Making (Slowly) as Method: Piecing,Stitching and Steeping Metaphors for Multiple Methodologies

Abstract

How and what do we make through method? This paper imagines the processes of designing and carrying out socio-environmental research through the lens of a slow, creative craft form: sewing a patchworked piece from hand-dyed fabric samples. In doing so, it contributes to thinking about how methodologies are pieced and stitched together from multiple parts. Based on early findings from an extended research project exploring the practice of natural textile dyeing in the UK, I offer a range of textile processes for thinking through the creative dimensions of the doing of methodological work. The quilt-like piece I am attempting to make from plant-dyed fabric is at once the object, objective, and method in this study. I draw on auto-ethnographic reflections on my attempts to begin learning natural dyeing and sewing skills, suggesting piecing, stitching, and steeping may be useful, tactile metaphors for thinking through the early, often messy and uncertain stages of multi-sited and multi-method qualitative research. As such, I build on and extend recent discussions about ‘patchwork ethnography’, an approach recognising that the realities of ethnographic research in practice are often fragmented, non-linear, and intricately shaped by researchers’ everyday lives and commitments. The paper also offers insight into the potentials and pitfalls of intentionally ‘slow’ scholarship that aims to disrupt the urgent temporalities of research projects as they are often imagined.

Introduction

‘Studying textiles not only provides information about cultural practices from past and present across the globe, but an insight into our own being and becoming, because the fabric of our lives is not just metaphorically but quite literally made of textiles’ (Goett, 2015, p. 121)

Bringing insight from textile making and theory into conversation with recent thinking on multiplicity in social science research, this paper sets out a series of tactile, textile metaphors for research that is pieced together from multiple parts. It aims to extend recent discussions of ‘patchwork ethnography’, an approach recognising that the realities of ethnographic research in practice are often fragmented, non-linear, and intricately shaped by researchers’ everyday lives and commitments. Developed by anthropologists (Günel et al., 2020; Günel & Watanabe, 2024), patchwork ethnography has enthused researchers across disciplines (e.g., Burnett, 2023; De Coss-Corzo, 2021; Fratini et al., 2022; Swettenham & Langley-Evans, 2024) particularly those re-evaluating research praxis in response to the ethical and logistical challenges brought by COVID-19 (Beattie & Zihms, 2024; Sambamurthy et al., 2022). Focusing on the embodied practice of patchworking and related crafts, this paper draws on my experiences of designing and carrying out socio-environmental research through a slow, creative craft form, as I attempt to assemble a patchworked, quilt-like piece. I ask, what can be revealed about how researchers imagine methodologies by following the fine-grained detail of these material and metaphorical threads (Elkins, 2022; Tadaki et al., 2023).

In thinking through methods as creative practice, the paper contributes to broader calls to consider and articulate both the mundane detail of doing methodological work (Hall & Holmes, 2020; Hitchings & Latham, 2020, 2021), the creative role of the researcher in generating novel insight (Freeman, 2020), and the transformational capacities of methods themselves (Marzi, 2023; Pottinger et al., 2022). This builds on a growing recognition that methods are not neutral tools for extracting data, but rather are generative and creative, acting in the world and shaping socio-cultural realities (Law, 2009). To extend this critical methodological exploration, I want to tug at the haptic materialities of textile metaphors to consider what it means to make methods that are soft, movable, bendable, even comfortable. Can we create methods that can be unpicked and restitched, individually and in collaboration?

I elaborate on early findings from an extended research project in cultural geography exploring natural textile dyeing. Working closely with textile makers and artists, and informed by participatory (Shercliff & Holroyd, 2020) and ethnographic methodologies, this project investigates the environmental relationships that might be developed in working with so-called ‘natural’ found materials, and fabric (Dean, 2018). Reflecting on autoethnographic notes made in the first year of this study, I offer three textile processes, piecing, stitching and steeping, for imagining the creative dimensions of the early, often messy and uncertain stages of multi-sited and multi-method qualitative research. I follow an approach in which ‘knowledge gained through practice can be expressed using language and imagery drawn from within that practice itself’ (Dormor, 2021, [no pagination]), whereby the creation of a quilt-like piece from plant-dyed fabric is at once the object, objective, and method in this study. While I am interested in metaphors for research praxis that might be drawn from textile making, stitching the patchworked piece is itself an important method within this research (Arellano, 2022; also Brien, 2019; Strohmayer, 2021; Barnes & Tulloch, 2022).

