Pick up a needle in London this September and you're in good company, because Selvedge London Textile Month starts today! For the next thirty days, there's an open invitation to join in, whether that means enjoying an online talk or building a day exploring the city (and beyond!) through cloth. Over the next four weeks, you'll find a quilter from Mumbai recreating a maharaja's wardrobe at quarter scale, a knitwear designer guiding strangers through their first machine-knit swatch, and a historian laying out four centuries of scarves for anyone who wants to look closely. And that's just a taster. This is London Textile Month 2026: not one event but a whole city given over to cloth.
Costume rails at Cosprop, London
Selvedge's festival runs throughout September, and this year's programme leans as much into textile history as it does hands-on learning. At Cosprop, the North London costume house behind Downton Abbey and decades of Merchant Ivory films, costumier Clara Drumez leads life-drawing sessions using pieces from the archive, unpicking the corsets and crinolines that built the Victorian silhouette. Browse our events and you'll find more costume related talks, tours, and textural encounters across the board.
Needle-turn appliqué by Yasmeen Branton of Sand & Stars
Hands-on learning runs throughout the programme. Yasmeen Branton of Sand & Stars, whose background spans the Royal School of Needlework and embroidery for film and television, leads a day introducing needle-turn appliqué alongside classic embroidery. Illuminated Arts, founded by textile historian Melissa Jo Smith and floral-textile specialist Rebecca Cole-Coker, explores the hussif, the small sewing kit once carried by soldiers, with participants stitching their own after a talk on its history. At Cockpit, Joanne Lamb, Hannah Refaat and Kim Sutherland join forces for a two-day workshop combining embossing, weaving and embroidery, ending in a resolved textile artwork.
Printed textile from the Warner Textile Archive
Further out, a day in Essex pairs a guided tour of the Warner Textile Archive, home to around 100,000 objects tracing two centuries of British furnishing fabric, with textile historian Mary Schoeser's talk on the scarf's development since the seventeenth century. Her collection includes a 1953 coronation head square designed by Oliver Messell, alongside work by Marian Clayden and Wallis Sewell.
Quilted artwork by Catherine Marie Longtin
Publisher Batsford Books brings a one-day book festival to Museum of the Home on the theme "Stitching for Wellbeing," featuring four authors with new 2026 titles: Deena Beverley on Playful Stitch, Jessie Cutts on Free-Form Quilts and Patchwork, Catherine-Marie Longtin on Log Cabin Quilt Blocks, and Claire Wellesley-Smith on Reflective Stitch. A Q&A and panel discussion follows, with all four reflecting on what stitching and creativity mean for wellbeing.
Tomoko Yamanaka in her studio at Chiswick house.
Technique sits at the centre of several events. At Chiswick House, Tomoko Yamanaka teaches machine knitting with undyed natural yarns from her British Alpaca Project, Rachna Garodia introduces table-loom weaving and photo-weaving on khadi paper, and textile artist Neera Sehgal demonstrates traditional Indian woodblock printing. Each session ends with something made, not just watched.
Geeta Khandelwal's miniature Maharaja costumes.
Two exhibitions push technique into storytelling. Geeta Khandelwal's hand-stitched miniature garments, four decades in the making, reconstruct India's royal dress from museum records and photographs, shown alongside full-sized originals from the Calico Museum of Textiles. At Museum of the Home, Christopher Farr's reinterpretation of a Huguenot silk fragment, developed with architect Chris Dyson, now lives permanently in the museum's 1690s period room.
Embroidery by Aitor Saraiba
Loop London marks its twentieth year by hosting Spanish artist Aitor Saraiba for the English-language launch of his book Embroider, Mend and Sew, while Fenton House opens its stumpwork collection for a rare private viewing.
And this really is just a taster. The full programme runs from cinema to screen printing, embroidery to embossing, archives to appliqué, with events for complete beginners and lifelong makers alike. Whatever draws you to cloth, there's a way in this September.
For full listings, a browse of the festival city map, and to book your tickets, visit the Selvedge London Textile Month events page. Enjoy weaving together your own day out inspired by cloth, and we can't wait to see you there!