Stitching the Blanket
What choices should we be enabled to make at the end of life?
This project explored the issues around Assisted Dying, an end-of-life option allowing terminally ill people to take life-ending medication to avoid suffering. Assisted Dying is increasingly offered overseas, but as yet is not available in the UK despite a vociferous campaign to change the law. It is an emotive and difficult subject to discuss. The project sought to engage people through a series of sewing workshops. Needlework is one of the favourite tools of the craftivist and has been used as a therapeutic tool to great effect. For this project people who had experience of end-of-life issues were invited to tell their stories using a hospital blanket as a canvas, and Victorian samplers as inspiration. Together we stitched our thoughts and insights.
Atul Gawande; 'Being Mortal'
Jo's Mum
The River Cannot Go Back, Kahlil Gibran
Keith
Letter to Dignitas
Nan
£10,000 to go to Dignitas
Red tape
The iconic plastic hospital wristband was recreated in felt. It was a way of re-appropriating an anonymous labelling system and using it as a vehicle for the patient’s own voice. Messages were sewn on to the bands and onto the blanket. Recurring themes were Choice, Justice and Dignity.
Making as therapy.
Our culture means that often we need tools to assist us to talk openly and engage in difficult issues. Avoiding direct eye contact helps and a needle and thread can be great tools for this. End of life experiences affect the dying, and those they leave behind, leaving long lasting scars. The blanket project brought home the need for us to think longer and harder about how we deal with end of life now modern medicine has completely reframed the debate.
“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end”
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.
Sewing workshop
Using Victorian samplers as inspiration
Sharing techniques and experiences