Natural dyeing and hand-stitching proceed slowly, and my investigation of these practices is similarly extended, carried out part-time over six years. In a modest way, this experimental approach attempts to subvert the normative temporalities and urgencies of academic research as it is often imagined (Horton, 2020; Rainford & Guccione, 2023). Yet, while interest in ‘slow scholarship’ (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1236) in the social sciences is growing, it is important to note that textiles academics and practitioners have long theorised slowness through and in relation to work with fabric, thread, and fibre (e.g., Fletcher, 2010; Lipson, 2012; Wellesley-Smith, 2015). I attempt to reflect this by drawing on a wide range of sources across disciplines and beyond standard academic texts.

To contribute to this rich and nuanced body of existing work, this paper shares my experiences of starting an intentionally slow, interdisciplinary textiles study which I have begun to piece together from multiple parts. This goes some way to addressing Hitchings and Latham’s (2020, p. 976) observation that ‘[w]e almost never see scratch notes that authors work through with us or reflections on early thoughts’ in the writing-up of geographical ethnography. The extended duration of my slower approach affords time to reflect on the early stages of doing research, what Whittington (2019, p. 209), following Sassen (2013) describes as ‘before the method’, ¹ where the methodology has yet to be neatly packaged. I hope to convey some of the anxieties and hesitancies I felt in starting this project, which may resonate with researchers who are attempting to work slowly, particularly in the context of transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary or arts practice research (Ashton et al., 2021).

The paper proceeds as follows. In the following section, in lieu of a neatly stitched-up, retrospective methods discussion I outline the context of this study and recent interest in natural dyeing, sharing my early methodological decision making. Next, I draw primarily on cross-disciplinary social science literatures to review academic theorisation of methods and multiplicity, with particular attention to metaphors deployed in relation to ‘patchwork ethnography’ (Günel & Watanabe, 2024), ‘facet methodology’ (Mason, 2011; Rodekirchen et al., 2023) and flexibility in research design (Budworth, 2023; Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2018). In the penultimate section, I set out three textile making metaphors for thinking about the early stages of multiple methodologies: piecing, stitching, and steeping. Here, I bring writing by textiles practitioners into the conversation, to describe how I have reflected with and through these processes in the beginnings of my study. Lastly, I conclude with a discussion of the potential of these tactile, fabric and fluid metaphors for imagining methodological thinking and knowledge creation.

Starting Slowly: Early Reflections on Making Methods

This paper is based on a study that began in October 2021 exploring how so-called ‘natural’ textile dyeing and other forms of slow, creative practice may develop new relationships with plants, environments, and places. Carried out part-time within a six-year fellowship, it explores the potentials and challenges of slow making in both practice and scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015). In this section I outline my initial methodological thinking, drawing on written reflections made during the project’s first year, setting out the research context and framing questions. This discussion outlines a methodology that may yet evolve in collaboration with participants. It thus perhaps reads more like a ‘wish list’ than the more usually presented logical framing of methods after the fact, tidied to omit the messy anxieties that often characterise the beginning of research (Horton, 2020; Hitchings & Latham, 2020; Sambamurthy et al., 2022). My hope is to contribute to a more open reflection on the sense of potentiality and overwhelm that can shape the start of an evolving, extended project.

