Hands to Work: Textile Reuse and Community Resilience

The Shaker Museum, LikeMindedObjects, and Basilica Hudson present…

Drop-in workshop 5pm – 8pm

Conversation 6 – 7pm

Join us for an evening of creative conversation and hands-on crafting with Jerry Grant, Elise McMahon, Sabine Steen and Fahari Wambura moderated by Sarah Van Buren, with a t-shirt weaving and textile upcycling workshop by LikeMindedObjects. The event coincides with and is inspired by the museum’s current pop-up exhibition at Kinderhook Knitting Mill, “The Alchemy of Re.Use,” and heralds the return of Basilica’s beloved Farm & Flea “Anti-Black Friday” event a week later.

From 5:00 pm-8:00 pm, the LikeMindedObjects design studio team will lead a textile upcycling and mending workshop in Basilica’s Main Hall. They will provide sewing machines, hand-sewing supplies, and large square t-shirt weaving looms. Participants should bring six old t-shirts for weaving, and/or clothing items to mend or alter.

At 6:00 pm, an hourlong dialogue around textiles, Shaker values, fair labor practices, sustainability, and community building commences in Basilica’s North Hall, featuring Shaker Museum’s own Director of Collections and Research Jerry Grant and local textile artists and vendors Elise McMahon of LikeMindedObjects, Sabine Steen of Triform Weavery at Camphill Community, and Fahari Wambura, whose eponymously named store is located on Hudson Street in Chatham, NY.

As an antique factory lovingly refurbished with 21st-century green energy technology, Basilica Hudson is an appropriate setting for conversations centering on preservation, ecology, sustainability, and work. The Farm & Flea Market – happening the weekend after Thanksgiving – is the embodied, commercial realization of these priorities. Local farmers, makers, vintage sellers, artisans, and other diverse doers gather to sell their offerings direct to human beings – “no plastic wrap, no barcodes.”

All areas of Basilica Hudson, internal and external, are wheelchair accessible, including exhibition areas, restrooms, assembly and seating areas, box office, concessions, and parking areas.

This event is free to all, and the workshop is appropriate for all ages.