Knit/Lit Workshop at ULITA

Thursday 8 September, 12.30 - 4.30pm

A creative workshop at ULITA - an Archive of International Textiles, organised as part of Yorkshire Year of the Textile.

Free of charge and drop-in, no booking required.

Led by Elizabeth Gaston, textile artist and teaching fellow at the School of Design, you will create vibrant lengths of knitted fabric using a variety of different synthetic yarns, which will then be inter-looped together into a stunning canopy, to be installed on the University of Leeds campus.

The workshop will take place at ULITA - An Archive of International Textiles, housed in St Wilfred’s Chapel on the Western Campus. During the workshop, you will have the chance to co-create new work with award-winning poet Rommi Smith.

This event draws inspiration from the current exhibition at ULITA, The Synthetics Revolution, which has been created in partnership with the Yorkshire Fashion Archive and The Enterprise of Culture (School of History). The rise of synthetic fibres has placed ‘miracle’ materials at the heart of the modern fashion system, and the exhibition looks behind the scenes to bring the story of man-made fibres to life.

Rommi Smith is a poet and playwright, and she has held many prestigious residencies including as the first Parliamentary Writer in Residence in British history, and the Inaugural Poet in Residence at Keats’ House, London. As part of the Yorkshire Year of the Textile programme, Rommi is creating an intervention to celebrate the history of Crimpolene in Harrogate in November, focusing on a blue Choral Society dress from 1970.

The Yorkshire Year of the Textile programme, initiated by the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds, is inspired by Yorkshire's rich textile heritage and focuses on creativity, innovation and new research. The Yorkshire Year of the Textile is funded by Arts Council England, and features textile and public art interventions, literary and performance strands with textiles as their theme, and events aimed at all ages and open to all.

Image: Detail from Lee Target knitting wool advertisement, She magazine, 1965 (Yorkshire Fashion Archive)