‘Natural dyeing’ is experiencing something of a revival (Marriott, 2020). The term relates to varied processes of colouration, including the immersion of fabric, yarn or fleece in dye baths (or vats in the case of indigo dye) (Callaghan, 2022; Dean, 2018); eco-print (Flint, 2008) and hapa-zome, where plant matter is respectively steamed or hammered to print cloth or paper; making inks (Logan, 2018), pigments, and more besides. Contemporary interest in botanical colour is influenced by growing awareness of the negative environmental impacts of fabric production, and researchers and clothing producers are exploring the commercial potential of natural dyes and biomaterials for a more sustainable textile industry (Jones & Henninger, 2020; Niinimäki and Lohmann, 2023; Wood, 2019). Natural dye plants and processes have also captured the public imagination. Notable UK examples include the 2022 Chelsea Flower Show’s ‘Textile Garden’ (Fashion Revolution, 2022) and ‘Homegrown Homespun’ (British Textile Biennial, 2023), a project attempting to grow and dye linen denim jeans in Blackburn, Lancashire. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions have arguably galvanised interest among individual artists and amateur makers, whose practices are the focus of my research. For many, the ‘lockdowns’ of 2020–2021 prompted novel temporal and working arrangements, in which both crafting and reconnecting with green spaces emerged as popular ways of coping with the challenges of isolation (Collins & Welsh, 2022; Genoe & Kulczycki, 2023).

Natural dyeing is slow and involves numerous steps, from collecting dye materials, to soaking, scouring, mordanting, rinsing and modifying, resulting in a subtle and ephemeral colour palette. Enthusiasts claim this extended process of noticing local, seasonally available natural and found dyestuffs (plants, fungi, soils, rust), then handling, manipulating and looking at them closely, might create new ‘intimacies’ (Myers, 2017) with materials that in turn hold potential to highlight the biodiversity of local places and polluting risks of conventional fabric production (Pottinger, 2025).

My research questions the environmental sensitivities and modes of attentiveness (Krzywoszynska, 2019) that might be developed in natural dyeing practice. I initially proposed a methodology, ^{2 , 3} combining: (1) material-focused interviews involving talking, handling, looking and ‘doing’ with textile makers, either online or in-person; with (2) participant observation in a variety of natural dye spaces (workshops, studios, dye gardens); and (3) autoethnography. This ethnographic study is informed by participatory approaches (Shercliff & Holroyd, 2020), so finding opportunities for collaborating with participants and supporting their goals is key. In the first year, I excitedly began imagined numerous collaborative ‘mini projects’ I could develop with individuals and groups locally and further afield. Examples include working with volunteers to renovate a historic dye garden at an urban park; attending meetings and workshops in a six-month community arts project (Pottinger, 2025); exploring algal dyes with artists in coastal locations; and connecting textile practitioners with interdisciplinary academic networks to develop creative research proposals (Pottinger et al., 2024). Some of these ideas have materialised, becoming substantial collaborations, while others have not (yet) been realised in the ways I had imagined.

Though I have an undergraduate degree in Textiles, now nearly two decades old, as a visitor to this discipline (Springgay, 2021), learning natural dyeing and sewing methods has been vital in respecting the skills of natural dye communities. Autoethnography, an established approach for researching making (Holdsworth, 2022; O’Connor, 2005), combines elements of observation and self-reflective writing. What Holdsworth (2022, p. 123) terms ‘making autoethnography’ explicitly frames this methodological approach as ‘incorporat[ing] activity and reflection’ to focus on the relationship between oneself and materials. In my research, ‘making autoethnography’ has entailed working towards a patchworked textile piece and recording my reflections about this process. This has given a focus and output for my dye experiments, as well as drawing attention to the ‘extrinsic social and intimate relations that shape these practices’ (ibid).

There are many elements to this research: multiple methods, places, processes, gardens, individuals, and groups, working separately but through a shared practice. My ambition to bring them all together is perhaps influenced by attempting ‘slow’ research. Despite this temporal orientation, my early notes describe feeling ‘frantic’, due to ‘so many different parts to this research that are all up in the air, it’s hard to keep track and see how they fit together’ (reflective notes, March 2022). The extended duration and imagined leisurely pace of the project creates a sense of possibility in which multiple explorations might yet unfold. But because the project is carried out slowly, on a part-time basis, engagement with the various pieces of the research is spread out. This presents challenges to maintaining the connections needed to bring the research together coherently. This feeling of fragmentation is amplified further due to the everyday challenges of, for example, illness, caring responsibilities, and having to take unscheduled time out. The next section reviews key literatures that I have found useful in thinking through these challenges of multiplicity and method, bringing recent discussions around ‘patchwork ethnography’ into conversation with complementary approaches that conceptualise research as made from multiple parts.

