From the studio No.43

NEXT UP - DATE FOR YOUR DIARY

Crafting Fashion Futures with Fashion Declares!

18th September, Conway Hall King’s X.

It's a symposium on regenerative fashion futures.

I'll be there.

I’ll be showcasing a collaboration with Safia Minney MBE - her artisan made, organic cotton fabric, my design and natural dyed, painted dress. She sent me 4m metres of the fabric and the dress will go in the entrance to Conway Hall.

It's beautiful fabric, so fluid and at the same time, sculptural.

Behind the scenes I've been busy draping, pattern cutting and natural dyeing the dress. One of the details I'm using is the selvedge. I do love a bit of selvedge! Next I'll be sewing on some little red corozo nut buttons and painting on some of my signature lines to finish off.

Draping the fabric and sewing together before dyeing with plant extracts.

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Why are we curating 'Crafting Fashion Futures' symposium?

"Crafting of textiles and clothing is key to slowing down extraction, promoting decent livelihoods, redistributing wealth and building new narratives. Business is beginning to wake up to the opportunities of post-growth thinking and practice - so we’re looking forward to a radical symposium at Crafting Fashion Futures on the first day of LFW" - Safia Minney, MBE

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The event celebrates the 1st day of London Fashion Week & the 1st ever London Textile Month at this fabulous event, at the iconic Conway Hall.
Kicking off the week, this landmark one-day gathering brings together over 20 pioneering voices in regenerative fashion, craft, and ethical textiles for a day of fireside chats, panels, brand pop-ups, and short films.

Organised by Safia Minney (founder of Fashion Declares, People Tree, and Indilisi) and co-curated with Polly Leonard, founder of Selvedge Magazine, the event features leading designers, makers, and thinkers shaping a just and sustainable future for fashion.

In-Person Tickets include a delicious plant-based lunch, and Online Tickets will receive a full recording of the event.

You can join in-person or online and there is an evening event too, with a panel discussion and music.

Fashion Declares! say,
’We’ll be hearing from 20 inspiring international craft thought leaders and pioneers covering the intersection between craft, sustainability, culture and social justice.

From organic textiles, handweaving, natural dying and hand embroidery to design, business and fair livelihoods, we believe that craft can be a key part of building a more positive future for people and planet. Each one of you is holding parts of a potential new narrative in which craft and making can help to create the shift towards a well-being economy and a more just society. We want to invite you to be part of this watershed event!

Crafted Fashion Futures is curated by Safia Minney, MBE, a half-Mauritian, half-Swiss Brit known for founding the slow fashion brand People Tree. Safia has dedicated her life to developing and promoting organic cotton and textile crafts.

Together with Fashion Declares, and her tiny new craft brand Indilisi [in-dill-iss-ee], Safia is proud to partner with Selvedge magazine on the first day of London Fashion Week to bring you an incredible event at Conway Hall, London with pioneers and craftspeople from India, Bangladesh, Kenya and the UK.’

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If you go to this event, please be sure to say hi.

Thank you for following my journey,

My best,

Sarah x

From the studio No.42

It's July and the dye garden is bursting with fecundity - of both plants and ideas.

Here’s a very short video of part of the regenerative natural dye, food and medicine garden, it forms a part of the forest garden.

Do you see it as chaotic and overgrown?

Or ABUNDANT?

This garden is full of flora and fauna. Full of dye, medicine and food plants. Here is a list of some of the plants in the video:

Budlia - colour

Rosa rugosa - food, medicine

Fennel - food, medicine, colour

Marshmallow - medicine

Sweet cicily - food

Tansy - colour, medicine

Mugwort - medicine

Elecampane - medicine

Evening primrose - food, medicine

Jostaberry - food

Comfrey - colour, food, medicine

Willow - food

Crab apple - food

It also has deep mineral accumulators and nitrogen fixers. Creating the edge of a forest garden. An edible forest.

