This guide is for neighborhood, community, and collective groups that are already active in their locality and wish to come together to express a shared idea through a collective textile creation.
The first part of this guide discusses materials and measurements (Material Matters). The second part addresses the theme, which each group will define to express their realities, both material and immaterial, in a textile piece that they can build together during their meetings.
Part 1: Material Matters (or materials matter)
Sewing Materials
- Reused fabric, old clothes, torn sheets, all that people usually throw away or donate, scraps that have been stored for decades.
- Threads – if there are any in existence and stored from grandmothers, better, but when they run out, we buy threads, ideally (where possible) national brands and natural fibers. Sometimes (or in some places) it is possible to know the provenance of our natural fiber threads and chose a more ethical source of cotton, but this is truly rare. Some of you may be able to obtain threads coloured with natural dyes. Just do the best you can: starting with what you have, followed by local brands and small ethical companies (where these exist)!
- Needles corresponding to the threads and fabrics.
- Pins
- Scissors
- Paper (reused, if possible) and pencils for thinking about designs
Why it’s important to reuse textiles
Important Information Regarding the Measurements of Your Finished Creation
Your collective piece must have certain precise measurements so that it can be easily installed within the Forest.
Each individual piece of the Forest of Hope measures 30cm wide and 30 or 60cm long. They are joined together with buttons and buttonholes, and their assembly depends on these being equidistant from one another. So we recommend the following:
WIDTH: The collective pieces will be larger than the individual pieces, but their width must be a multiple of 30cm (60cm, 90cm, or 120cm). In the diagram, you can see a «collective expression of what they’re already doing» in the middle of the Forest of Hope, measuring 60 x 60cm:
So, you can choose to make a piece 60 cm or 90 cm wide. There are a few (very few) pieces that are 120 cm wide, but working with very large pieces can become more complicated. If you have experienced seamstresses in your collective, go for it!
LENGTH: The length doesn’t matter as much, but ideally it would also be 60 or 90 cm.
We recommend: choosing a large fabric (tablecloth, curtain, sheet) the full size you want to make your piece (with 2-4cm of margin on all sides, and you can mark it with a pencil to know the space within which to place your design). This will serve as your canvas, and you can add add fabrics and stitches to it as you define your design.
It’s also possible to make the design on several small canvases.
Very soon, we’ll make a video on how to measure and properly place the buttons and buttonholes on collective pieces, but this is something you will do at the very end, so go ahead and get started.
If you have any questions, write to us, and we’ll help you clarify the size of the collective piece. You can email: zurciendoelplaneta@gmail.com (you can write in Spanish, English, French, Portuguese… and then we’ll ask deepl for help on other languages).
Part 2: How to Organize a Collective Embroidery
The truth is that doing embroidery among many people is an excellent metaphor for any other organizational challenge. It’s one of the reasons why we believe this experience can strengthen groups.
Furthermore, sewing and embroidery are ancestral technologies, for which we evolved: it calms the mind and works our body, connects our heart and mind through our hands, releases oxytocin, and connects us with the collective. In a world where we are surrounded and immersed in digital technologies and individualism, we want to invite you to reconnect with this ancestral social technology!
Some reflections:
- Not everyone is necessarily going to embroider – this used to frustrate me, but you have to go with the flow. In reality, there are many different tasks that contribute to the collective creation, and all deserve recognition: convening and inviting neighbors, organizing and facilitating meetings, gathering fabrics and old clothes, drawing, cutting, machine sewing, hand sewing, preparing drinks and food for stitchers… We don’t all want to do all the activities, but we can all do something.
- The process is important. Although the final piece may endure over time, the process and the woven relationships and shared memories can be more important, pay attention to them. Take photos, invite someone to be a rapporteur and keep a chronicle of the creation.
- Don’t rush. A collective creation won’t be finished in one sitting. It’s okay to change your mind too. Give yourselves time to express opinions, to share. That’s where the value of this activity lies. Then you’ll see how you get organized. We consider it important to have several collective meeting sessions, but there can also be times when different people take the piece home to keep stitching at their own pace. In 2023, a collective in Argentina designed their piece together and created it across 4 canvases of 30 x 60 cm so that 4 people could work in their homes at the same time. These 4 canvases are installed together to form the collective image of the natural reserve the community is campaigning for.