Patches, Facets, and Bendy Metaphors for Making Research?

‘Patchwork ethnography’ is an approach developed recently by anthropologists (Günel et al., 2020; Günel & Watanabe, 2024, p. 131; Tsing, 2005) that sets out to challenge prevailing masculinist and ableist ideals of fieldwork as a long stint in a faraway place (see e.g., Leyland et al., 2022; Rose, 2022 for parallel debates in relation to geography fieldwork). Instead, patchwork ethnography recognises and amplifies the ways that doing research is often, if not always intricately shaped by researchers’ everyday lives and commitments, ‘from childcare and health concerns, to financial, environmental, political, and temporal constraints, to relationship commitments at “home,” to the transience of particular research subjects’ (Günel et al., 2020, [no pagination]).

I was drawn to patchwork ethnography’s obvious metaphorical connection with slow textiles, and because it describes and perhaps legitimises the ‘gentle’ (Pottinger, 2020, 2021) ⁴ , multi-sited and multi-method approach I have taken previously. This includes doctoral research with gardeners located in disparate ‘fields’ across the UK, where a patchy approach, combining multiple short-term visits, remote contact and autoethnography (Pottinger, 2018) worked well to connect gardeners’ loosely organised practices, whilst also fitting around my own embodied and logistical capacities. Though situated in geography, a discipline arguably more open to alternative interpretations of ethnography, I have, nevertheless, tended to qualify this approach. This includes describing my methodology as ‘ethnographic’ rather than 'ethnography', for example, or ‘smoothing out’ (Oliver, 2022, p. 83) the gaps between my physical encounters with participants by explaining my continued situated practice with plants in my own allotment.

Rather than viewing patchiness in ethnographic research as a limitation, patchwork ethnography mobilises the multi-sited, non-linear, piece-meal character of research as it is often performed, in anthropology and related disciplines. Patchwork ethnography ‘works with rather than against the gaps, constraints, partial knowledge, and diverse commitments that characterize all knowledge production’ through, for example, ‘short-term field visits, using fragmentary yet rigorous data, and other innovations that resist the fixity, holism, and certainty demanded in the publication process’ (Günel et al., 2020, [no pagination]). This approach resonates with thinking on ‘assemblage’ that has been influential across social science and humanities disciplines. In basic terms, assemblage ‘describes processes through which different entities come together, form relations, and operate as provisional “wholes”’ (Kinkaid, 2020, pp. 448–9). Inspired by the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome is a central metaphor here that conveys horizontal, nonheirarchical and proliferating interconnections and structures (Sellers & Honan, 2007), and draws on subterranean, botanical associations that are quite different to the tactile qualities evoked by a crafted textile piece.

Patchwork ethnography has been especially useful for reconceptualising fieldwork in the wake of COVID-19 and the associated practical and ethical restrictions to in-person research. Burnett (2023), for example, describes research with local agri-food systems in the UK and Germany as patched together through pieces gathered over several years, ‘provid[ing] rich data […] in the absence of a long research stay’. In a study of the ‘death industry’ in Adelaide, Fratini et al. (2022, p. 9) suggest a crucial feature of patchwork ethnography is this ‘long-term commitment and slow thinking’. Movements towards slower and more care-full modes of researching have also been taking root beyond anthropology and geography, with researchers from varied disciplinary backgrounds drawing on a range of tactile, fibre and fabric-based metaphors to convey these ethical dispositions. For example, Yunkaporta (2019, p. 131) describes yarning in Indigenous knowledge-making as grounded in ‘story, humour, gesture and mimicry for consensus-building, meaning making and innovation’; Ortega et al. (2023) discuss quilting in applied linguistics/language education; and Calderon (2021) draws on the notion of trenzando or braiding as a methodological framework for bringing together theory and narrative in home-based pedagogies.

