Pattern club workshop: (un)weaving patterns

Where: Pattern Club alpacalab, 2-4 Matilda St (just off the moor, above EE), Sheffield S1 4QD
When: 6:30pm – 8:30pm, Tuesday 14th April 2026
Tickets: free signup required
Who: People curious about making strange things with patterns

What: Our 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 we’ll be looking at the structure of woven patterns, in two ways. Firstly we’ll try out “reverse drafting”, where we take small pieces of woven fabric and take it apart to try to understand how the interlacements work. This can be a very surprising experience that might change how you look at fabric! We will have enough fabric for everyone, but feel free to also bring along interesting-looking woven fabric you don’t mind taking apart in order to work out how it works.

We’ll also have a look at the free/open source AdaCAD web-based weaving software (bring a laptop if you have one handy!) to try out our understanding of the weaves and look at more complex patterning techniques. 

If we have time we will also play with weaving paper strips to get further hands-on understanding, and have a look at the pattern club 8-shaft table loom.

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.