How was #SeptTextileLove 2023 for you? With 12,678 uses of all the hashtags this year we can safely say it was an overwhelming success from our side of the fence. All of us in the seam collective would like to extend our gratitude to everybody who took the time to share their textiles and the stories behind them this year. THANK YOU!

Community on Instagram

We love the community that #SeptTextileLove brings to Instagram; the diversity of posts, and how wonderfully warm and welcoming everyone is. It does mean making time to read everyone’s thoughts and chatting online with people about them, which so many of you do.

A great example of how insightful comments can make a difference – comments on her response to the ‘risk’ prompt resonated with @whitstabletail and she showed how for the ‘support’ prompt

In your last posts, many of you mentioned being frustrated with the Instagram algorithm – we agree! We feel sorry that Instagram changing how hashtags are seen means that we have all potentially missed lots of interesting posts and missed ‘meeting’ new textile lovers. We especially want the people who are new to Instagram, or those who use it infrequently to take part and feel part of it too. That being said it has been an amazing month of textile thoughts and images, so inspiring – do check out the hashtags #SeptTextileLove and #SeptTextileLove23 for more inspiration!

Thank you to everyone who mentioned @seam_collective or tagged us – on our days working from the seam account choosing three posts to highlight, this made finding all your posts much, much easier. We will think about how we can work around Instagram for next year, or if you have any suggestions let us know!

Community online – seam collective x The Loom Shed

We’ve watched #SeptTextileLove snowball over since its inception in 2017, and this year it also spread its wings in an exciting new direction thanks to Liz Croft (@weavecroftyweave) and Louise Cottey (@louisecotteytextiles) from The Loom Shed (@the_loom_shed). They presented team seam and #SeptTextileLove participants with an opportunity to elaborate on the Instagram conversations through a series of Zoom sessions. The four one-hour ‘meet and make’ dates saw Angie Parker and Julie Heaton (date 1), Jane Colquhoun, Oliver Bliss and Angie Parker (date 2), Lydia Needle and Helen MacRitchie (date 3), and Nina Gronw-Lewis, Lou Baker and Joy Merron (date 4) of the seam collective introduce themselves and their practices. The conversations with groups of fellow textile enthusiasts then flowed with the daily prompts providing a starting point.

You can view the introductions again here, but once the recording was paused, the real sense of growing a community took hold. We’re generally more comfortable chatting via screens these days; an unexpected benefit of living through a pandemic, and the sessions provided an excellent opportunity to go deeper into the topics covered on Instagram. These ranged from career development and confidence, health and dementia, to regional variations in natural dyeing, and the different working practices of the artists within their varied disciplines.

The participants generously shared their work-in-progress projects too, which brought to life their #SeptTextileLove posts. The sessions also consolidated some connections we have built through seam collective, including Liz and Louise and other participants such as Helen Adams. Helen runs the popular Textile Curator website and Instagram account @textilecurator for those who have yet to discover her online library of contemporary textile artists.

“The sense that seam collective creates community was also so central to the events. Be it community for the members of the collective, but also for us as participants in their exhibitions and also the #septtextilelove challenge. Community is also at the heart of The Loom Shed and that feels like a good reason to collaborate with seam collective in the first place”. Liz Croft.

Community in-person for the future?

So what next for #SeptTextileLove? We’ve already highlighted a need to navigate the changing algorithms of Instagram to ensure we continue to thrive as a community. But have The Loom Shed sessions opened the door to more real-time interactions and maybe even regional group meet-ups?

“Who would be at your STL dream dinner party?”

Professor Becky Earley

We know these are happening all around us, all of the time, as many of this year’s posts talked about the textile groups you’re part of. But what if we were to instigate specific meet-up sessions?

As part of our A Visible THREAD project, we will be trying out a couple of different shorter online community interactive events in 2024 – more details on our website and @seam_collective on Instagram later in the year.

Don’t forget to check out the wonderful collective archive of inspiration from all the participants at #SeptTextileLove and #SeptTextileLove23, and let us know who would be at your dream #SeptTextileLove dinner party!

Angie and Penny