Patchwork ethnography emboldens researchers who have been ‘recombining’ (Günel & Watanabe, 2024, p. 131) field and home, following long-standing critiques of these binaries (Amit, 2000; Lederman, 2006). Emphasising the piecing and joining techniques specific to this craft form, it builds on ‘seamful’ theory which emphasises the generative capacities of vulnerability and disruption (Cameron, 2014). As such, it proposes ‘an engagement that foregrounds the seams in our work, the moves of contextualization/decontextualization, the indeterminacies between “data” and daily life, the movement between field site(s) and home, and the various editorial decisions ethnographers make as they refine their stories.’ (Günel & Watanabe, 2024, p. 131). The patchwork metaphor challenges methodological imaginings of a smooth, consistent whole (Smolka, 2021), in which fieldwork visits are lengthy and uninterrupted. It instead depicts research as constructed from many different, perhaps mismatching swatches, generated through processes of ‘repetition and return’ (Günel & Watanabe, 2024, p. 133, citing McKay, 2022), stitched together by the researcher.

Questions of piecing and joining are also pertinent in ‘multi-sited’ methodologies which connect multiple places through research (Falzon, 2009; Marcus, 2011). Though such approaches have historically been criticised within anthropological traditions that define ethnography as a period of inhabitancy, they sit more easily with Geography’s tolerance of diverse qualitative practices (Crang, 2005) and nuanced conceptualisations of space and place. ‘Multi-sited’ approaches move beyond viewing the ‘site’ of ethnographic research as a container for social action and focus instead on ‘follow[ing] people, connections, associations and relationships across space’ (Cook, 2006; Falzon, 2009, p. 1), with the researcher’s role being that of threading these connections together. It is not only ostensibly multi-sited research that involves this stitching between multiple locations, as Günel and Watanabe (2024) point out. All research, to a degree, entails negotiation between the many places in which the researcher experiences the research problematic, including, for example, the mundane and domestic spaces of the office, the home, and travel between key research sites.

Researchers across disciplines are increasingly mixing qualitive methods in novel ways, partly motivated by a need to consider complex topics from multiple angles (previously conceptualised in terms of triangulation, an orientation which many, including Freeman (2020) now note lacks conceptual clarity). Building flexibility into methodology is also advocated by feminist and participatory researchers to support ethical research that can accommodate the needs, interests, and constraints of participants. Researchers in geography, for example, describe providing a ‘suite’ (Barron, 2021, p. 7) or a ‘palette’ (Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2018, p. 6) of methods from which participants can choose, and are thus invited to shape methodologies along with researchers. Budworth (2023, p. 1) describes such approaches in her research with Disabled and chronically ill young people as ‘flexible’, ‘bendable’, and ‘one way to ensure that research projects work with participants’ comfortabilities and capacities.’

Creative research methodologies often entail some form of making, combined flexibly with talking. Researchers argue that methods involving hands-on techniques, such as collage (Barron, 2023), zine making (Cameron, 2014; Sou & Hall, 2023) and participatory textiles (Shercliff & Holroyd, 2020) can modestly disrupt the power hierarchies inherent in research interactions. These distinct approaches can be performed with a variety of media, but each involves an element of piecing or putting together different parts, thus providing opportunities for participants to make choices about materials, composition, topics shared, and the pace of research interactions. The COVID-19 pandemic has also galvanised interest in remote, digital and online methods (e.g., Ackerley, 2022; Briggs, 2022; Marzi, 2023), which remake the distinctions between field and home in novel ways. Despite restrictions now lifting, there remains an imperative to offer options to participate without face-to-face interaction, ⁵ coupled with growing recognition that ‘not going there’ may be the most ethical way of doing research (Guasco, 2022, p. 468). Drawing on autoethnography (Holdsworth, 2022) within a multi-method study is one such strategy for situated research that does not require travelling elsewhere. Such flexible, multi-part methodologies generate varied outputs and forms of data, and these multiple parts must be carefully sifted, arranged and reconstructed by the researcher.

