A Narrative Textile Design Project for What If?
I met Pauline Johnstone from What If? when I was doing some free, drop-in screen printing sessions on Edgeley’s Castle Street. Pauline and Stockport Council had asked me to develop some simple visual motifs to represent areas like Castle Street, Hollywood Park and Alexandra Park. We had a mad, messy time – screen printing with everyone from kids who could barely reach the table to pensioners leant over from their mobility scooters.
Later, I did some more development and research work when we used Edgeley as a jumping off subject for a free bookmaking workshop at What If? I did more research and eventually made this concertina book about the Edgeley bleach works. It’s an area with an incredible history (like most places, when you give them a good scratch).
What If? – the building, the idea – is now the brainchild and baby of three visionary women; Aiofe, Kirsty and Pauline. Their aim is to rescue, restore and re-enervate a historic Victorian building in Edgeley so that it is resilient to climate change and becomes a place truly embedded in the community where anyone can rest and play. Not lip service; properly bound to and reflective of the people and place.
In 2025 What If? secured funding to help protect the building’s thermal barrier. They needed their wonderful main hall to be darker and warmer for community events (like their cinema nights, run by Brinksway Cinema Club). On a practical level, this funding meant they were now able to retrofit some secondary glazing to their huge windows. It also meant they could afford to take down their particularly heinous 90s curtains and ask me to design a fabric I could use to make six pairs of new ones.
What if they’re not just curtains?
Pauline told me in an early meeting about getting lost in a pattern as a child – staring at curtains or wallpaper and imagining yourself inside the design; spotting all the things, using it as a map for daydream-y play. Pauline described looking at patterns and not being able to resolve what they were all about; mentally walking amongst the shapes in her mind whilst the adults got on with stuff. And I loved that idea – a textile that felt like a puzzle.
It also needed to be something that wasn’t purely decorative (though it needed to be that as well). Every element of the design had to have purpose and refer to something specific to Edgeley. So I took a lot of photographs of the What If? building itself, the streets surrounding it, Hollywood Park and Castle Street. The idea was: what if these curtains could tell a story that the people in the area could recognise or feel ownership of? What if this fabric could keep people warm, but also reflect who it was warming and where? I gathered as many reference points as I could.
Sometimes this meant looking at the area from above, using satellite images to pick out shapes and places that could combine to make a cohesive print.
Printmaking Improv
We decided to get the fabric digitally printed by Maake, whose social responsibility angle seemed like a good fit. Printing on luxurious and cosy deadstock chenille, I knew the fabric would naturally have a texture because it had pile. But I also know from teaching many, many screen printing classes that texture in printmaking is more than just about what you’re printing onto. You have to find ways to create interest and snag the eye in other ways (and I didn’t want to fake that texture digitally). Screen printing is wonderful for delivering a flat splash of colour, but sometimes it can be flat. So I started hands-on, with Tetrapak printmaking.
Tetrapak
Working with tetrapak prints allowed me to add in the texture that is a by-product of the process; folded, scratched and scored plates became the basis of each pattern element. In the end, I used 10 Edgeley places, buildings and plants in the finished design, which were scaled and modified into 32 individual motifs. The colours were drawn from my photographs and we settled on a rich navy blue for the background. Here’s a few of the motifs.
And here’s the finished pattern tile:
Here you can see various takes on: the Medlar apple, the bus station roof, the entrances to the Brinksway Caves, the Hollywood Park ice age boulder (that some call ‘The Elephant’), the Armoury roof, the railway lines converging, a rope rainbow, the square panelled windows at What If?, Sykes Ponds, decorative brickwork on Castle Street and the skate park at Alex Park.
Here’s a few alternate designs from along the way (surface pattern design is very addictive):
The Workshops
As part of the project, I ran a series of workshops on both tetrapak printing and textile banner making.
For our Sewing Sprint, I prepped textile banners using offcuts of the curtain fabric and recycled curtain material. I wanted textile banners to evoke the same feeling I had attending music festivals at Conway Hall in London – which has ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’ lettered above the stage in elegant capitals. A venue that declares its intent (and inspires you to join you in it) has always felt quite special, and What If?’s aims felt powerful and inspirational in a way that I thought it was important to shout about.
For the tetrapak workshops, we used my etching press to create drypoint etchings based on photographs of What If? and the surrounding buildings. I was thrilled with the prints produced, and framed them for the hall.
The Results
Sewing 6 pairs of enormous curtains was no mean feat – I weighted the hems with lead rope and disc weights so it took two chairs to hold the weight of the fabric as I sewed. I also finished the banners, attaching felt loops with brass hardware, allowing them to be removed if necessary. After painting and installing wooden battens for the industrial-grade curtain tracks, installing new tracks and mounting/hanging the prints, it was all done. I also made a ‘murder board’ for the exhibit, displayed the alternate designs and hung small, treasure-hunt style explainers to the wall at child-friendly height.
On launch night, I was supported enormously by Pauline, Aoife and Kirsty who are turning this into an amazing space for Stockport. It was an incredible project to work on and I couldn’t have done it without their tireless help or the workshop participants, who were a delight. Follow What If? on instagram here to find out about their wonderful programme of events.