24th – 27th September 2025

Our festival Common Threads will soon be underway on the Moorfoot. And so before we’re swept up in that, we thought we’d share a few reflections on the festival with you.

The basics: Common Threads invites women—and their families and friends—to take up space in the city centre. The setting is a ‘woven living room’ that is added to by visitors over the course of the week. The theme of the festival is weaving: weaving in a range of forms, which reflect all the international weaving traditions and practices that happen in Sheffield today.

A variety of workshops and performances will be taking place over the course of the week, including  workshops on how to sew, how to repair clothes, and how to use natural dyeing methods—see the full list of what’s on here.

And, true to Bare Project form, there will also be home-cooked, nutritious ‘n’ delicious food available on a pay-what-you-can basis each day. (Has a theatre company ever behaved more like a catering company?)

Common Threads will happen at the pace of weaving: it will be a slow, purposeful, meditative time. So you can add it to the list of ways you’re going to be good to your brain this September.

Some of you might have gone to festivals this summer. Common Threads will be a reminder of the calmer times at those festivals: where you sat around with no agenda, with other people who were committed to relaxing and recovering.  So if you feel the Summer went too quickly, and you didn’t have enough of that type of time, then worry not—here’s another opportunity.

Stories are often described through reference to weaving. Here’s a fun fact for you: ‘text’ and ‘textile’ both come from the Latin verb texere, meaning ‘to weave’. And have you noticed that when we tell stories we say that we ‘spin a yarn’, and that we often call subplots ‘threads’? It seems there’s a strong association between the two activities in the human mind. The festival will close with a show that blends weaving and storytelling: and yes, you guessed it, we are calling it Spin a Yarn.

It will be a free-flowing, relaxed kind of show: with weavers and storytellers sharing folklore and fairytales from around the world on the theme of weaving. Some of the stories will be performed in the languages they were originally told in, and then translated into English; and some stories will be told in English, and then translated into other languages. The overall hope for the show is that all the stories (told in familiar and unfamiliar tongues), and folksongs and melodies, and the satisfying sight of weaving being carried out by expert craftspeople, will seamlessly blend together, and sort of become one thing… much like a tapestry. Rehearsals are coming up for this, and we’ll keep you up to date on how it’s all going.

Whilst we talk about Common Threads in terms of gentleness, softness and slowness, it is still a festival with a strong ethos: it insists that this type of space is vital for social and environmental health; and that it is vital for women from all backgrounds to feel safe and welcome in the city centre. We’ll say more about the feminist thinking behind this work in the coming months.

That’s all for now. We’ll be uncharacteristically active on social media this month—expect images of colourful thread.

Thanks for reading,

The Bare Project