Pattern club workshop: Experimental weaving and drafting with Laura Devendorf

Where: Pattern Club alpacalab, 2-4 Matilda St (just off the moor, above EE), Sheffield S1 4QD
When: 6:30pm – 9pm, Monday 14th Sep 2026
Tickets: free signup required
Who: People curious about making strange things with patterns

What: Our (roughly) monthly Sheffield pattern club meetup. All people interested in the stranger side of patterns welcome! These meetups will be focussed on sharing practice-lead investigations into pattern-making in heritage and contemporary arts, crafts and music. For example if you’re a textile/fibre artist who is curious about creative coding, a coder who wants to be a musician, a musician who is curious about choreography, or a choreographer who wants to integrate braiding into their work, an origami artist who.. well you get the idea! We want to make this a safe, fun and diverse space to share ideas. We actively encourage ‘imposters’ to attend!

This time textile boffin Laura Devendorf will be visiting from the US in September, dropping by Sheffield for this workshop. Laura is an amazing experimental weaver and creative technologist, and runs the unstable design lab in Boulder Colorado. She made the awesome free/open source AdaCAD software for playful, algorithmic design of weave structures. In this beginner-friendly workshop, we’ll be getting into the structure of woven patterns, by working with paper strips, threads, table looms and AdaCAD.

This workshop is well-suited both for total beginners to weaving, and more experienced weavers who are interested in the possibilities of designing weaves with AdaCAD.

Unfortunately our current studio doesn’t have step-free access. Please get in contact if you have problems with this or other access requirements and we’ll try our best to accommodate you.