Craft Circles: When, Where, and How to? 

A how-to guide for building and facilitating community-based craft circles to nurture healing, well-being, and connection.

Across cultures, the communal practice of craft-making circles has served as a practical, political, and emotional resource for women and other groups of people in search of community. Through sewing, knitting, embroidery, quilting, weaving, etc., craft-making collectives continue to facilitate opportunities for people to gather in the spirit of kinship and resource sharing. Drawing upon the rich history/legacy of these traditions, this resource guide will explore the value of social connection -via craftmaking circles- as sites of healing and growth. It will also offer a step-by-step guide on how to initiate and develop a craftmaking circle within one’s own community/network. 

History and Significance of Craftmaking Circles

Around the world, craft-making circles such as sewing circles, quilting bees, weaving collectives, and knitting groups have long served as communal spaces where knowledge, culture, and practices of care are exchanged and developed. Within Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Black diasporic communities, these gathering opportunities have historically functioned as vital sites of mutual aid, political organizing, and economic survival. They specifically cultivate intergenerational environments where women and poor/working-class people can share resources, preserve cultural memory, uphold cultural traditions, and promote individual wellness through interdependent practices of community care. As Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa has written about in her foundational text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), creative communal practices are central to cultural “survivance” (a portmanteau for “survival” and “resistance”), allowing marginalized communities to transform everyday labor into acts of resilience and identity-making. This is why craft-making circles continue to exist in the ways that they do. 

Despite their significance, many craft traditions have been devalued because of their association with women’s work and the domestic sphere; however, craft-making circles continue to operate as powerful spaces of resistance and empowerment, offering opportunities for participants to collectively imagine new ways of thinking, making, and living while still honoring ancestral traditions. Black feminist thinkers like bell hooks—e.g. Yearning: Race, Gender, & Cultural Politics (1990) --have emphasized how much the home (and its creative practices/outputs) function as “sites of resistance,” affirming that craftwork is far from passive—it is an active and embodied archive of care, solidarity, and continuity. Through these circles, women and under-recognized groups of people not only build material objects, but they also construct social worlds rooted in connection, creativity, and community empowerment.

Interactive Map

Click each pin to briefly learn more about specific examples of craftmaking circles around the world.

 

How to Build a Craftmaking Circle

For individuals who are interested in initiating a craftmaking circle within their own community, the following guide offers theories, strategies, and suggestions for how to establish, design, and manage craftmaking circles that are specific to your needs. Divided into four sections– (1) Research & Preparation, (2) Logistics, (3) Community Culture & Accountability, and (4) Scaling Up/Closing–the contents of this guide have been developed according to the combined experiences/expertise of Cordelia Rizzo and Nnaemeka Ekwelum. While both artists/cultural workers have extensive experience creating and participating in collective and collaborative craft circles, there are many ways to approach the work of cultivating a creative community. We encourage you to adopt what resonates and to research and apply alternative strategies and methodologies that work best for your intended goals. 

Research and Preparation

This section outlines how to identify potential participants/collaborators and intentions/goals of your craft circle, including the development of a “collaborator intake form.” The following suggestions and questions will help you identify goals, values, skills, and resources of the craftmaking circle that you hope to form.

Questions for Research and Self-Assessment

  • What is your intention for creating a craft circle? Have you researched whether your needs can already be addressed by an already-established craft circle in your community?

  • With whom do you want to share this communal space/opportunity? What qualities are you looking for in people who are interested in joining this craftmaking circle

  • Who else do you know is/might be interested/invested in this idea? What ideas/vision do they have for establishing a craftmaking circle with your community?

  • Where do you feel most confident as the person who is initiating this process? What skills are you bringing to this space? Who do you know that can help to support this endeavor?

  • What is your capacity for managing this process? What role do you want to take on in this process? Please Note: The role that you carry in the beginning of this process might not be the same role that you have the capacity to maintain throughout the process of forming and facilitating this craftmaking circle.

Collaborator Intake Form

(e.g. google form, paper intake form, informal asking): Creating a “collaborator intake form” can not only help you begin to identify who is/would be interested in this endeavor, but also what specific attributes, skills, and interests they might have. Although it is up to your discretion to determine whether certain individuals are a good fit for what you are trying to build, the goal of this form is not to encourage exclusionary and discriminatory behavior. It is more than okay for you to build your craft-making circle around shared identity/affinity, especially when shared affinity is vital to honoring the goals of your collective; however, out of respect for anyone who takes time to respond to your form, be sure to establish a standard and respectful way of communicating why someone may not be a good fit for what you are trying to build.  

