KATE UZZELL

By Standing Voice

August 9^th, 2018

The Tunajitambua Tailors are the most determined group of learners I’ve encountered, hands down. Teaching them reaffirmed my belief that sewing is never just sewing, and clothes are never just clothes. For people with albinism, this workshop became a source of agency. It was an opportunity for participants to take ownership of something, to elevate their own status, and to help each other grow.

Kate Uzzell is the founder of Studio 1A Workshops, offering sustainability-minded, innovative sessions in creative art and textiles with talented and experienced workshop leaders in Bristol. This year, Kate led Standing Voice’s tailoring group at the Summer Skills Workshop on Ukerewe Island, Tanzania. After returning to the UK, Kate reflected on what this process meant for her and for the aspiring tailors.

As with my teaching in the UK, I wanted to make this workshop as collaborative as possible. I’m not a teacher who tries to be above anyone else, and I think the participants found that empowering. They weren’t used to it! Everyone, including me, was learning from one other in a shared experience of mutual respect. They taught me as much as I taught them. Culturally, that felt like a big deal. It seemed especially powerful for the participants with albinism, who are often made to feel worthless, irrelevant, or incapable of contributing.

I began the workshop by focusing on design. I was fascinated to discover that the entire concept is alien in Tanzania! There, tailoring courses jump straight into production. When I asked people to sketch their ideas, I was met with confusion. Blank faces. Quizzical whispers. “I thought we came here to sew?” Pushing through, however, the group began to understand the importance of design as an opportunity to focus one’s creativity and build a wider brand. If I could go back in time and give myself any advice, it would be not to panic when confronted with those bewildered faces! In no time at all, the tailors took to the process and were flying ahead, full of momentum.

After design, we began using blocks to cut shapes from our chosen fabrics. With the mission of making hats—a pertinent project for people requiring sun protection—participants cut three pieces that would eventually constitute a hat. It was great to introduce a professional process for that, so the group could understand how to make maximum use of their materials and minimise waste. It was also vital to teach quality control, ensuring consistency and uniformity across any items produced in batch.

Throughout this process, I felt the group identity building. Participants were growing closer, and more confident in their collaborations. Before the workshop, I’d pondered whether people with albinism would struggle to grasp techniques, or struggle on the technical side because of visual impairment. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There were people with albinism who took to the process far quicker than their peers without the condition, and many were helping their partners to improve! That led to an infectious confidence, and stronger cohesion within the group. Florentina, an inspirational woman with albinism who built her own tailoring enterprise with the support of Standing Voice, was an absolute force of nature: floating across the workshop to help others, she was more like a co-facilitator! Charles, who also has albinism, was the group's unofficial technician, dispensing advice and fixing equipment whenever a problem cropped up. Together they united the team and brought us together as a unit. This spilled outward, and led to further interactions with the other workshops: the photographers would document the tailors’ products; and it was through the woodcut printers that the tailors finally identified their company logo, a palm leaf, a symbolic nod to the importance of sun protection.

I was blown away by the breadth and quality of the workshops delivered by Standing Voice. Across the organisation, communications were reliable, clear, and succinct, an experience that hasn’t been universal in my collaborations across the charity sector.

This workshop invigorated my faith in what tailoring can achieve. In one week, I watched a group of vulnerable people step away from ordinary life to find an inner transformation. Skills were developed, for sure; but more than that, less tangibly and somehow more profoundly, a ceiling was shattered. The participants with albinism proved to me, themselves and everybody else that their condition is not limiting, and their capacity to learn, and grow, and create, need know no bounds.