Thinking through patchwork metaphors is also useful in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. In considering stitched seams, for example, attention can be drawn to how different disciplinary modes are joined, where they rub up against one another, and how these frictions can be overcome to create something transcending the sum of its many parts. Springgay (2021, p. 212), writing through the rich embodied metaphors of hand-felting fibres, discusses the challenges for social scientists interested in research-creation, an approach combining creative and academic research practices: ‘Transdisciplinary work is hard, complicated, and requires an ethical commitment and accountability to many different disciplines, practices, and ways of being in the world. It requires a degree of intimacy in multiple fields and multiple registers.’ She notes, this ‘demands that we critically cite and work within multiple disciplines and to assess our inherited models of doing research.’ However, as Palmer & Fam, (2023, p. 305) suggest, ‘the “trans” in transdisciplinary can easily become “multi”: the possibility of the truly new lost in a negotiated compromise of “passing the data” through one model then another or combining different discipline-based data and analyses in an additive fashion where the parts do not really talk to each other or to the whole.’

Mason’s (2011) facet methodology (see also Rodekirchen et al., 2023), developed in sociology is intended for thinking through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and directly theorises methodological multiplicity. This approach draws on the striking visual metaphor of the carved gemstone as the research question, which in turn is made up of constellations of ‘facets’ - the cut edges and planes of the stone. These facets represent sets of ‘mini studies using different clusters of methods’ (Mason, 2011, p. 77) which, in combination, ‘refract and intensify light, taking up the background, and creating flashes of depth and colour as well as patches of shadow.’ (p. 75) This approach is not simply about mixing or adding methods, assembling them in a ‘kind of bricolage’, nor aiming for a ‘total set’. Rather, it foregrounds the inventiveness of the researcher who must ‘create a strategically illuminating set of facets in relation to specific research concerns’ (Mason, 2011, p. 77.) The researcher’s role is to carve these facets, to work out iteratively what forms the different shapes and how they are then positioned to create novel ‘flashes of insight’ (p. 75).

Both facet methodology and patchwork ethnography share what Mason (2011) describes as a ‘connective epistemology’, whereby knowledge is created artfully by the researcher through bringing together different planes into a larger whole. Metaphorically, both approaches bring to mind qualities of tessellation, a geometric fitting together of angular, flat shapes into different patterns. Facet methodology conjures associations with light and brilliance, and a skilled craft worker grinding and perfecting crystalline edges and sharp corners. Patchwork thinking, in contrast, allows for elements of fray (Bryan-Wilson, 2017), of ragged joins and the perhaps more familiar, tactile practices of stitching, unpicking (Arellano, 2022), wear and repair (Mattern, 2018). Thinking method through textiles also resonates with Budworth’s (2023) notion of ‘bendability’ (p. 5). I am drawn here to the potentialities of thinking about research with and through the soft, tactile, movable, qualities of fabric and thread, materials that can be readily manipulated to ensure they are comfy and accommodating.

Though metaphors can help to make complex ideas relatable (Tadaki et al., 2023), there are of course limitations to their use. Metaphors can ‘reinforce particular value systems’ (ibid, p. 497) and constrain thinking, leading to generalisations or oversimplifying complex realities, and Mason (2011, p. 78) cautions against getting ‘carried away’. However, used carefully, metaphors can enable researchers to both elicit and convey the mundane details, and the affective, embodied and emotional qualities of the doing of methodological work (Lord et al., 2023; Pottinger et al., 2022). Creative thinking through metaphor affords opportunities to articulate the capacity of research methods not simply as neutral tools for collecting data, but as acting in the world (Law, 2009). It remains crucial, however, to consider critically both the consequences and limitations of the metaphors we are drawn to.

Returning to my own methodological thinking, I want to consider the specific affordances of patchwork and related textile metaphors. In doing so, I build on Günel and Watanabe’s (2024) question of how to make visible the patchiness of ethnographic research, including its disruptions and constraints, by considering how the multiple pieces of a slowly paced research study are fabricated, arranged, and joined together. In the next section, I consider three textile processes encountered early in my research: piecing, stitching and steeping. Importantly, these three techniques do not represent an exhaustive set of instructions, and they are not presented in chronological order. Rather, they are partial processes that are repeated cyclically in the making of a textile piece. Drawing writing from textiles theorists into the conversation, I consider what these tactile and embodied metaphors can reveal about research that starts slowly and is assembled from multiple parts.

