Carla are I are both Creative Arts Therapists who share a love of women’s ways of knowing, and craft as creative practices for restoring health and wellbeing.

Our collaboration in bringing this workshop to the 2023 Creative Mental Health Forum draws on both our early working lives in the fashion and textile industries, and our appreciation for the craft of handwork, stitching and making.

Practices of sitting in circle as women, stitching and sharing stories, run deeply through women’s work in many diverse cultural contexts, and may connect with participant’s own Cultural practices in a variety of ways.

We hoped that by sharing and celebrating women’s ways of knowing, we can help to empower ourselves and others in claiming knowledges and practices that resist the dominant voices of patriarchal systems that can make us feel inadequate, and, instead, promote agency, choice and wellbeing by de-pathologize ‘imposter syndrome’ together