news archive
sort content: all creatives clients press from founder press features press releases press mentions
The Textile Anthropologist: An Interview With Folk Lounge
Handwork is disappearing right as people are starting to notice what it took with it — patience, lineage, the ability to just sit still and make something with no deadline attached. Sara talked to Shagho, who runs ornamental programs out of Frogtown Arts in LA, about why rest and slowness are survival skills, not indulgences — and the real, doable path back: knock on the door of a local archive or museum, find the ornamental lineage tied to your own family, and let a "quirky calling" pull you somewhere useful, the same way a random library visit led her to research at the Huntington Library.
Ten Fires Still Burning: Indigenous Prophecies On Road to 2100
Across the Americas, independent nations separated by thousands of miles arrived at the same picture of the future — in remarkable detail. This is what they saw.
The Braid and The Spine: How Diaspora Culture Travels
What does it mean to belong to a culture you were never fully inside? One of the world's oldest diasporas has been working on this problem for a century. The answer looks like a braid.
A Thousand Songs: Armenian Folk Tales
Armenia has been telling stories since before it had an alphabet. Some of them are strange. Some of them are very good. Most of them are both.
The Armenian Mirror Spectator: Examining History Through Clothing at Glendale Gallery
Talk For The Craft Contemporary: Narrative Embroidery & Hero’s Journey Scroll
What does it mean to archive a life? The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of humanity's oldest stories, was pressed into clay tablets over four thousand years ago by hands that understood something we are still learning: that what we do not preserve disappears.
Notes on Pattern, Physics, and Aesthetic Mathematics
On aesthetic mathematics, the geometry hiding in a 15th century shrine wall, and what opens up when artists and scientists start asking the same questions.
9 Embroidery Giants Before Instagram
Some of the most important embroidery books ever written are free to read right now, in your browser. They exist in the Internet Archive's public domain collection — digitized, searchable, available to anyone. Most people don't know they're there.
The Women Who Held The Gold
On the convent as design studio, the border as a licensed zone of knowledge, and what ornamental manuscripts reveal about who gets counted as a maker.
Canvas Rebel: What We Forgot To Pass Down
Young women are driving from Orange County to learn their first stitch. People are returning from burnout to finish projects their grandmothers left behind. Folk Lounge founder Shagho is rebuilding what diaspora and acceleration erased—one workshop, one stitch, one archive at a time.
For Pasadena Heritage, Pattern Keepers
The Pasadena Now Weekendr: Workshop Series Explores Batchelder’s Tile Legacy Through Nature
Press Release: Year In Review
PASADENA, CA — Folk Lounge marks its second anniversary this March, celebrating two transformative years of gathering creative communities across Los Angeles County through contemplative craft practice, archival research, and connection with local landscapes. Since the first Embroidery Social on March 9, 2024, Folk Lounge has evolved from park gatherings into a recognized cultural infrastructure, forging partnerships with institutions including Pasadena Heritage, the Wende Museum, and securing its first municipal grant from the City of Pasadena.
The Pasadena Now Weekendr: In Pasadena’s Historic Blinn House, Needle And Thread Stitch Together What Screens Pull Apart
The Pasadena Now Weekendr: Pattern Keepers: Batchelder Nature In Relief – Workshop 2/3: Birds
Pasadena Weekly: Rediscovering Batchelder’s Legacy: Workshops Honor Pasadena’s Tile Master
When the Eaton Fire tore through Pasadena, Batchelder's century-old tiles were often the only fragments that survived. Folk Lounge founder Shagho is leading workshops at Pasadena Heritage asking his question: why did we stop embedding beauty into everyday objects? Made possible by the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division.
Folk Lounge Interview With Founder, Shagho: Why Cultural Sustainability Matters Now
In this conversation, Shagho explores cultural sustainability—the idea that culture functions as a fourth pillar alongside environment, economy, and society in sustainable development. She discusses her approach to designing cultural programs for institutions, and why textiles offer a vessel into intangible heritage that holds the capacity for joy and connection.
Press Release: Pattern Keepers, Batchelder Nature In Relief Workshop Series
PASADENA, CA — Folk Lounge, in collaboration with Pasadena Heritage, is thrilled to announce a three-part workshop series exploring the ornamental legacy of Ernest Batchelder through hands-on creative practice, community engagement, and local ecological connection. Made possible in part by the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division. Led by artist and cultural sustainability practitioner Shagho, this series emerges from deep archival research and years of community-based embroidery practice.
Folk Lounge Interview With Founder, Shagho: How Did Folk Lounge Begin
What began informally in February 2023 as archival research of design patterns became Folk Lounge monthly park gatherings in March 2024, evolving from meet-ups into a fuller practice that includes workshops, archival research collaborations, and programming with cultural institutions. Shagho believes in the power of collective making to weave new connections between past wisdom and future possibility. In this conversation, she traces the origins of Folk Lounge from a spontaneous encounter at LA's Ararat Eskijian Museum to the circles of stitchers now gathering regularly across Los Angeles.
For LA Design Weekend, Downstream Prophecy: What Serves The Current Canvas
Rivers teach us about selective preservation—what flows forward, what settles into memory banks, what carves new channels through time. For those of us gathering at Folk Lounge to explore embroidery as cultural practice, this natural editing process offers a framework for examining how we carry forward ancestral knowledge while releasing what no longer serves our collective becoming.