S5 E3: Weaving a Stronger Community with Radical Weavers (Mairi Breslin & Peter Dickie)

In this episode of the Sweet Georgia Show, Felicia explores the work of Radical Weavers, a community weaving studio in Stirling, Scotland. Founded by Mairi Breslin, the studio supports young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds through weaving workshops and inclusive teaching methods. Peter Dickie, Mairi’s son, runs the studio’s commercial offerings and community work, showcasing the transformative power of weaving.

The Radical Weavers organization, which started as a small hobby, has grown into a community hub that offers therapeutic weaving workshops and support for individuals facing challenges. Through inclusive and inspiring programs, the organization empowers people to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals. The Radical Weavers’ commitment to diversity and inclusion has earned them recognition and support from the community.

Takeaways:

• Radical Weavers focuses on building community through weaving.
• The studio supports young adults who are neurodivergent or LGBT.
• Weaving is used as a therapeutic tool for trauma recovery.
• Accessibility adaptations are made for individuals with disabilities.
• Tartan weaving is evolving with innovative designs and materials.
• The V&A Museum residency showcased the creativity of the studio.
• Personal stories highlight the transformative power of weaving.
• Future plans include opening a Tartan Centre in Scotland.
• The organization aims to be self-sufficient and community-driven.
• Inclusivity and support are at the core of Radical Weavers' mission.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Welcome to today's episode of The Sweet Georgia Show, where we explore how the through her background in trauma counseling, Mari has created an inclusive, inspiring and wholehearted organization focused on helping young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to develop essential life skills in a safe space. This work is about more than weaving fabric. It's about bringing confidence, connections and new opportunities for the community of individuals who are often socially isolated. So you'll hear about how traditional Scottish tartan designs are being given new life and meaning and how inclusive teaching methods are opening the doors for those who were previously excluded from craft spaces and very, very moving and touching personal stories that showcase the healing powers of creating with your own two hands. This conversation reveals how the simple act of weaving can actually create profound ripples of change through an entire community. But I really wanted to thank you both, Mary and Peter, for being here for this conversation. Originally, this is like months and months ago, I've been wanting to have this conversation with you because I noticed, you know, that Mary, you had joined the School of Sweet Georgia. And I was just kind of like looking through the members who had joined that day. And then I saw your name and then I saw your email address pop up. And it had the domain name radicalweavers.org. And I was immediately like, oh, this is interesting. I wonder what And then I went over to your website and then discovered this whole world of all of these things that you've been working on and doing. And I found it so fascinating and wanted to have a chance to chat with you about it and sort of explore that whole world of all of the amazing charity work that you have been doing. And so thank you so much for being here and agreeing to do this. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_02: 2:30

Thank you for inviting us. We're delighted to have the opportunity to talk about the work that we do.

SPEAKER_00: 2:35

Fantastic. So why don't we get started with just if you could tell us a little bit about yourselves, both of you, Mary and Peter. And so, Mary, if you want to start first and just sort of talk about, you know, where you're from, where you sort of got started with weaving and and yeah, what you're doing now.

SPEAKER_02: 2:53

Okay, so my name is Mary, Mary Breslin, and we live in central Scotland. We run the Radical Weavers based in Stilling. So we started initially in 2019 and I thought that it would be nice to have something for the community, somewhere for the community to go and to do something lovely and creative and I was a weaver for many years before that. I was at the time a trauma psychologist working at the local university but I had an idea that something in the community would be nice so I thought how am I going to do this? Will I do it part-time around work or will I do it full-time? So I decided to run a crowdfunder to see if anybody was interested and that would help buy looms and stuff initially. And we got a fantastic response. So I decided to give up the academic career and start a charity, a community weaving studio, initially for people who had experienced trauma or loss. But from there, we have evolved into quite a smaller niche. And really, we support young adults who are either neurodivergent or LGBT and who have become socially isolated. And essentially, they've left school. They didn't have a good time at school, typically. Bullied, probably left school, underqualified. And then we encourage them to come in and spend some time with us. And they discover the wonderful world of weaving and spend a bit time with us and then we say well you know what do you want to do from here whether it's go and get some qualifications or looking for a part-time job or a full-time job or just volunteering with us or with one of the other charities locally and that's what we encourage them to do and we've had some great results. So as I say I started in 2019 and then when lockdown hit I needed help because I was doing things online and all sorts of stuff. So I turned to who was the nearest person who could help me. And my son, Peter, or this is Peter, I said, could you help me please? All these looms come flat packed and I'm hopeless at that. Could you please help with building the looms? And he reluctantly agreed. He'd finished his college course and he was kind of hanging around looking for something to do. So he agreed to build the looms and said, I'm not interested in weaving. I'm not going to learn to weave. Not interested. But he did come to the studio every day when we were able to go. And over a period of time, I watched him working with the other young adults and he was very good at supporting them. And we ended up dragging him into the weaving. Kicking and

SPEAKER_01: 5:40

screaming.