Textile Making Metaphors for Multiple Methodologies

Piecing

The first textile process is piecing, which I suggest is useful in imagining how researchers arrange, organise and experiment with multiple moving parts in the preparatory phases of a research methodology. In simple terms, piecing relates to the connecting of different fabric parts to create either a larger whole, or intermediate sized ‘blocks’ which will later be joined, as in the craft of quilting, for example. My thinking here is inspired by conversations between textile artist Matthew Harris and multi-disciplinary artist Linda Brothwell in the MAI-DAY textile elements online events series (Research UAL, 2022). They describe piecing as an important creative process in the early stages of developing ideas and imagery, engaging physically with materials, improvising, and responding to different configurations. Critically, piecing is about movement - keeping materials, information and decision making in motion, before working out at what point they are allowed to settle and solidify.

I began exploring botanical colour with basic immersion dye processes on cellulose fabrics (linen and cotton), creating small sample pieces. I wanted to identify a sizeable project I could continue across the research that would motivate me to learn dyeing skills. However, deciding what this should be proved tricky. I imagined a collaborative piece, made with the input of participants and swatches gathered across the project, but I quickly realised that before collaborating, I first needed to get a better understanding of these skills and techniques myself. I knew I wanted to create something patched, to allow the many pieces created through my experiments with plants and colour to be connected into a larger whole. This would provide a record of the extended project, made from smaller, manageable chunks. Though the logical output of patchworked textiles is often a quilt ⁶ I did not have a finished piece in mind. Instead, I had a notion of something vaguely quilt-like, that could grow and evolve, perhaps changing shape as the research progressed.

After much anxious deliberation, over, for example, machine or hand stitching, the shape of the pieces, whether to experiment with traditional quilt blocks or more organic, freeform compositions, I settled on a slow, hand-stitched paper piecing technique. My aunt has worked with a similar method for many years, creating gifts of small cushions and blankets, and I knew I could ask her to teach me. Rather than a strategic decision, this personal connection seemed intuitively to be a comfortable place to start. The way I have adopted this technique, sometimes called ‘English paper piecing’, is using regular isosceles triangle shapes to create a geometric patterning across the piece.

Once I have dyed and modified a selection of several dyed pieces, I press the fabric, write labels with details about the plant, place it was collected, and dye process, which I attach with pins. I then cut 45-degree paper triangles, also labelled, which I pin to the fabric, paying close attention to its warp and weft construction, aligning the straight paper edges with the grain of the cloth (Rosner, 2022). I cut around the triangle, leaving a seam allowance, before folding the edges and lightly attaching fabric to paper with a temporary basting stitch, which I later remove. This gives neat triangle pieces (Figure 1), which I can move around and play with (Research UAL, 2022), as well as a collection of unruly angled scraps which I store in a carboard box for some as-yet-unknown future use.

Figure 1.

Arranging triangle pieces into different configurations.

I then loosely group the triangles into clusters, of, for example, swatches produced from a particular place, plant, point in time, or dyeing technique, asking what memories are evoked, what stories can the collections of pieces start to tell, and what narratives (Wellesley-Smith, 2015, p. 82) might be elicited in the way they are joined? My approach is not to follow a strict system for organising the pieces in relation to (scientific) information, as in ‘temperature scarves’ which visualise climate change data in knitted form, for example (Moreshead & Salter, 2023, p. 882). Rather, there is a tension between a kind of creative mapping (Miles, 2023) and generating something visually appealing. This is determined through a lengthy and uncertain process of moving and rearranging. Likewise, there are decisions to be made about which pieces within a research project are joined, which edges abut, and where and how distinct elements of the research become connected with one another.