DATE FOR YOUR DIARY! - FASHION SHOW 17th AUGUST

And a little head’s up. SARAH POLAND is taking part in a fashion show during Aberjazz Jazz n Blues Festival 2025, at the beautiful venue Ffwrn in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire.

There will be cheese and wine tastings with Feral Pig Wine , DJ’s spinning vinyl and fashion shows from SARAH POLAND, and Jolette Le Roux.

I’ll send more about tickets and details next week when I get the poster.

And there are so many more events to come to let you know about…LONDON, BRIGHTON, OXFORD.

Thank you for following my journey,

My best,

Sarah x

STUDIO JOURNAL 8

From 3rd April 2022 newsletter - Drawn to nature

Here on Friday morning in South-West Wales, we woke up with melted, hardened, snowy hail. Crunchy under foot, the school run brought back memories of Scottish winters driving through creaky snow laden roads.

I grew up in the Scottish Highlands, in an area of rich soils and deciduous forests, between the foothills of the Cairngorm mountains and the sea. For some years I spent every weekend during winter with the Cairngorm ski club; season pass strapped to my arm, balaklava and hat pulled high to protect my face from the often fierce and bitter weather. In fact, lunchtimes were regularly spent thawing out our gloves and balaclavas under hand driers whilst eating squished semi-frozen egg sandwiches.

However, when the weather was clear and dry, it felt like the most beautiful place in the world. More corries than peaks, deep and snow covered, it was a place where you looked down rather than across or up.

Infact, the Scots don’t call their hills mountains, they’re hills. I think there’s a modesty to it, they aren’t towering and grand like the Alps. Yet within this modesty belies an awe. They are awesome in the true sense of the word and having spent some time away now from both Cairngorm and Nevis Range, on occasion to return I have been humbly brought to a standstill.

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In 2007, whilst travelling from West Cornwall to an artist residency in the Northern Isles (Shetland), I stopped near Inverness with some great friends. One of them, Mandy, lent me her book Findings by Kathleen Jamie. Handing it to me she told me I should read it. It took me half of the book before it fully got into me. And it got me.

While I was doing my fine art Masters I was looking for books to see how writers tackled the subject of nature and landscape. I read Thoreau, Emerson plus other great writings but they were not what I was looking for. I wanted something to really resonate with my approach. Kathleen Jamie’s Findings led me on to discover The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. The difference in these writers to the previous readings was what I was looking for. Less conquestorial, more about place and the poetics of it.

Cairngorm from the A9

The Living Mountain is a personal account of being in and knowing the Cairngorms. In the studio this week, listening to it this time around, it is sympathetically read with a voice which lulls one into the miracle and beauty of nature.

I quote The Living Mountain, Chapter 11 : The Senses

‘For the ear the most vital thing that can be listened to here is silence. To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves. When the air is quite still, there is always running water, and up here that is a sound that one can hardly lose, though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the water courses. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute and listening to it one slips out of time.

Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element and if water is still sounding with a low far off murmur, it is no more than last edge of an element we are leaving, as the last edge of land hangs on the mariners horizon. Such moments come in mist, or snow, or a summer night when it is too cool for the clouds of insects to be abroad, or a September dawn. In September dawns I hardly breathe. I am an image in a ball of glass. The world is suspended there and I in it. ‘

Passing the Eastern edge of the Cairngorms on the A9.

I have another friend, who now lives at the foot of Ben Nevis. She is a geologist and mountain guide to put it lightly. Her current job involves a walking commute to a very specific area of Nevis Range to monitor moss and grass. Her walk to work is 6 hours one way. She used to live in the Cairngorms and told me once that she doesn't get lost there, doesn't actually need a map and compass (although she’s got a heid enough to take one). She said, even in fog she knows every rock and can find her way.

Now this, is knowing a place.

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It is difficult to better the mountain and sea air and they are places that I have always been drawn towards.

All of these photos have been included because I have always really appreciated how both fog and snow rub out features (and sounds) in the landscape, altering distance and scale. Everything becoming visually simplified.

One of my favourite south-west Wales beaches local to us.

And yes, it is a secret!

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