Charlie and I spent a few days in Devon recently. It was a little bit of a busman's holiday, as one of the highlights of the trip was visiting the Craft Festival at Bovey Tracey.
This is so much more than just a craft show - it's a real festival and celebration of Making. There were over 200 makers exhibiting, covering everything from jewellery and ceramics to textiles, woodturning, enamelling, basketry and glass. Some of the work was extraordinary. Not just beautiful, but technically astonishing. Yet what stayed with me long after we left wasn't necessarily the objects themselves. It was the people behind them and the sheer depth of knowledge that sat behind every item on each stand.
As I've been working through the Re-Wire module of my MA in Sustainable Fashion, I've found myself thinking a lot about systems. One of the recurring themes is that the systems which shape our lives are often invisible until somebody points them out. Once we see them, they seem obvious, but until then they remain largely hidden in plain sight.
Standing in a field surrounded by over 200 makers, I realised that craft has a wonderful way of making those hidden systems visible again.
Most of us spend our lives surrounded by finished products. Clothes appear on rails in shops. Furniture arrives in showrooms. Food appears on supermarket shelves. We rarely see the networks of materials, knowledge, labour, skills and resources that brought those things into existence. Modern life is incredibly good at hiding complexity.
The festival did exactly the opposite.
Every stand seemed to reveal another layer of what sits behind the things we use. A ceramic bowl was no longer simply a bowl but a story of clay, geology, firing temperatures, chemistry and years of practice. A piece of jewellery carried within it not just precious metal but design decisions, technical expertise and countless hours spent refining techniques. Textiles became stories of fibres, spinning, weaving, dyeing and construction.
The objects themselves were beautiful, but what made them valuable was the knowledge embedded within them.
I often see something similar happen with sewing students. People arrive at a workshop wanting to make a garment, but what they leave with is something much more significant. Once they have spent time cutting fabric, fitting patterns, sewing seams, unpicking mistakes and trying again, they can never quite look at clothing in the same way.
They begin to notice things they never noticed before.
They see the quality of stitching. They understand why one fabric behaves differently from another. They start to appreciate good fit and recognise skilled construction. A dress or shirt stops being simply an item of clothing and becomes the visible result of a whole series of decisions, processes and learnt skills.
Learning how things are made changes how we value them.
One of the highlights of the festival for me was having a go at machine knitting. I came away with a scarf, which felt like a small triumph, but what I really gained was a deeper appreciation of the skill involved. Marissa, who was teaching, has been machine knitting for more than twenty years. Watching her work made everything look effortless. Trying it myself quickly reminded me that effortlessness is usually what expertise looks like from the outside.
That seems to be true of almost every craft.
The more you understand a process, the more respect you develop for the people who have mastered it. What initially appears simple gradually reveals itself to be layered, complex and deeply skilled.
Another lovely surprise was seeing my MA tutor, Zoe Gilbertson, who was there talking about Devon Grows Flax and her involvement with the LifLad project. Both initiatives are exploring what a more local textile future might look like, reconnecting fibre production with place and community. You can read more about them over on Substack.
What struck me was how closely this linked to many of the conversations we've been having on my MA course. So much of modern fashion is disconnected from its origins. We know where we bought a garment, but rarely where the fibre was grown, who processed it, where it was spun, woven, dyed or sewn. The systems remain hidden from view.
Projects like Zoe's help make those systems visible again.
A piece of linen stops being just fabric. It becomes a story about soil, weather, farming, processing, transport, community and knowledge. The material becomes connected to people and place.
And once that connection exists, our relationship with the finished product changes.
Perhaps that was my biggest takeaway from the festival. The value of knowing how things are made is not simply that it teaches us new information. It changes the way we see the world.
One of the ideas we've explored during the Rewire module is that systems become powerful partly because they are invisible. We simply accept them as normal. If you imagine having a banana for breakfast. Pretty normal, yeah? But when you think about the system behind making a tropical fruit so 'everyday' that we don't even think about where it was grown. who grew it and how did it actually get from there to us here in the UK, it starts to make you reassess what we think we know.
Fast fashion, global supply chains, next-day delivery and disposable products all rely on us not asking too many questions about how things arrive in front of us.
Craft asks different questions.
- Who made this?
- What skills were required?
- How long did it take to learn them?
- Where did the materials come from?
- What relationships made this possible?
Those questions don't just reveal the object. They reveal the system behind the object.
Walking around the festival, I found myself thinking that perhaps this is one of the most important things making can teach us. Not simply how to create something with our hands, but how to notice. How to see beyond the finished product and become curious about the networks of people, materials, skills and places that made it possible.
Once you know where things come from, you stop seeing them as isolated objects.
You begin to see relationships.
And perhaps that is the first step towards building better systems for the future.
Jules x