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Dr Cat Rossi, Senior Lecturer in Design History at Kingston University and Annie Warburton, Creative Programmes Director at the

Podcaster talks about her craft hobby and shows Jane how to make a kimono top using three scarves.  

Our reporter Angela Robson joins a session which shares skills, promotes learning and asks what are the benefits of craft?

To tackle the proliferation of plastic bags, Claire Morsman decided to make fabric bags from material and distribute them for free.  She set up a website to encourage others to do the same, and since then 160,000 have been made worldwide by 1000’s of volunteers in their local communities. 

Many of us enjoy craft as a hobby but how easy is it to create a viable business?  And how do craft skills feed into other industries?  Ptolemy Mann is a weaver who has also worked on the façade of a new hospital building, and Donna Wilson is a designer maker who runs her own homeware label having started off making quirky knitted creatures.

Chinelo Bally was a finalist on the Great British Sewing Bee in 2014, but she only started sewing a couple of years before that.  She talks about the hours of practice she put in to perfect her craft, and about the practice of freehand sewing which doesn’t use a pattern.