Gathering

Told through personal encounters with cloth, Gathering is a meditation on slow sewing as a mode of creativity, connection, and resistance.

Sewing is physical. Sewing is all-consuming. These are things Nina Mingya Powles did not realise until she began teaching herself how to sew her own clothes in lockdown in London, far from the country of her birth. In the face of an ecological crisis driven by over-consumption, sewing is also political. For Powles, sewing becomes a form of solace and quiet resistance in the midst of growing anxiety about the impact of the fast fashion industry.

Gathering charts the author's journey of becoming a maker, exploring how the craft has helped steady her mental health and reshaped her relationship with her changing body. This book is a personal and political exploration of cloth and thread, asking: what if we confronted the reality of how our clothes are made? What if sewing could be more accessible to everybody―to all kinds of bodies? This is a book about the power of sewing and other slow forms of making, about the material fibres that make up our everyday lives, and the layers of history and memory threaded into them.