Category: events

On October 9, 2025 The Future is Wool hosted a public pop-up stitching day in the EV Junction at Concordia University, inviting folks from within and beyond the university to join us and add embroidery to our panel. We also encouraged visitors to participate in our questionnaire, so that their ideas and stories about wool could be part of our next panels of tapestry. 

Sustainability front and centre, TFiW team reminded visitors that wool is biodegradable (no plastics!), anti-bacterial, flame-retardant, insulating against both heat and cold, and can be the basis of regenerative agriculture that  nourishes our soil! Artisans, hand crafters, and wool farmers are leading the way!

The light in the high-ceilinged atrium was beautiful, the colours of our naturally-dyed and undyed wool glowed like jewels as we moved our collaborative stitching forward. 

We will hold another Montreal area pop-up later this fall, and will announce the date and times on Instagram and via our mailing list! Please follow us and sign up for updates!

The Future is Wool welcomed over 100 stitchers to our tapestry during the three days of the TWIST Fibre Festival in St-André-Avellin, August 8-10, 2025: a great way to kick off our public outreach! In anticipation, we explored materials. We acquired and tested naturally dyed and undyed wool from Canadian producers including Les brébis du Beaurivage, La Bergerie des Étoiles, and Longway Homestead. We evaluated weights of natural linen cloth. We tried out various embroidery stitches, including the Bayeux stitch, a three-part embroidery technique that lays beautiful dense areas of colour on top of cloth. We researched other narrative tapestries, from the Bayeux to the present day, and considered their storytelling techniques. And we designed a first panel – something to get our stitching going while people’s input poured in to create other panels! – that included the specific breeds of sheep whose fleece contributed to the yarn we were stitching with, text in both English and French (we plan for our tapestry to be multilingual with contributors’ words), and a portrait of Anna Hunter. Anna is a wool advocate and farmer (Longway Homestead) as well as author of the recent book, The True Cost of Wool. Both featured in our panel. 

We transferred the design of the panel to our linen using digital technology, lightly stitching the images with the Tajima digital embroidery machine at the Textiles and Materiality cluster of Milieux Research Institute, Concordia University. This 21^st century improvement on medieval technique made it possible for us to offer an easy-to-follow guide for participants, should they wish it. 

At TWIST, we set up our booth with information about our project, samples of stitching, reference books, and of course lots of beautiful yarn ready for stitching. Over the course of three active days, The Future is Wool welcomed visitors aged 5 to 95, who added their own touches to our panel – some holding a needle and yarn for the first time! TFIW team members Van Randall and Sharmistha Kar joined project lead Kathleen Vaughan in working the booth, team member Pramila Choudhary joined us for some of Saturday, August 9. Hectic and happy days! 

We’re co-creating a Bayeux-style stitched tapestry about Canadian wool – beautiful and sustainable! Embroider stories that depict histories and futures of this miracle  fibre, which is biodegradable (no plastics!), anti-bacterial, flame-retardant, insulating against both heat and cold, and can be the basis of regenerative agriculture that  nourishes our soil! Artisans, hand crafters, and wool farmers are leading the way!

If you cannot join in-person, we would love for you to add your wool stories and photos to the project via the questionnaire which you can access using this link.

All welcome! No experience needed!!  

A research and creation project led by Kathleen Vaughan, kathleen.vaughan@concordia.ca.