SPEAKER_02: 5:41

And now he runs all the classes. He does all the community work with young adults and he runs all our commercial offerings as well. And I very much take a back seat. So Peter, do you want to talk about what it's been like learning to weave?

SPEAKER_01: 5:59

Exhausting. Hi, so I'm Peter Dickey. I started at Radic Weavers about five and a half years ago now, give or take. wove one thing then didn't weave again for about another two or three years almost and then we needed a new weaving instructor and I already knew how to do all the stuff so I've just kind of fallen into that role stuck it in now they kind of get rid of me

SPEAKER_00: 6:25

Yeah, so I have so, so many questions. Maybe first, I could ask about, Peter, how you go about teaching somebody how to weave? Like, where do you start? Are you starting with yarn? Are you starting with warp? How are you going about teaching? And are people coming in for, you know, week by week training? Are they coming in every couple of days? Or is it just one session? Or how many sessions? What does that kind of all look like?

SPEAKER_01: 6:53

So for the community stuff, so all the charity work that we do, what usually happens is I have a table loom or a floor loom set up in advance with just something on it, usually just like four-ply cotton. And it's just something quick and easy. And people come in and they'll just have a shot and see if they like it. And usually what happens is it's just plain weave, so it goes really quickly. And they end up loving it and they want to come in and they just keep doing it. more and more complicated things so they'll start doing like I said plain weave and then move on to like a straight draw twill or then they'll do diamonds or zigzags something a bit more complicated with levers and things and the treadle pattern or lift pattern tends to get more and more complicated until we get to a point where it's too difficult and then we work backwards to where they're most comfortable and then they usually get a chance on setting up their own loom and just trying out different things usually either me or mary will find a pattern online or even they'll find a pattern online and we'll set up a room in advance or get them to set it up depending how often they're in And then they start to do that pattern and just trial and error research things for us. Just because we don't have time to weave anymore, do

SPEAKER_02: 8:04

we? No, I can't remember the last time I actually wove anything at the loom. I think

SPEAKER_01: 8:08

it's been about a month for me now.

SPEAKER_02: 8:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 8:09

And then for the commercial stuff, we usually run a weave-a-tart scarf workshop where people come in for one day from 9.30 until about 5-ish. with an hour break in the middle for lunch. And we have this big IKEA unit full of balls of knitting yarn. And I just showed them one of the examples, say pick three colours and then they just go from there. And that's, as you'll know, the hardest part of weaving is picking your colours. So it takes, I think the longest I've had was about three hours for one workshop. Like an eight hour workshop, somebody spending three hours picking their colours and I'm trying to egg them on to hurry up. But then they just start warping up. It's just rigid heddles for that one. So it's nothing overly complicated. So it's set up within half an hour. It's warped up in half an hour, threaded up by the hour mark, and then they're up and weaving in an hour and a half, usually. And then it's just entertaining them until the end of the workshop and showing them all the other things you can do with weaving, like all the twills and all the fancy patterns and like croak bright, overshot, and shadow weave and all that other nonsense that's a bit more complicated.

SPEAKER_00: 9:18

That's fantastic. And you've been learning all that sort of on your own or are you learning that anywhere?

SPEAKER_01: 9:23

More or less on my own. So Mary taught me all the basics. I think the first thing was just plain weave on an Ashford table and so with all the levers and it was just one, two, one, two, one, two, the whole way up until I was finished. And then you showed me the basics of foreshaft weaving and I was like, no, it's too complicated. And then went back to it years later and and everything after your first four-shot pattern has just been on my own. And you're self-taught as well, aren't you?

SPEAKER_02: 9:50

Yeah, so I just learned from... Initially learned from YouTube, trial and error, because there wasn't any weavers or anything like that around where I lived. And then I discovered Jane Stafford's online guild, and that was transformational. So I love the way Jane teaches, and I have to say we follow a lot of her examples in the way she teaches. If something... if something unexpectedly goes wrong, she doesn't try and cover it up. She just says, aha, this can happen. And this is how you fix it. And I thought that was fantastic. So we did that as well. But yeah, my weaving transformed when I saw how she taught, really helped a lot. And then as Peter says, he started, I showed him the basics and then left him to it. And then I would come back and find that he was doing something that there's no way I would be able to do. And I think, oh my goodness, that's amazing. The only downside of this is that typically he'll send me pictures of you know pieces of woven material or weaving drafts and stuff like that in the middle of the night I get the bong on the phone and it's not an emergency it's oh look I found this and it looks really interesting how do you think they did that you know so I'm not

SPEAKER_01: 11:03

sure how

SPEAKER_02: 11:05

many young men his age would do that but he's really taken the challenge and run with it so we all have our particular favourites and favourite styles and things like that so we weave very differently. Yeah, we have different preferences in what we make. Different tastes. Very much.

