Join us for an intimate workshop with @folk.lounge, where we'll uncover the forgotten art of reading cloth like ancient text. In quiet rooms, Slavic women once transformed ordinary linen into powerful talismans, weaving protection and blessings into the very fabric of daily life.

We gather as they did—needles in hand, stories flowing—to learn their visual vocabulary of safety and hope. Each geometric pattern held instructions for calling rain, ensuring harvest, or blessing new love. The goddess Mokosh, spinner of fate itself, guided their fingers as they stitched cosmic mathematics into kitchen towels and wedding cloths.

Working on travel pouches, we'll explore how symbols transform thread into meaning, testing ornament techniques that our ancestors knew could shift energy and invite good fortune. Step into the circle where craft becomes ritual, where patience becomes prayer, where simple stitches connect us across centuries to women who knew that making beauty was making magic.

The Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and archive that preserves history and brings it to life through exhibitions, scholarship, education, and community engagement. 

In community textiles series, we take needle and fabric not just as tools, but as instruments of memory, resilience, and reinvention. Inspired by the Wende collection—a tapestry of lives lived under constraint and in defiance of it—we gather to explore the quiet, radical act of making by hand. Every stitch is a story, every thread a link between past and present.

* Explore the Wende website to learn more about new books, walks and guest speakers!