  • As you develop the focus of the questions that you plan to include within this form, it might be helpful to answer the following question(s): what biographical, geographical, professional, and personal information do you need to know about potential participants/collaborators? Please be careful about how you solicit, collect, and document sensitive information. If you need to collect mailing addresses or other private data, be sure to disclose how you plan to store and keep that information confidential/safe.

  • This form can help you solicit information about the skills, interests, and resources that you have access to through your network (and through the networks of interested parties). It can also help you begin to establish community expectations that will help to shape the culture of your artmaking convenings. A helpful way to identify questions for this section of the form is to answer: what do I need to know about these participants in order to be vulnerable and successfully build a loving, trusting, and care-filled community with others?

Additional Consideration

If the focus of your craftmaking group is meant to explicitly support victims and/or survivors of Gender-Based Violence (GBV), please ensure that the group has access to qualified therapists and/or social workers (if participants are triggered by traumatic memories or information). If you cannot ensure that you and participants have access to such resources, please seriously consider whether member groups will have the capacity to adequately address/manage the mental health needs of the participants who are impacted by GBV. For participants in need of significant mental health support, it might be worth encouraging them to inquire about group art therapy sessions through their physician’s office or at a local clinic. 

Logistics

This section outlines how to determine the structure and logistics of creating and maintaining a craftmaking circle. In this section, we will discuss the importance of: (1) where and how often your circle will meet (i.e. ensuring times and locations are equitable/accessible to all, pros and cons of meeting too often or too little, etc.), (2) a sustainable leadership structure (i.e. who is the “natural leader”, etc. democratic approach, horizontal, what might happen) and (3) sourcing materials (i.e. buying vs. donating vs. fundraising) - how much do materials cost, be specific about what you want. 

  • Even if you have an idea about how often the circle will meet, talk to participants and decide the most convenient frequency and time of the day to meet. 3 hours long is a good estimate, but two hours is also good. Sewing, weaving, and textile work in general is time intensive and this should be taken into consideration. People get into “the zone”. Don’t let too much time in between meetings go by. 

  • Leadership is not an arbitrary decision, so be sure to have an open and honest conversation about various leadership models and structures. Ask everyone to share their perspectives on leadership models that have worked well -or not- in their experience -and why-. Be sure to observe and make note of emerging leaderships, but also who takes care of the space, and who has experience leading groups. Be mindful of whether leaders carry too much weight. Other power imbalances often occur in groups. Check in after some time to see if the leadership situation is harmonic and conducive to the group’s objectives.

  • Be sure to have a list of what the materials you want, and their cost. Do you want to ask for donations? If so, be specific about what you want and find a space to keep them. Upcycling used clothes or scraps is neat, but it also requires cleaning and organizing materials well for them to get used. Experimenting with them is also important so you can learn to use them in cool ways. Materials carry value with them, so upcycling promotes thriftiness, ingenuity, and connecting to legacies of resourcefulness and practicalities in the lives of women. 

  • Emeka (Riffing): The importance of in-person vs. virtual gatherings…do what works best for the group, but regardless of the format, make sure that the space feels intimate/connected/warm/productive. Reference “Stitching Together: Good Practice Guidelines…” as a helpful resource that reinforces many of the ideas that we’ve discussed in this resource guide

Community Culture and Accountability

This section addresses the importance of establishing and maintaining a culture of safety and comfort  (i.e. hospitality, food, music, things that make people comfortable, answering the question of what makes a space comfortable/safe, check-in prompts/discussions, themed meetings, critical play/experimentation, fostering relationship between participants/collaborators outside of craft circle meetings, incorporating emerging values, etc.). It will also outline how to develop an accountability structure that aligns with the intentions and goals of your circle (i.e. managing meeting frequency/goals, establishing mutual investment, developing/enacting strategies for conflict management/resolution, conducting periodic evaluations/assessments to determine what is and isn’t working for the group). 

  • Depending on the intentions/goals behind your craftmaking circle, your group will need to develop a community culture, over time, that feels safe/inviting/productive. You can name your group, and with the name project and affirm the spirit of the group. Building trust is an essential component of a long-lasting/successful collaboration. 

  • Developing community norms together is essential to building trust. It gives the group a shared agreement -even tacit agreements- that can easily be referenced whenever issues and/or conflicts arise. By clarifying what the members of the group perceive as a tacit agreement, people can easily articulate what they observe to be the culture of the group and how it has been functioning.