SPEAKER_00: 11:27

Yeah, it's very unique and individual, right? I love that story about Jane Stafford because Jane Stafford is like around here, like around our area, Pacific Northwest area. She's in Salt Spring Island. And so to go all the way from like education in Salt Spring Island, making it all the way to Stirling in Scotland, I think it's just like really, really cool. So that's fantastic. And then we'll be sure to ping her and let her know. Thanks, dude. Yeah. Now, I know that you had mentioned before, Mari, about how the first sort of crowdfunding that you had done to get started and to bring on looms and things like that, and you were working sort of around the idea of your trauma psychology and trauma counseling and everything. And in that crowdfunder, you had mentioned about taking those looms and being able to modify them so that wheelchair users could use them, so that people with limited mobility could use them. I didn't even know that that was really possible. Can you sort of describe what needs to be modified in order to allow all different challenges, how you can access a loom if you have all different kinds of limitations?

SPEAKER_02: 12:32

So mostly for people who need modifications, we use the sorry weaving looms. So they come with all sorts of additions that for people with different abilities. So there is a loom that you can use when you're in a wheelchair. There's one's that you can push the shuttle with a stick in your mouth. There's additional bars to hold onto for the beater that makes that easier to do. So really most of the work for people who have additional needs is done in the soiree. The only things we would really do otherwise is just things like adjusting the height of the loom, maybe putting it on a special table that you could get a wheelchair under if it's a small table loom. But we tend to try people, when we're teaching people, we tend to build on strengths and we use this psychological technique of errorless learning in the beginning. So everything they do is correct. And that's one of the sorry principles is there's no such thing as mistakes. And we always say that to people that come to our studio. Nobody ever makes mistakes. mistakes in our studio. There might be some unplanned design features that creep in to the work that you're doing, but they're absolutely not mistakes. So when people are coming along and they're learning and they're developing their skills, we try to have everybody doing the same thing, regardless of where you've come from. So we have people of all sorts of abilities working together in the studio. One of our regular weavers is a blind lady. So she came along and said, I would love to do this. How can I do it? And, you know, I'd sort of chatted to some people who said that you can't, a blind person can't be weaved. Don't be ridiculous. That's just can't be done. So Joan has repeatedly proved this wrong. And Peter's taught her from basic plain weave, where she, she just you know, went with the touch of the lumen and got the feel of how that all works to things like, well, she's done twills, she's done...

SPEAKER_01: 14:34

She can do tartan. So one of the things we do quite a lot is we get tartan and then try and do something different with it. So instead of doing a regular 2-2 twill, it's a diamond twill or a herringbone or just something different. So she ended up doing a four-shaft undulating twill as a tartan. So she would follow the undulating twill pattern and just throw in the colours that she needed as she went. And it's ridiculous. She's a better weaver than neither of us.

SPEAKER_02: 15:01

The results are incredible. So she has a very limited amount of vision and she can see high contrast. But she almost does it, you know, by intuition now. She's so familiar with the loom and how she weaves and what she produces is incredible. And she's often saying to us, you know, there's not much creativity activities that as a blind person I could do. Yes, I could do pottery, perhaps a bit of mosaic, but mostly you need a decent amount of vision. But this, because of the tactile nature of the yarns and the high contrast colours, the fact that your loom is self-contained and you're working within a box almost. Yeah, and she absolutely loves it. So, yes, and we often wheel her out if we're doing demonstrations and displays and she'll stand and show the work and talk about the looms. And then I'll say, and of course you realise that Joan is blind. And people are sort of like, what?

SPEAKER_01: 15:57

They think we're joking. And then she gets out He used the white

SPEAKER_02: 16:00

stick and said, no, really, I am blind, but I do this. So it's remarkable and it's given us so much joy. So we have, typically we have blind weavers. We've had very frail elderly people in. I'll never forget one of the first elderly people that we had was an older man and he wanted to weave tartan, a specific tartan. But, you know, we were looking at the warping board and thinking, well, how can we make this work? So So we decided that he would follow the draft and he would shout out the colours to Peter and how many threads. So it was like, right, Peter, four reds. So Peter winds the four reds and eight black, eight black. So the gentleman was in charge of what was happening and Peter was just being his arms and legs. And then we put the warp on and he wove away with that. So it's always about trying to find... what people can do so that everybody in the studio is treated the same regardless of where they are. And often we get a real surprise. We've done a lot of work with autistic young adults who are autistic who are told that they can't do things. When they come to us, they're often referred from a sort of social work situation and we'll be told This person can't do this and can't do that. Here's all the adjustments you'll need to make. And we're right. OK, so we'll take all that into account. And then you see what they produce. And after they've had a go and produce something, they're shocked that, oh, my goodness, I've made a tartan scarf. You know, that's incredible. And so next time, well, you pick the colours and pick the pattern and off they go. And then next time you set this bit up. and off they go and it just builds on their skills and what they produce is incredible.

