own.  

Indicating four phases, Emma carefully set out how the award will be used. This includes costings for materials, refreshments, the fee for hiring the space, the purchase of a second-hand sewing machine, and paying for child care so that the mothers will be able bring their babies/young children along with them.  The award will also be used to pay a stated amount per hour to cover Emma’s work as the project’s lead artist. 

Emma is a well-qualified and experienced graduate.  Whilst living in London she delivered talks and led modules for degree students. She also facilitated creative, textile-based workshops for mothers, parents, carers and refugee women mainly at the Woodfield Pavilion, a beautiful community space on Tooting Common. 

In 2023 Emma relocated to Dorset where she is now undertaking Doctoral Research to explore materializing early motherhood experience through her own craft-based textiles, and beginning to facilitate creative textile-based workshops from Studio 28.

It will be interesting to follow how Emma, given the award, will develop her practice as a textile artist and the collaboration with Fiona Wilkinson to set up and deliver this interesting, inclusive and heartwarming STAR PROJECT.

Selecting the Star Project has been a rewarding and challenging task. Over a dozen applications were received, some for existing groups whilst others aimed to set up a new group. No group is too well established or too small or unusual to be considered. The venues varied from community centers or schools, to arts centers or museums. A wide range of creative textile artists and teachers applied, each proposing a project which would both benefit individual participants and reach out to new audiences.

The selectors appreciated the time and thought everyone gave to preparing and presenting their text and images.  Without exception all the projects proposed are potentially viable, and merit being set up and we wish these projects every success. 

The Star Project Award is biannual and will be offered again in 2026.