September 19 | 12:00 – 15:00
10 October | 12:00–15:30
14 November | 12:00–15:30
12 December | 12:00–15:30
Dearest friends of holistic craft magic, local ecologies & getting your hands dirty, Rub your hands together and take a deep breath. Somewhere in Osdorp, a sheep ishaving absolutely no idea that its wool has been invited to Lola Lieven. And yet, here we are. The Soft Spot: New Kinship in Nieuw-West is a local wool project by The School of Softness — a queer ecofeminist practice exploring what happens when we slow down, pay attention to materials, and learn through making together. We’re working with raw wool from sheep in Osdorp and following it through its many transformations: washing, cleaning, carding, hand-spinning, dyeing and weaving. In the Netherlands, up to 95% of sheep wool is discarded or burned. We’re interested in what happens when we look at this material — and the knowledge, labour and relationships around it — differently. At Lola Lieven, we’ll continue through the different stages of the process, gradually bringing the wool towards a community blanket for
Nieuw-West. There will be making, of course. Depending on where we are in the process, we might be carding, spinning, dyeing or weaving. There might also be some textile history, local plant wisdom, a poem, a strange wool-related fact, a little theory, or a question that stays with us for a while. And then there are the conversations. Our hands have a way of
making conversation move differently. We might talk about where we grew up, where we feel at home, where materials come from, what we consume, what we remember, what knowledge travels through families, what gets forgotten, and why so much of what we make has become so far removed from the places and hands that make it. Someone might remember a technique their grandmother used. Someone might teach something they didn’t realise they knew. Someone might ask a question that changes the direction of the afternoon. Someone else might have a very strong memory about scratchy sweaters. The blanket grows through this too: through the wool, the hands, the knowledge, the conversations and the relationships that form around it.
The School of Softness is interested in these kinds of entanglements between humans and other beings, material and memory, body and landscape, making and knowing. Not as something to explain from a distance, but something to practice. So we’ll wash. We’ll card. We’ll spin. We’ll dye. We’ll weave. And, slowly, the blanket will come into being.
Free to join. All ages welcome. No previous experience needed. Snacks provided.
As spots are limited, please sign up via Tally: https://tally.so/r/LZqD7v_