SPEAKER_00: 17:51

Yeah, their confidence must be going up so, so much just to be able to produce something and to be excited about what they've created. I think that that's, I mean, there's life skills built into all of this and then confidence boosting for everyone in all of this. So Peter, you actually mentioned something about the tartan that I thought was really interesting because you were talking about, oh, maybe not doing it necessarily as a tutu twill or as a plain weave, but just like trying different weave structures. And we're going to do a diamond and we're going to do undulating twill. We're going to do all these different things. And I think, Mari, I had also read that. you had done an exhibition at the V&A in Dundee. And as part of that, you were talking about, you know, using different materials, using maybe like repurposing waste materials, maybe using recycled yarns, all sorts of things like that. And so this past year, I'd been exploring and reading and researching a lot about tartan and the history of tartan and all these kinds of things. And initially, when I came into this whole sort of field of weaving, I thought it was very like disciplined and almost very rigid and it has to be two to twill it has to be set at 24 ends per inch it has to be this kind of yarn it has to be this kind of colors and then the more and more i looked into it i was like oh actually tartan weaving and tartan design is very open it's very inclusive it's very you know um there's lots of innovation happening constantly people coming up with new designs all the time using different materials trying different things um and so i wanted a chance to like speak to you guys about this as well like how how do you how do you see tartan weaving now is it like historically always I mean it's it's changing I think from from what you're showing me

SPEAKER_02: 19:29

yeah so we do a design and weave your own tartan workshop which takes six hours so people come along no previous experience we sit with them and help them design the tartan and it's actually it's maybe building on my psychology background but it's more of a counseling session than a design session so we we try and find out we have a set of prompt I'm giving away all our secret that's here. But we have a set of cards that helps them decide on what's important to them in their world. And then we match that with colours. And then we work out a division of space, as Jane would say, how the colours are going to fit. We do yarn wraps and we do colouring pencils and all this stuff. And in the end, we just set up a little rigid heddle loom. They set up the rigid heddle loom and weave a little piece, just about an A4 size. And at the end of it, they're presented with a booklet that shows the journey of the design that they've done. And it's a lovely thing to do. It's all woven in cotton because the colours of the cotton are much broader than the wool. It's also more beginner friendly because it tends not to snap quite so easily when it's on the loom. But we had a lovely experience with a group of refugees who had resettled in Stirling and they came along to do the design and weave their own tartan because obviously they came from countries where they don't have family terms. I'll never forget, it was the most moving thing. There was a gentleman who was from Ukraine who had come to settle with us and he had brought his daughter and they were working away and of course were practicing English as well. But at the end of it, we got to where the colours were that he had chosen and he chose red, Ferrari red, because he liked motor racing. and he chose black for the road because he'd spent a lot of time on the road. Blue and yellow to represent his home of Ukraine and this lovely bottle green colour. And I said, well, what does the bottle green represent? And he said, for me, it represents trust. He said, I have come to Scotland with my disabled daughter and we've trusted in complete strangers who have taken us into their home and given us somewhere safe. But also the people who took us in trusted us because we're strangers from another country and we don't speak your language. And he said, I just thought this green to me represented trust. And, you know, it was the most moving thing I'd heard was his description. And he wove out this beautiful, designed and moved this beautiful little piece of tartan that demonstrates what his life in Scotland was like now. Really a lovely, lovely experience. But when we did the residency at the V&A, Peter did this for eight weeks with one of our volunteer weavers. And we'd been given the brief of pushing the boundaries of Tartan. And I think we definitely did that. So you want to talk about some of the projects?

SPEAKER_01: 22:32

So it was me and one of our volunteers. So we just We went up to Dundee, which is about an hour and a half by car from Stirling. So we took the train up every day, ran into the studio because the train got in like two minutes before the studio opened every day. And just spent, I think it was about a part of 10 weeks, give or take, designing and making tartans and trying to do different things. So while we were up there, I hadn't actually decided what I was going to do. But the volunteer had. He decided he was going to design his own tartan. He was going to make it look a little bit funky and make a waistcoat out of it. And he had only really woven about five or six things at this point. I just needed an extra hand up at the museum. And what he ended up doing was usually when you weave tartans, you have a set of warp threads and then your weft threads is your warp sideways. So you do four weft passes on four warp threads, gives you a square, That's what Harten does. But for these white and black houndsteeth sections they wanted, instead of doing four white, four black, four white, four black, as you usually do, he did four different shades of white and four different shades of black and grey. So that way you get striations as you go. And it was just one weft the whole way up. Or sorry, one weft for... that whole tooth. And that means you get all these weird 3D effects almost happening with the teeth. And he sat and wove about four metres of tartan on a wee lever-operated table loom in about a week. He took to it like a fish to water and just... pounded out meterages of this stuff. It was insane. And then all the other volunteers, not volunteers, sorry, all of our other colleagues came up and had a go, because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity thing, really, being the design and residence at the V&A. So we had somebody who designed a goth tartan, so it was all black. So it was all different shades of black and it came together quite well. I think we used latex, latex threads at one point, which is almost as fine as silk and nowhere near as strong. So it just started to disintegrate after a while. But then when we finished it, it kind of melted into itself and made this weird 3D bubbling texture and various other things. We had somebody who... decided i can't do foreshaft weaving confuses me too much so they wove a plain weave sheet of fabric on a rigid heddle and then took the readout reattached the sheet fabric and used it as like an embroidery frame almost. Embroidered a warp on top of their fabric and then wove with a needle a 2-2-12 tartan in a circle on top of this piece of fabric. It was insane. Absolutely ridiculous. And then a few other people coming up trying just different things or just designing their own tartans. And what was your piece? My one... was a rainbow gradient tartan. So it starts off with red in one corner, ends on violet in the next, and the pattern for it was 10 red, 1 orange, 9 red, 2 orange, and it slowly, slowly transformed into... more and more purple. So, from red into orange into yellow, the whole way through the visible light spectrum, finishing at violet, with a little grid going over it, so about six vertical lines across every repeat, and therefore six horizontal lines. So what you ended up getting was this massive piece of gradient cloth where, through the middle, tartan repeat, it perfectly blends from, like, one colour into the next, into the next, and so on, so on. And you get all the colour mixing throughout the whole piece, but it was in... mercerised bamboo, like veni A2 bamboo, and that means it's really shiny as well. So everything just glimmers and looks really fancy and intricate and it's good fun. Certainly

