For Youth Week 2026, Weave’s Youth Advocates group brought creativity, storytelling and sustainability together through a special tapestry project called Sew-Wot.

The project gave young people the chance to learn new practical skills while also sharing parts of their own lived experiences in a creative and meaningful way. Through sewing, mending, tailoring and upcycling workshops led by skilled seamstresses, the group explored hand-sewing techniques, principles of design, ways to recycle and repair clothing, and learned how to transform old fabrics into something entirely new.

Using recycled fabrics — including materials that held personal meaning for some participants — the group co-created three large tapestry artworks. As the pieces developed, so did the stories woven into them. The tapestries became a reflection of the group’s experiences, creativity, humour, resilience and individuality.

A particularly meaningful part of the project was deciding where the finished works would go. The Youth Advocates chose to gift each tapestry to a service that had impacted their lives in some way — places they had accessed, relied on, felt supported by or connected to in the past. This made the artworks not only creative pieces, but also acts of gratitude, recognition and community connection.

The project was launched on the rooftop at Weave Waterloo and representatives from each service attended to receive their artworks. The Youth Advocates spoke about the process of making each piece, and expressed their gratitude to the services for the impact they have had in their lives.

The care, patience and teamwork shown throughout Sew-Wot highlights the strength and importance of spaces for young people to connect, learn, lead and express themselves. Watching young people who had never sewn before confidently contribute to large collaborative artworks is a powerful reminder of what’s possible when creativity, storytelling and lived experience come together.

Twenty10

This piece is gifted to the community of Twenty10. This community is emblematic of the power of identity and self expression, that those who persevere in the face of people who wish to stop them from being who they are and with who they love demonstrate an immense strength that inspired us at Weave.

As such, we created this piece as a monument to this strength, a patchwork tapestry where each patch is an artwork of an individual wishing to express that same strength within themselves.

Each patch represents someone; their interests, their talent, their history, their thoughts, their identity.

Each piece surrounds a large heart, the visual representation of love, courage and passion. This design choice is also representative of the power of self expression and identity, in that it is innate. No deeper reason was needed to justify this, just as no deeper reason is needed to justify our identity.

Professor Marie Bashir Centre

This artwork is dedicated to the guests of the Professor Marie Bashir Centre at RPA. Nature has an important role in healing and maintaining mental health through its beauty and its serenity. The image of nature can be grounding, bringing through simple yet powerful memories of dirt between your toes, the sounds of life and the smell of wood and rain. We loved the idea of being able to spend time exploring the nature scene finding different nature hidden surprises and animals instead of being caught up in your own head.

Knowing this, Weave and our local community have collaborated to create a naturalistic tapestry to express our care and support for the guests who attend here.

Each leaf, each insect, each aspect of its greenery was hand embroidered by caring hands with full intent to communicate that through each stitch.

Many people contributed to this naturalistic piece, putting in labour and creativity. This piece expresses our community’s desire to bring healing and peacefulness to those who access the Professor Marie Bashir Centre.

OzHarvest

When deciding which organisations to design, hand make and donate an artwork to, OzHarvest came up quickly. It seemed that everyone in the group had had an experience with OzHarvest, whether that be directly, through Weave, or completing Nourish, or simply through seeing an iconic yellow truck on the street.

It made perfect sense for us to create this tapestry as a gesture of our gratitude for the role OzHarvest plays in our community, and in the lives of many individuals who struggle with food insecurity.

Using a picnic blanket as a base, this piece features a vast number of hand-crafted food items enclosed by a border of little yellow OzHarvest trucks, all contributed by the Youth Advocates at Weave.

Thank you OzHarvest for your incredible work and we are thrilled to be able to gift you this tapestry.

Thank you to our partners and supporters for helping us bring this project to life:

NSW Multicultural Grants | Sewn by Mob

Photography by Jules Sarantis