By Paula Briggs
Sewn banners sit within a long and powerful tradition of creativity and activism, where textiles, stitch, colour and symbol are used to make visible what communities care about. From suffrage banners to trade union, peace and protest banners, making by hand has enabled people to gather, speak collectively and claim space. In this post, we document how AccessArt made a sewn banner to help create a strong visual presence at advocacy events.
As a Subject Association for art, representing over 24,000 members, and as a visual arts educational charity, we always try to balance our practical work creating resources for teachers and learners with our advocacy work, raising awareness of the importance of arts education for all. With the Curriculum and Assessment Review, the government’s response to that review, and a whole raft of proposals aimed at providing a world-class curriculum for all, the wider arts education community has, in many ways, never felt more united in its message. It felt like an appropriate time to make a banner that AccessArt could use at events to help create greater visibility. Inspired by the beautiful banners created by trade unions and the Suffragette movement, we decided our banner needed to be carefully crafted and beautiful to look at.
To Begin
Letters were drawn on paper to act as templates. We sketched these freehand, working between measured lines, but you might decide to enlarge letters downloaded from the internet.
We then used the paper letters to cut out a fabric letter that was 1cm larger in every dimension than the paper template, and then a letter cut from iron-on interfacing. The shape cut from interfacing needed to fit the reverse of the letter, as it was to be ironed onto the back of the fabric letter.
Using a running stitch, we hemmed each letter around the interfacing.
We then pinned the hemmed letters to the banner background, using a chalk pencil to mark out positions to ensure everything was straight.
We used a small overcast stitch to simply attach the edges of each letter to the banner. We then ironed each letter down, using the interfacing to help fix the letters in place.
We scaled up the AccessArt bird using the grid method.
As we wanted the banner to display the message “AccessArt for All” from both the front and the back, we made two versions, one mirrored, so the text could be read from either side.
We then sewed them together (hemming as we went) using a sewing machine.
Time to take the “AccessArt for All” banner out into the world!
The Arts & Minds Coalition visited Westminster to deliver an open letter signed by 10,000 people to make space for the arts in schools (2025).