SPEAKER_02: 26:16

doesn't look like traditional tartan.

SPEAKER_01: 26:18

God, no, it nearly killed me.

SPEAKER_02: 26:20

And I'm desperate to make something to wear with it because it looks incredible. It's beautiful, lovely drapey, fine fabric. It's just gorgeous.

SPEAKER_01: 26:27

And then because I was up there for about 10 weeks, I finished this piece and I was like, oh God, what do I do now? So I tried doing turns. I was a 1-3-12, so on one side you have warp stripes, on the other side you have weft stripes. I'm a massive video game fan, complete nerd, so I designed a bunch of Tarthans based off of various video games. Some work better than others. What else did we do? Oh yeah, so we had a loom in the museum for people to come over and have a shot on. So it was just a... I saw a H-frame loom, just two shafts, it was just plain weed, but we would set up 10-meter warps or 11-meter warps on this loom for just members of the public just to come in and have a go. And whenever it got low, I would do another warp setup, take it in and put it on the loom whenever they ran out. So it's just constant fabric being made. I think... what was it in the end, 173 metres?

SPEAKER_02: 27:24

Yeah, visitors loved it. When they came to see the tartan exhibition, because that's what was on, we were there to compliment, all the feedback was saying, oh, the best bit was that we got to weave on a loom.

SPEAKER_01: 27:36

About a third of all reviews they got for the entire exhibition were about this loom that we just left.

SPEAKER_02: 27:42

We just had the best time. But we try to be as sustainable as we can and not waste what we're weaving. So we put cotton warps on that and at the end of the exhibition we cut up all these long cotton warps into chunks and basically made tea towels and placemats and things like that and they were distributed to local charities so everybody got a bit of the weaving that had been done when the exhibition was on as a memory and that was lovely as well so just try to make as much as we can out of you know what we have there. Yeah, but a huge experience. So the V&A Museum, to be anywhere near it, we were so honoured. But we discovered that we were the first charity, not-for-profit social enterprise that's ever had a residency. And as Peter says, we ended up being there for about 10 weeks. But it was a great experience. And everybody associated with the charity, whether it was volunteers or people who come along and use our service, We offered them all the chance to go and do something so that at the end of the day they can put on their CV that they were designers in residency at this V&A. And we just had a great time. It was transformational for us. And it was

SPEAKER_01: 28:57

the oldest home.

SPEAKER_02: 28:58

Yeah, so they discovered the oldest piece of tartan in Scotland, found this piece of Glen Affric tartan, and one of the curators came and asked, could we recreate this? Could we make a piece of this tartan? Of course we could, but we wanted him to do it. So Peter sat and trained him how to weave. He showed him how to set the loom up, and he finished all his warping and whatever, showed him how to weave, and he wove it, and then proudly produced this piece of tartan that was this first attempt. So even the curators of the museum had hands-on experience of weaving and we all had a great time.

SPEAKER_00: 29:37

That's amazing. You guys are doing so much to spread the, like the knowledge of weaving and the love of weaving. And just, you can see all of like the excitement and the enthusiasm and the passion that comes from everything that you're doing here. This is fantastic. It's amazing. I love that going back to like, you were talking about having those cards to help indicate, like figure out like, what are your values? What do you believe in? And how do you express that in color? And then into a piece of cloth that then becomes something super, super special. I know you have like a post on your web site, very recent kind of post about a couple that came on their honeymoon to design their own tartan and then using that for a future baby blanket. I think that that entire story is actually really lovely as well. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that? So

SPEAKER_01: 30:26

this couple came in from, I think it was Northern California, something like that. and they wanted to just they wanted the whole scotch experience so of course they come and do something involving tartan usually people go to the mills and see all the big machines weaving it but they wanted to they saw that this is the fact they could design their own tartan and decided to come to it so we showed them how to design everything they picked out all their favorite colors and one was a particular shade of brown that was the same color as their dog I think they had three different shades of greys and browns for all their different dogs and stuff like that. And then they wove their little sample of tartan, took it away and were perfectly happy. Got back to Northern California after the holiday and then got back in touch with us and said, could we commission a baby blanket? So we ended up weaving a baby blanket for them. So they got this tartan that they designed themselves. So they have the actual piece of tartan and this meter square-ish baby blanket in bamboos and cottons. It's all very soft and nice and lovely. They have a very comfy baby.

