Today, there are two events we wish to invite you to:
From 12:15pm to 1:15pm, via Zoom:
The Bertha Harris Women’s Center and the Center for Global Engagement present:
“Stitches to Hold the World Together: Women’s Textile Traditions around the World”
Since 2024, the Bertha Harris Women’s Center has held a series of workshops to study and recreate the textile traditions in which women across time and across the planet have used stitching as a source of resilience and survival. In times of war, poverty, isolation, and other challenges. Women from many world cultures have created stitching traditions to hold their worlds together.
In this illustrated International Woman’s Day lecture, Professor Catherine Lavender, PhD, the Director of the Bertha Harris Women’s Center and a member of the History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty, will talk about these traditions. This event is sponsored by the Center for Global Engagement and the World on Wednesday Lecture Series.
Zoom Meeting ID: 811 3178 5767 Passcode: 015322
From 2:30pm to 4:00pm in person at the Bertha Harris Women’s Center, Building 2N, Room 106:
“Stitches to Hold the World Together: Visible Mending Workshop”
Please join us for a relaxing stitching workshop focusing on visible mending and the Japanese textile tradition of Boro. Using simple straight stitches, Japanese women developed a sophisticated art form of decorative repair for valuable silk garments that is now celebrated as “boro” or “sashiko” stitching. Come learn about this resourceful response to recycling clothing that has persisted over centuries in Japan. Today, sashiko has become a popular form of artistic expression around the world.
As the high environmental cost of fabric waste has become more evident, many have turned to repairing rather than trashing damaged clothing. One response has been to embrace “slow stitching,” a meditative process focused on the feeling of stitching, and sustainable repair practices in which the repairs themselves become decorative expressive fashion.
Come and learn about the traditions and innovations that are the foundations of “visible mending” — bring some clothing you’d like to mend with expressive stitching, or just something you’d like to stitch on decoratively. We will provide supplies, including a range of interesting fabric to use for patching. Come be part of a supportive community of stitching and help us hold the world together.
By the Bertha Harris Women’s Center and the Center for Global Engagement
