As guests come to Florence for upcoming workshops and for the Project Threadways Symposium, we wanted to share some of our favorite places in town—a kind of community guide for visitors, whenever your travels bring you to The Factory. Alabama Chanin and The School of Making have been hosting workshops and events here in Florence for over 15 years, and we’ve built a community of connections to bring our guests the best of the city. Our team is here to help plan your trip and workshop experience from start to finish. StayWe recommend The Stricklin and Gunrunner, both boutique hotels downtown with easy access to restaurants and coffee...
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Conversations. Storytelling. Inspiration. Last spring, when I first began imagining a new future for Alabama Chanin, The School of Making, and Project Threadways as an integrated nonprofit, our team went into research mode. We launched a Constituent Engagement Study to inform the values, goals, and structure of the future organization, interviewing stakeholders across our community about what they want to see from this work—in programming, in the workplace culture, and in the industry at large. We spoke to board members, employees, artisans, collaborators, partners, and guests. We’ve learned a lot, and we’re still going. For me, one of the biggest...
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Above: from The Quilts of Gee’s Bend by William Arnett, Alivia Wardlaw, Jane Livingston, and John Beardsley; quilts by Loretta Pettway. Photograph by Abraham Rowe. The 2023 Project Threadways Symposium will be held April 20-22 in Florence, Alabama. ORIGINS AND VOICE OF THE 2023 PROJECT THREADWAYS SYMPOSIUM Last spring, a group gathered in Florence for the 2022 Project Threadways Symposium to explore textiles and activism. Among the presenters was Aleia Brown, an interdisciplinary scholar who studies ways that Black women—through collective making—have experimented with different models of freedom. Her talk drew on narratives from quilting cooperatives to show how Black...
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