SPEAKER_02: 31:35

Yes, and easy to wash. You don't want to be wrapping the baby in wool, but you need to hand wash. Well, none of my babies anyway. You need something you can chuck in the washing machine. So hopefully that becomes an heirloom for them to keep for many years. And there's a lovely story behind it.

SPEAKER_00: 31:52

That's fantastic. So I know that when we were initially trying to organize this recording session, we had to like kind of pause for a little bit because you were in the middle of a very important, I mean, you were doing a big fundraiser for Radical Weavers. Can you talk a little bit about how that went and sort of like what your plans for how you want to grow the organization, where you want to take it and how we can all as a community help and what can we do?

SPEAKER_02: 32:20

So we were running a crowdfunder last year to allow us, we have this beautiful building in Stirling. It's an old bank building, Victorian sandstone, huge windows, fabulous. But it was in a bit of a state of disrepair. And as a charity, we don't have a lot of money. We're lucky to get some grant funding, but mostly we have to earn the money that we need to run the workshops and the experiences. And we were conscious that we had a lot of space in the studio that wasn't being used because it was needing lots of work done and some heating put in. So we ran a crowd funder in the run up to Christmas looking to raise funds because we know that most of the young people that we work with have become socially isolated and often they're living in poverty. So they don't have a lot of money and they live on their own and it's pretty miserable and in particular January is a very difficult month for this group of people. So we wanted to have everything set up so that after Christmas we could throw open the doors, we would have a beautiful warm place for people to come in and that would just encourage the guys to come in and see what goes on with us. When we invite people into the studio as part of our community, we typically don't go for referrals from social work and social agencies. Sometimes that happens, but mostly we try and be a bit cleverer about that because if we take referrals from organisations, we miss out on the people who don't engage. We've found that lots of these young people that we work with just don't have any support systems in place. They don't engage with the support that they could do, They typically have mental health issues. They don't have a lot of money. So instead of asking them, you know, organisations to do fair, instead we say, is there somebody out there who has some time every week that they could volunteer to come and help us? And what we want to do is we want to weave pieces, which we will then donate to other good causes. So people are thinking, well, I've got a few hours every week. I could go on a Wednesday afternoon. You know, we'll teach you all you need to know. They look in the window. They see the beautiful colours that the yarn is. They hear the ridiculous music that is being played far too loud for anybody to be able to concentrate. And you can probably guess which of us is responsible for that. But they hear this great music. They smell the coffee. They see the colours. Why would you not come in? They come in and then... We start them off on simple, weave a tartan scarf and the wellbeing, the confidence that builds, they can see this thing emerging and it is definitely a tartan scarf. And in Scotland, that's generic. Everybody loves tartan. It doesn't matter what gender you are, what age you are, we all know and recognise tartan. So they typically go home really pleased with that. And once they've made that decision, step over the doorway they're hooked pardon the pun but they are hooked they will come back next week next week they'll choose colours differently to the ones that did the first time and they'll do the same thing again so it wasn't a fluke They have managed another piece. And then by the third time, Peter's got a program that he takes them through. And so we add in, we build on the skills, complexity, the responsibility for the individual. And it's just really great for their well-being and confidence. And they can see other people around them, just like them, who have been through the process. And often they're the ones that are coming over to help. with the setting up of the loom or just talking about their experiences and so on. I use every psychological trick in the book to get people to come in and to build on their confidence and so on, but it works. And the young people that come through, the idea isn't that we end up with this huge family of people who are all coming in and staying in the studio. My thought is once we've got you in and your confidence is good and your mental health's okay, it's then a case of what's next where do you want to go what what would you like to do in life and i'm not suggesting that we're trading a whole army of volunteers and weavers because there aren't jobs for weavers but there are jobs for social media and so that some of the young people get involved in social media photography accounts we manufacture a little set of coaster weaving kits for different Tartans. So we've got manufacturing, we've got deliveries, we've got customer service. So they get a chance to have a look at all these different things and think, I could do that, or I could go this way. And we encourage and support that to happen. But plans for the future are, it's a big secret, so don't tell anybody, but we're planning to open Scotland's Tartan Centre. So we're the only place in Scotland where tour groups, for example, can come and have a hands-on weaving experience and try the looms and speak to real weavers who this is their job. to weave. So we're planning to develop that into a proper tourist destination visitor centre for Scotland and that will allow us to generate more commercial revenue because people will come and will see the history of tartan. They might want to weave their own family tartan and take a piece of that home with them or commission us to do it and one of the team would do that. So there's all sorts of commercial revenue that we can generate which will help support our work but just And just as importantly, that means there's a whole lot of volunteering and work experience that our young people can get. So there will be jobs with us that some of them will want to do, really what we want them to do is to fly the nest and go out in the big bad world and be confident to do work out there. But when we have our bigger centre set up, it certainly will give people more opportunities in our safe space because we run a trauma-informed safe space. So they can try all the customer service and all that stuff with our support and then ultimately we move on from there. So we would love to have people visit us. Please do come to Scotland. It is a beautiful country. We are not biased in any way, but it is the most beautiful country in the world. Maybe not so beautiful, but the people are friendly. It's always good fun. So please do come and visit us if you would like a tartan designed for yourself, family. So yes, we did a beautiful piece recently for a wedding anniversary and then wove up the full piece of that. We can do the design your tartan online. So if you wanted to do it from home, we can happily do that. All of these things will help us to grow. We're always looking for, so we sell little tartan weaving kits that you buy in a box. You don't need a loom. Everything you want is in the box. And when we can do family tartans or company tartans, we'd love to have a distributor. either in Canada or the USA for these kits or maybe things like New York Tartan Week. We'd love to speak to people about that. Oh yes, so one of our local politicians, a member of Parliament, wore a piece of our tartan. She was in a New York Tartan parade last year and she wore a piece of our tartan and took it out there. So yeah, I mean, we're always delighted to take any donations that people are able to give. I mean, I know everybody's money is so tight and there's so many causes out there um but yeah we we we try to be self-sufficient so we'd rather earn money than than you know ask for a donation we always want to give something back in return for the help that we get um so yeah but big plans um hoping to open in the summer this year As always, we're doing everything on a shoestring. We've got lots of people volunteering skills and time and bits of wood and stuff. So hopefully our Tartan Centre will have an exhibition about the Tartan radicals. So that would be William Wallace, you may know from Braveheart, Robert the Bruce, Rob Roy McGregor. Mary Queen of Scots. These are all local to Stirling. Bonnie Prince Charlie. Bonnie Prince Charlie, yeah. So we have bits of all of these in our story, as well as the story of the original Radical Weavers from 200 years ago, which is a rather fascinating, if somewhat grisly story. And spoiler alert, it did not end well for the original Radical Weavers. So if you're able to visit us, you'll see all about the story and what these guys did 200 years ago to make our lives a bit better today. day.