  • How do we build trust? How do we assess trust in the group? Using prompts at the beginning of each session to build and assess the evolution of trust. It will be incumbent upon the person who initiates and/or leads the circle to modeling vulnerability for the group. This might be a good place to talk about the value of in-person gathering, critical play/experimentation, and hanging out outside of the craftmaking circle.

  • Begin discussion on accountability. You can use Sara Lawrence Lightfoot’s quote about the importance of creating rigorous structures when working with friends/loved ones. –> “When portraiture becomes a collaborative (rather than an individual endeavor–when researchers use a group voice–different challenges and opportunities arise that require the development of rigorous structures and unison processes.” – The Art & Science of Portraiture

  • Fostering reciprocity -via accountability- should lead to creating a democratic structure that empowers everyone to become mutually invested in showing up as a major and/or minor key leader of the group.

  • Creating a communication structure that empowers the group to honor the need to pivot toward a new set of goals/intentions as the needs/wants of the group evolve. 

  • Conflict is not a sign of failure, even if previous frictions make one fear failure. Analyzing the source of the conflict and creating space to listen to the parts will strengthen a group. Letting conflict turn into chaos and discomfort, by not addressing it when it is still manageable, can weaken and eventually break the structure of the group. Your craft-making group can become a network, lifelong friends, colleagues, and business partners, if you allow these types of relationships to flourish.

Scaling Up/Closing

This section discusses how to scale the growth and impact of your craftmaking circle to align with the evolving needs of the collective (i.e. identifying resources/needs, fundraising/development, supporting an individual participant’s goals/needs, acting upon a collective goal/need, etc.). This section will also address the importance of creating and enacting rituals to properly/respectfully end a craftmaking circle with care, especially if/when the circle is no longer serving the needs and goals of the collective.

  • Once your group has been going on for a while, you might be thinking the group can be a step towards accomplishing other things. If your circle has been perfecting its craft, or you became good friends, these accomplishments might give way to wondering what else can the group achieve. 

  • Groups can subsist for decades, and that is perfectly fine. Nevertheless, one need not commit to the idea of longevity if individual, collective, and institutional conditions take a toll on group members.

  • This moment of reflection should prompt us to look at the culture of the group, assess trust amongst members, and develop a diagnosis about how the group is. A healthy group, one that communicates, enjoys meeting, values reciprocity and mutual respect can choose to scale up or even choose to conclude the project to preserve the relationships in a different way.

  • Scaling up might involve starting to fundraise or turn the craft-making aspect into a source of income. Deciding what the income is for, and being frank about it at this point is paramount. Who will administer the money?

    • Also, money is not a dirty word; we all need funds to survive and pay our bills. Is the fundraising goal long-term, as in a source of income or a way to pay the meeting space’s rent, supplies, or food? Or is it short term, like a means to attend a conference, a group excursion or a mutual aid campaign to help a member? Have these objectives clear and socialize them. 

  • When the group is noticeably struggling, the idea of concluding the project might provoke sadness. However, it is important to hold conversations about the conclusion and affirming all the valuable resources and lessons taken from meeting as a group. 

  • Money is not the only legitimate form of currency; bartering systems are also an effective way to achieve the goals of the group…. If the group decides to formally close the craftmaking circle, this is okay! Discuss the value and importance of ritual across Black diasporic culture: honoring endings/transitions.

  • Examples of fundraising:

    • The Love Aboundz Art Raffle, was a cool fundraising strategy, deployed by Emeka Ekwelum to fund his PhD graduate show.  

    • FUNDENL, a group of activists that came together as an embroidering circle published a book with their stories after three years together. Later, they received a donation of books by writer Lolita Bosch and another by scholar Ileana Diéguez. They sold all of these books to raise awareness and fundraise as well.

Reading Lists

Craft-group Management Reading List

This list contains resources geared to understand creative and collective processes. Contributions to these come from singular cultural points of view in the arts, human rights, and cultural studies, that offer meditations about healing and resistance through creative work. 

Textile Work and Women’s Studies Reading Lists

The following are reading lists to orient arts-based interventions designed for survivors of gender-based violence and facilitators who are interested in art made by women, textile art, and textile work as a wellness practice.

The list consists of texts in English and another reading list with materials in Spanish.

Nnaemeka Ekwelum, PhD

Cordelia Rizzo, PhD

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