- Sewing in public space. If it’s safe, we encourage you to gather in public spaces to sew and embroider your collective creation as often as possible. Hopefully, people will approach to ask what you’re doing, and you can share the multiple meanings of your stitched creations and about the collective action you are portraying.
Setting the Mood for the Meeting
We recommend starting the meeting with a playful intervention that invites people to focus on the place and the ideas to be discussed. You can generate a simple grounding dynamic or reading a poem or play a song that leads everyone to synchronize and focus their thoughts. We leave some suggestions in this link.
You can find some poems to inspire at the end of this entry.
If you have other techniques that work well, we would love for you to share your wisdom so that other collectives can try them out too.
When you start work on your collective creation, please let us know on the link below. This helps us to stay in touch and invite you to virtual events.
We’re getting started
How to Design Your Piece
You’ll need to start by presenting a bit of the context of the proposal to be stitched. Everything about the collective is on this website, but if you need material about the Zurciendo el planeta collective, just ask us for it!
Once everyone agrees to make a piece and contribute it to the global project, the most interesting part begins: what hopeful aspect do you want to represent about what you do? This is a very interesting reflection for any group: you may not all agree on the most valuable elements of your activities, or some may value an aspect that others haven’t visualized. It’s not about one perspective «winning,» but about seeing how to intertwine them or give them all space, how they relate, so you can reaching a shared expression that you are all happy with.
We leave you with some questions that can help spark ideas:
- What do we do?
- What does each person feel is the important or valuable thing about what we do? You can all contribute to creating a long list.
- Think not only about the physical things you have done for your locality, but also other more intangible things (non-material, spiritual, or what word would you use?) that contribute to the human or more-than-human community of your locality.
- What are your achievements? Surely there are things you feel you have already achieved, others that are on their way but can be improved, and others that you still want to address.
- What are the visible impacts of your collective actions for yourselves? What does the community perceive?
- Now consider the invisible, intangible impacts, for yourselves, for your community. Are there any?
- These questions can be shared among yourselves, simply by talking, but some groups also like to draw them on a large sheet of paper, or on several. You can add the answers in different colors until you have a small universe portrayed that represents what you are all experiencing about your collective project.
- Now, from everything that has been talked about and captured on paper, what is the most important thing you want to communicate to the world about what you do? Of all the things you are trying, creating, which do you feel would share the most hope with other collective groups?
- We know that we all face many challenges. It is important to reflect on them, to find ways around them. But on this occasion, for your creation, we seek to share the most hopeful elements that you have experienced in your collective. That will be the theme of your collective creation.
- And then, how would you represent it and capture it on fabric?
To inspire you, you can see some of the Collective Embroideries that are already part of the forest, but your story will be different, because each collective has a unique journey.
Collective Embroideries – Spanish
How to Start Working With the Fabric
You don’t need great knowledge or expertise to work on the fabric. Here are some suggestions to facilitate the work:
- You can make a sketch of your design on paper, with ideas of the colors you want to use. If you have paper big enough, it is easier if it is the actual size (see measurements section, above).
- You can cut out the shapes in paper and then transfer them to fabric and add them to your base canvas and hold them in place with pins to assemble your figures.
- If you have background colours (like for example sky, lakes and grass) we recommend putting them down first and adding smaller shapes on top. When you stitch the smaller shapes you will fix the larger ones in place. They might need a bit more stitching in themselves, but your image will start coming together quickly this way.
- We will soon make some videos of sewing and embroidery techniques for those who need them.
- Many pieces will overlap each other. That depends on your design.
We would like to leave you some useful and hopeful things to read (and listen to) around your stitches.
Finally
Contact
If your collective starts making a piece with this guide, please let us know by registering on this google form, and send some photos of you putting together your collective artwork to zurciendoelplaneta@gmail.com.
If you need help, we can support your group with some virtual workshops (or in-person, if we’re nearby) to start the activities (we can run workshops at present in Spanish, Portuguese, English and Swedish).
- We will continue to improve our materials, so we greatly value any observation or suggestion you have to make them better.
- We are going to organize talks on various topics, about crisis, hope, and imagination over the following months, and we would like to invite you and have you share your collective’s experiences.
So please make sure you register in the google form because that is how we will be contacting you!
When You’re Finished…
When your collective piece is ready, we invite you to follow these steps so that we can identify it, know the story of its creators, and have it arrive safely into our hands.