SPEAKER_00: 41:06

This sounds amazing. I mean, what you're building here, the organization, both on the charity side and the commercial side and everything that you have planned, it all sounds amazing. Did you ever think that this is what it was going to become when you first started weaving? No.

SPEAKER_02: 41:22

No. Absolutely not. So I started in a corner of my living room by the window, as you do, and I have this horrendous habit of late-night yarn buying, especially on eBay. So I bought more and more and more of this. I'm sure we all know exactly what that's like. So then I had to move out to the garage and I took all my yarns out to the garage and filled that and got a couple of looms and got some friends round and that was great. And then it started to get there's not enough space. So I had to get a weaving studio. And I knew that I found weaving hugely therapeutic. And I would have described myself as a non-creative person previously. And then when I saw these things coming off the loom, I was amazed that I made that, you know, from nothing. And we found that people, if they really enjoy it, they typically enjoy it, but sometimes they think, oh, my goodness, this is just... we love the fact it's always a challenge. And at the end of it, you always look back and think, well, next time I would do that on a different set and a different color. I wonder what would happen if we did. And it's this never ending perpetual challenge. And it's, I think that's the joy and the frustration of weaving. But it is, I mean, we've, We have people hooked on it. So I would never have thought Peter would in any way have been interested in weaving.

SPEAKER_01: 42:54

God,

SPEAKER_02: 42:56

no. And now he has his own Instagram. He runs these commercial workshops. The fellow that Peter did the workshops with up in Dundee, this was a... Someone who from locally who he had been referred to us by the food bank. So he was living alone and in poverty. He's one of my older community members being in his 40s and ex-forces, ex-military, a vet. had trauma when he was in the army and had left early, hadn't worked for more than 20 years. And he would describe himself as very rough. I mean, I know that our accent is difficult, but even we struggle with Chris to understand. And he came in one day, he saw an advert that said, basically free tea and coffee and biscuits in a warm space. So he thought, well, I'll go there. And he said, what are you doing? What is this? What is that thing? And he said, it's a loom for weaving. We were slightly, you know, it's a loom for weaving. Have a go. And he's like, okay, okay. So I'll eat my biscuits and I'll fill my pockets with the ones that are left and I'll be back next week. And he did. And he stuck around and he ended up being remarkable in his capacity to produce beautiful things. And we would sort of look and think, you know, I'd be saying, oh, what's everybody doing? Oh, who did that? And it's Chris. And you think, how has he managed to make this beautiful thing? And he's gone from strength to strength and to the extent that he did the whole contract with Peter up at the V&A, between the two of them, they did the whole lot themselves. And the difference in him, in his confidence, his wellbeing, turning up, his mental health's not great enough to do a paid job, a regularly paid job, but he treats his volunteering with us as if it was a job. So he sets his alarm in the morning and he turns up every day and he does the full day. A's work and he goes home at night having done all this and he's the sort of peer support he's almost like the father figure in the team because he's that little bit older than the rest of them but yeah I mean we have success stories I'm always conscious about you know the confidentiality but we have two young people one young man who came to us a couple of years ago with quite bad mental health issues and really holding him back at school quite badly. And after he'd been with us for a few weeks, he didn't have to attend as many appointments with his mental health support. He ended up being absolutely hooked on the weaving thing and became, in his final year at school, became the creative ambassador for school. So when there was a parents' evening, he was the one who borrowed the loom and demonstrated what we do in the weaving studio. And then we found out that just in August last year, that was the end of his final year at school, and he has started a university course to do a full bachelor's degree in architecture and interior design, which was completely inspired by the weaving studio and the experience that he had there. And that's a life-changing thing for that young man. I mean, I don't know where he would have what he would have done if he hadn't been with us. But we certainly wouldn't have seen him going to university. I believe he's the first person in his family who's gone on to higher education. But yeah, huge, huge experience. And that's not an isolated example. We have lots and lots of stories of people whose lives have turned around. And it's this beautiful craft that we share. It's wonderful. It's inspiring. So we have three words that describe what we do. And they are, Peter, test for you. Let's see if he's paid attention.

