Makers Mixtapes - Roisin Taylor
To celebrate the launch of Issue 6 of FAIRE we are thrilled to share a fab new Makers|Mixtapes playlist by Roisin Taylor.
Roisin is part flower farmer, part florist, part climate change policy person and part sewist. Having grown up in North East England, buttressed up against moorland and a fossil-filled river in the valley of Weardale, County Durham, she now lives a stone's throw away from County Durham over the river from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne with her partner Jocelyn and their enormous borzoi Sacha.
“I listen to music and podcasts when I sew, music recommended by others in the community, but most often things that make my heart beat a bit faster, with soft melodies, pop undertones and a good mix of the music my dad would put on on long car trips. ”
Words by Roisin Taylor
I’ve often been accused of being ‘too-busy’ by friends and family, a whirlwind of new hobbies and new creative pursuits, wanting to try them all at once, falling down rabbit holes of learning a new language of craft, finding new communities, filling boxes with fabrics and pencils and paints and threads. I didn’t expect my creativity to flourish most amongst the flowers though.
Photo credit Esme Mai
Flower growing has always been a science to me, and with a C at A-level chemistry I don’t feel like a particularly good scientist. But Mum has always grown flowers with the knowledge of all the people she has ever encountered, and when I joined her part-time to arrange flowers and to help her with odd jobs in the garden a few years ago, the creativity began to rush from me, and it seeped into all areas of my creative life. It feels like it is the first time I’ve ever truly seen colour, and suddenly everything I make, print or sew is rich in texture and steeped with colours that previously I felt ‘weren’t for me’.
Photo credit Esme Mai (L & R)
I started sewing at school, with the inimitable Mrs Hully. I’ve been listening to The Original Home Economist podcast whilst cutting out fabric for my next project, and thinking about how our education system has changed so much when it comes to teaching essential skills of repair, sizing clothes, and mending. Mrs Hully embodied that, teaching me how to use a sewing machine, telling us all the horror stories and laughing as she did so with the look of a mischievous teenager in her eye. Armed with packets of custard creams and strong orange squash, at age 15 I designed and sewed a floor-length, empire line, embroidered ball gown inspired by a fiery teenage obsession with Pride and Prejudice. That dress, made from buttery-soft cream shot silk that I saved up for over months working on a local farm, was my pride and joy, and although the dress is now lost to the ether - somewhere in a school fabric bin I suspect - it remains one of my greatest achievements.
Sewing is this perfect mode of expressing who you are, to be political, to be creative, to be thoughtful, to be reckless. Anyone who tells you it isn’t an act of political expression is either lying to you or is willfully ignoring the origins of craft. There is no such thing as ‘just sewing’. For me, one of the most political aspects of sewing is the damage that fast fashion and overconsumption does to our planet, our communities and our ecosystems.
Five years ago I made a decision to stop buying fast fashion, opening my eyes to labour concerns within the supply chains, the promotion of overconsumption built into the ethos of these companies, and the carbon and nature fall out from the production and end of use cycles, it felt untenable to continue buying it. My aim was to shape my wardrobe with what I already had, what I could buy in charity shops, what I could make, and the occasional sustainably-made item of clothing that might be an investment piece. Without realising it, it was at that moment that sewing morphed into something new. That purpose felt like it took hold of me and shook me, gave me a spark that propelled me into creating in a bolder way.
Creating a garment with your hands is to intimately understand that you are part of a larger community, one point in a long chain of fabric makers, engineers, and farmers. One of the things that I am most grateful for in my creative life is the community that came with it.
I started GiveHerPockets as a way of finding small pattern creators, and I have ended up as a part of one of the most remarkable communities I have ever encountered. This celebratory, diverse, thoughtful, talented group of non-binary folk, trans-folk and women have stimulated my creativity and challenged my perceptions and internal biases in ways that have been life-changing for my creative purpose and for my life.
Sewing amongst this community has helped me to understand my own queerness, holding my hand as I gently unpick areas of my wardrobe that made me feel uncomfortable, to create clothes that I feel proud of, clothes which represent who I am and celebrate that. To hand stitch a hem, or even an entire garment, to mend a seam, or to run it beneath the feed of a sewing machine, to slice fabric with scissors and to feel an outfit grow with each pattern piece you add, is to appreciate the labour and love and the meaning that has gone into creating something new. It creates a bond that simply can’t be bought, and it is in those very details that we are political and that creativity hands us collective power.
Discover more about Roisin Taylor and her work : Website | Instagram
Roisin can also be found at @VerdeFlowers and @reigning_in_the_north