Sew What The Larder (East Belfast)
Sew What — A Craft Club for Collective Nourishment
Sew What is a community craft club delivered at The Larder in East Belfast, pairing hands-on creative making with guided discussion on themes including unpaid labour, food justice, and community wellbeing. Run by feminist oral historian and artist Dr Livi Dee in partnership with The Larder’s co-leads, it offers a free, inclusive weekly space where local women and community members can learn a craft skill, talk, and reflect — producing zines, textiles, and visual artefacts as shared evidence of collective insight.
Make-Talk-Capture
A craft + conversation micro-lab that turns side-by-side making into rich qualitative evidence — for any community project working with lived experience, hidden labour, or social precarity.
Phase 0: Logic Model & Topic Mapping
Identify the “Evaluation Gap” this method fills. It is best suited for community settings where face-to-face interview formats feel intimidating or extractive and projects exploring sensitive or emotionally complex lived experience — such as unpaid work, wellbeing, identity, or social inequality.
Primary Objective
To generate rich qualitative data — quotes, artefacts, and reflections — from participants who would not engage with traditional research methods, by using craft activity as a social lubricant that lowers defences and opens conversation.
Key Stakeholders
Community members carrying lived experience of the project’s themes; facilitators and volunteers with local trust; funders and decision-makers who need credible human evidence; and the wider community who will see and use the final artefacts.
Part 1: The DIY Step-by-Step Method
Match Your Craft to Your Theme
Choose a craft activity whose physical properties echo the social theme you want to explore. The craft is not decoration — it is the structure that holds the conversation and makes reflection feel safe and purposeful.
The Details:
- Action: Select a craft with a natural, unhurried rhythm — printing, cyanotype, quilting, collage, zine-making, or clay work all work well. Pair it with a theme rooted in everyday experience: care, time, value, belonging, or justice.
- Tip: Let the craft’s physical qualities do conceptual work. A slow process like cyanotype suits reflection on overwork and pace; quilting suits conversations about repair, history, and connection. When craft and theme are aligned, participants feel the meaning without being told it.
Design the Session Structure
Keep the format simple, predictable, and consistent across all sessions. When participants know what to expect, they relax — and relaxed participants talk more freely.
The Details:
- Action: Structure a 90-minute session in five phases: welcome and tea (10 min); craft demonstration (10–15 min); side-by-side making and conversation (40–45 min); reflection and capture (15 min); closing and what-comes-next (10 min).
- Tip: Use Eventbrite or similar ticketing with a mix of reserved places (for the people you most want to reach) and walk-in spaces. Keep sessions free and provide all materials — access barriers kill participation before it starts.
Set the Room for Care
The physical environment is an ethical statement. How you arrange a space tells participants what kind of conversation is possible before anyone has said a word.
The Details:
- Action: Use round tables or cluster seating rather than rows. Place craft materials, prompt cards, and post-its at each table rather than at the front. Have child-friendly materials available so parents and carers can participate without arranging childcare. Assign a gentle boundary host — someone whose job is to welcome, observe comfort levels, and check in quietly.
- Tip: Think of room setup as part of your ethics protocol. Accessibility, inclusion, and trust are communicated through how the space feels on arrival — before you open your mouth.
Facilitate Making and Talking
Your job is to hold the space, not to lead the conversation. The best facilitation is nearly invisible — it creates conditions for talk and then gets out of the way.
The Details:
- Action: Begin with demonstration and reassurance — show the craft technique briefly, making it clear that no skill or experience is needed. Scatter prompt cards around each table rather than reading questions aloud to the group. Encourage conversation fragments, not formal answers. Ask volunteers to scribe memorable phrases quietly without interrupting the flow.
- Tip: Use gentle, evocative language instead of formal evaluation questions. The more a prompt sounds like a survey, the less honest the response will be.
Capture, Loop Back, and Synthesise
Data collection in this method is about respectful noticing across the whole series — not extraction in a single session. Capture little and often, then loop back what you heard to validate participants’ voices and show that their contributions matter.
The Details:
- Action: After each session, pull three to five quotes or insights from the notes and artefacts while memory is fresh. Share a brief visual summary at the start of the next session — a quote wall, a sketch, or a “map of what we heard” — so participants can see their words shaping the collective story. In the final session, lay out artefacts from all weeks and invite participants to sort, cluster, and caption them before co-creating a shared output: a zine, banner, quilt, or publication.
- Tip: Treat the synthesis session not as evaluation after the project, but as the final creative act of the project itself — the moment the community tells its own story back to itself.
Part 2: The Realist Pathway
Evidence Manifest
Documenting how the Mechanism was verified through specific data collection.
| Evidence Type | What it Proves | Data Source |
|---|---|---|
| Qualitative Post-it Reflections & Table Scribe Notes |
That participants moved beyond surface-level responses into complex, personal themes — including gendered expectations, homeschooling pressures, and experiences of unpaid labour — within a single session of side-by-side making. | Written post-its and reflection cards collected at the end of each session; volunteer scribe notes captured during the making period. |
| Artefact Physical Outputs: Zines, Quilts, Clay Pieces, Cyanotypes, Banners |
That participants engaged substantively enough with the themes to produce shared creative work expressing collective insight — and that this work constitutes tangible, community-owned evidence of the process. | Session box of physical artefacts collected across all sessions; photographs of work taken with participant consent before items were taken home. |
| Quantitative Attendance Metrics and Ticket Demand |
That the method genuinely lowers barriers to participation: the first session drew 30–35 people against an expectation of 8–10; subsequent sessions sold out within an hour with a waiting list of approximately 10 people per week. | Eventbrite booking data; facilitator headcounts; waiting list figures recorded after each session. |
| Relational Repeat Attendance and Community Networking |
That the method builds sustained engagement rather than one-off participation: the same individuals returned across the series, and new cross-organisation connections formed between participants from different local initiatives. | Facilitator observation notes; session-by-session attendance records; informal tracking of new collaborations and volunteer sign-ups emerging from the group. |
Don’t write a report about the sessions. Let the sessions speak for themselves — your artefacts, your quotes, and your numbers are already the story.
The Quote Wall Snapshot
Post-its and scribe notes from across the series contain ready-made qualitative evidence. Grouped by theme, they become a visual argument for impact that funders and evaluators can absorb in seconds — far more memorable than paragraphs of summary prose.
The Artefact as Evidence
The physical outputs of each session — zines, fabric squares, clay pieces, printed banners — are not craft byproducts. They are primary data: embodied evidence that participants engaged deeply enough with a theme to make something about it.
The Demand Metric
Ticket data, waiting lists, and repeat attendance figures are simple quantitative evidence that your method reached people who wanted to be there — and kept them coming back. In a field dominated by satisfaction surveys, demand data is refreshingly unambiguous proof of value.
The “One-Sentence” Report
“Because we used Make-Talk-Capture, participants in our community felt safe and recognised enough to speak openly about invisible work — and to make that work visible together.”