Meet The Crafters
Meet our Close Knit crafters! The stories and photographs throughout this website were shared by these craftswomen, who are skilled in all kinds of crafts, from sewing to woodburning. They come from different backgrounds and cultures, but all share a love of crafting - so often passed down the generations by mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.
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For this project, we interviewed crafters living or working in Newham about their crafting memories and heritage in oral histories interviews. We also visited community groups at Trinity Community Centre, The Well Bonny Downs Community Centre and The Gate Library, working closely with the Stitches in Time embroidery group and the Ekta Project.
These oral histories are now stored in our Hidden Histories archive – please get in touch if you would like to visit!
I've always enjoyed doing craft things, so like knitting and various textiles (...) I've just taken on a studio which is in Stratford and the idea of that is to explore more the textile side of things (...) which is in printing, embroidery, quilting and a range of other things relating to textiles.
Kina
Textiles
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I really do enjoy it. At work, you know, anything there, they said ‘Oh, Nandra can do for us this’. You know, the uniforms - ‘Oh, Nandra she can do for, she can do for us’. (...) Day before yesterday, I did one of my colleagues' dresses, you know - uniform. She said ‘Could you?’.
Nandra
Seamstress
"I like to do card-making, I like to do colouring (…) I like to colour a lot and I feel happy when I do it."
Card-making
Asiya
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I made my own clothes all the time and I (…) You know there’s kadai, you know we call kadai, and sweater – everything I can make.
Anon
Sewing, knitting, kadai embroidery
"When I knit, it's about relaxation so I want something mindless on the telly (...) and then I knit and I only want a simple pattern because I want the mindlessness of it and not having to think too hard. So a pattern has to be fairly simple."
Sarah
Knitting and embroidery
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"Knitting I started when I was twelve or thirteen. Started when twelve/thirteen around the school, yeah. Sewing, I was seventeen/ eighteen. I made my dresses, I do everything."
PARKASH
Seamstress
"I tried doing it at home, but my husband wasn’t too keen on me carving wood in the living room (...) so that’s when woodburning came into, into being (...) I think we’d seen the tool in Lidl or something and I thought ‘Oh!’ (...) I’d never even heard of woodburning, pyrography before"
RUTH
Woodburning
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"Knitting I do, this is how I done knitted a muffler and things like that, easy things. I am not an expert but still I’ve done some."
MADHU
Knitting and embroidery
"When I had my children years ago we did knit. I knitted all their clothes and I could dressmake. I didn’t have a machine, I used to handmake and I enjoyed doing it. Perhaps it was a matter of necessity then. But as I’ve gone on through my years, I don’t actually like craft (...) I can’t sit too long. I like to be more active."
Knitting and dressmaking
VALERIE
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I said to my granddaughter, ‘Learn machining, and you know there you have to fix your clothes up, you have to do it, then you will know how to do it’. ‘OK, Nanny, here I’ll do it’, but no, they don’t want to. It’s not in them. Me and my sisters, my mum, we all did the machining.
Anon
Seamstress
"I like card-making, I’m not really a knitter or a crocheter, but I do like making cards, decoupage, anything like that. I find it very relaxing, very therapeutic."
BEZ
Card-making
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My main ones at the moment are I make jewellery, mainly beaded jewellery, but I do also do a bit of silversmithing, and I still attend a class – I’ve been going for years and years and years in Newham. (...) I’ve always done crafts and tried different crafts that I don’t necessarily do now.
Jenny
Jewellery-making and embroidery
I consider myself an artist and a craftsperson (...) For me this definition, this split is very modern (...) I find it very unhelpful. My art form, if you like, is the involvement of people – that is my artform. (...) I could say, if I wanted to make a definition, that the crafts are the things which we then use to achieve that, but then I could say that the craft in itself is achieving that.
Hazel
Mosaics, tapestry, costume-making, crochet
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I’m a great believer in crafts should be useful – crafts should be beautiful, it should be useful. (...) So it’s not a waste of time and it’s not a waste of material, there’s a purpose to it. ‘Cause otherwise all those hours – I mean, I know you get joy, I get joy from doing it. It’s lovely to be with the other ladies, but I need something else which is a purpose for the end product, because I don’t like waste. You know, I was brought up, there wasn’t a lot of money, and so you used what you had.
Anon
Embroidery, card-making, drawing
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It’s probably easier to say what crafts I don’t do! (...) I knit every single day, I’m always, always knitting. I can crochet a bit, I do a lot of dressmaking, so I do dressmaking. When my kids were small, I made a lot of their clothes. (...) when I’m selling stuff is greetings cards, framed vintage prints.
Fern
Knitting, crochet, dressmaking, card-making
Sometimes with silversmithing and soldering and that you can be a little bit messy and then clean it back, so I think that’s why it works quite well for me.
Jewellery-making
Louisa
A couple of years ago they started doing the embroidery group and it wasn’t something I really thought I could do but I’ve really got into it and I really enjoy it now. And it feels creative in a different sort of way from knitting. (...) With knitting I like a pattern and seeing what I’m doing, whereas it feels much freer doing the embroidery.
Ro
Knitting and embroidery
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My family when I was back home, we did a lot of this sewing things and it was mostly on the sari, you know, sort of thing (…) We did certain - it’s like a nylon thread thing and we used to make handbags out of it. So, you know, so my sisters used to do them but I used to also learn from them.
Kousar
Embroidery
I do a lot of art, but I also do obviously the embroidery group. When there’s things like Heritage Month or Black History Month, whatever is about I’ll do it. So I think last year or the year before I did fabric printing, some collage. I’ve done a couple of little exhibitions with people.
Caz
Embroidery, art, collage
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I was learning sewing, so I was making bags and I was doing patchwork, I learnt that. (...) The first thing I sewed - yeah, it was a bag (...) it was a patchwork bag. I’ve improved quite a lot, ‘cause I did that piece that’s gonna be in that exhibition I think, so that’s good (...) I'll feel proud because I've done a little piece.
Ruth
Sewing and embroidery
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"My mum was always knitting (...) she had various attempts to try and teach me to knit which proved really difficult ‘cause I was lefthanded – or as we were known then actually as ‘cackhanders’ in the fifties and sixties, um, and that term was readily used. I ended up adapting what I could from my mum and what she showed me."