SPEAKER_01: 46:45

Inclusive, wholehearted and inspiring.

SPEAKER_02: 46:48

Correct, but in the wrong order so inclusive it's working with family it's just it's just horrendous we argue all the time inclusive inspiring wholehearted okay so we are always inclusive first always um inspiring and it's that sorry type inspiring so we inspire we're not inspiring because we're the best or the most professional or the most you know Sometimes, but thank you, by no means, he says. Sometimes, in fact, most times the inspiration comes from the fact that you look at someone and see how far they've come. And that's inspiring. Or somebody has overcome obstacles, you know, the blind weaver or the person who you would not ever see in a weaving studio. And they've overcome all of that. And that's inspiring. and wholehearted just means that we we give our best we do our best we are limited with funds um we try to do try to be as self-sufficient as we can be in every way so when we're renovating the studio you are handed a paintbrush when you come in and if you've got if you've got the energy and the capacity to do an hour's painting please just go ahead and so we might be a bit wonky around the edges but the beauty is in the fact that we've all taken part it's we're all doing this so uh yeah so the inclusive part has so we now support mainly young neurodiverse and that's typically autistic kids or lgbt kids and they found us we didn't advertised specifically for these groups. That was just who happened to drift in. And I think they were probably lured in by the colours and the music and all these things. But they definitely chose us. So one of the things that happened a couple of years back was we had a young man in the studio who was transgender. And he had a family wedding coming up and had got really distressed because the suit that he was trying to wear to the wedding just didn't fit him. It didn't hit the right places. It looked awful. And he had a horrible experience. And we had this lady in the studio who could sew. And she said, well, do you know what? I can alter that with just a little nip and tuck. I'll alter that suit. You'll look great. And he did. So this Sam... took forward that project as we thought the name Nip and Tuck was lovely for a transgender alterations project. And we've now run that for the last two years. We have another couple of years to go with that project. And it's for clothing alterations for people with non-standard body shapes. So typically that is our young trans and non-binary young adults, but it can cover all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds. And we've won a number of awards, haven't we, in diversity and inclusion for that because we have a safe space and it's trauma-informed and we're inclusive. We developed a training programme that we run for everybody who comes along that joins us has disability the opportunity to have this training. So we've got transgender awareness. We have Tourette's awareness because we have somebody in the studio who has Tourette's. And if you're not aware of that condition, it can be quite you can take a step back sometimes when you see, you know, hear what people say and so on. So whenever we have something that where someone's particularly vulnerable, we do an internal training programme and everybody gets the training regardless of their own life experience or whatever. And that just helps to keep this safe space going. And it means that we have the most incredible bunch of people and I find them very inspiring. All these young people who maybe missed out first time around for whatever reason and end up flying off and doing wonderful things with their lives. And that's why we do what we do.

SPEAKER_00: 50:51

Yeah, this is incredible. I am so inspired listening to everything that you guys have brought up today. And I'm just so excited to sort of hopefully spread your story to more of our community. And hopefully the people in our community will also check out your website and go visit radicalweavers.org and see all of the amazing things that you're doing and hopefully support you there as well. It is incredible the impact that you're making on your community around you. And listening to your talk. So this is fantastic. So I appreciate you making the time today, both Peter and Mari. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 51:29

Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us. It's been inspiring for us to