This approach allows for a form of ‘pieced work’ (Carlin, 2024), in which the slow and time-consuming process of construction is broken down into discrete tasks (e.g., writing a batch of labels, pinning, cutting, basting). These tasks can be carried out in short blocks of time, and are relatively ‘portable’ (Holdsworth, 2022, p. 127), allowing them to be performed alongside other everyday activities such as travelling, waiting, or watching television (Collins, 2016). While ‘piecework’ (Hart, 2016) connotes efficiency, standardisation and the time-pressured remuneration of industrial textile and garment manufacture, it, too, is a facet of slow making.

Portioning out these individual tasks prompts me to reflect on the varied forms of piecing echoed in my attempts to begin this research project, and the hesitant questioning that accompanies early research. What should form the different pieces of this study, where are their edges, and from what are they constructed? Who, what, and which spaces will be eventually brought together? On which chunk of work should I focus my attention, and how do I avoid becoming distracted by the wider whole and instead make steady progress on the repetitive, standardised tasks at hand? In summary, I have found it useful to think about this stage of research as ‘methods in motion’, where decisions are not yet ‘pinned down’ (reflective notes, September 2022), but can flex and be reconfigured.

Stitching

At some point, these pieces must stop moving and be attached to one another. The second process, stitching, requires committing to a design and deciding where the seams will be created, to move the project forward. In my notes, I see parallels between the overwhelming sense of possibility in considering the research spaces and methods I could potentially explore, tangled together with reflections on my trepidation about starting stitching, and therefore committing to a practice I will need to follow over the coming years. My desires to plan and neatly structure my research interviews and participant observation activity are frustrated by an unmoored sense in which ‘everything still feels very up in the air’ (reflective notes, May 2022). At the same time, I am impatient to get on with the ‘repetitive and time-consuming’ (Hall & Jayne, 2016, p. 221) yet almost meditative, absorbing labour of stitching (Shercliff, 2019), but not quite ready to decide. I write: ‘There are almost too many possibilities, that I can’t quite do any of it, and it’s making me feel a bit frantic. How do I know if I’ve chosen the right technique to start on when there’s so many options?’ (reflective notes, June 2022)

Once I settle on an arrangement, the neat triangle pieces are ‘whip’ stitched together (Figure 2). Two triangles are placed right sides facing, then their edges are joined with tight, close stitches, which unlike the earlier basting stitches are not intended for removal. Shercliff’s (2019, p. 74) account of hand stitching highlights the intimate sensations and embodied knowledges that develop through making:

‘I know when it feels right. Repeated practice and correction over time has habitualised this knowledge into my hands. The looping, piercing and tugging gestures of making stitches and the accompanying sensations of manipulated cloth are familiar to my body. […] With practice, the gesture becomes fluent and is made almost without thinking. For an experienced maker, this combination of attentive precision and thoughtless repetition engenders an almost trance-like state of mind.’

Figure 2.

Joining the fabric triangles with ‘whip’ stitches.

Shercliff’s autoethnographic reflection is that of a skilled maker, but while I have worked with textiles intermittently for many years, this paper piecing technique is something I am adjusting to with growing practice. I experiment with different needle types, stitching in different directions, working out what feels best for my hands and my posture.

I become irritated by the pieces that refuse to join neatly, and wonder if I cut the triangles unevenly, failed to line them up properly or perhaps did not account for the varying thicknesses of different fabrics. Such disruptive ‘moments of frustration’, Shercliff (2019, p. 72, citing Sennett, 2008) notes, are mutually transformative of maker and material, as they ‘invit[e] reflection, imagination and adjustment […] thereby subtly reconfiguring the boundary of the maker’s knowledge and experience’. I join the triangles along their longer edge into short rows, then join the rows to create irregular blocks, so I can get into the flow of stitching in straight lines rather than awkward angles. I notice with satisfaction when my stitches become neater, faster, and more rhythmical.

In my initial dyeing experiments, I can see that cotton fabric with varying weights and finishes takes on the hue of the dye in subtly different ways. Stitching prompts fresh evaluation of the fabric’s material qualities and handle. My first attempts are with a new square of lightweight cotton calico, which crinkles and softens with dyeing, the needle passing easily through its open weave. Next, attempting to avoid wasteful purchases, I source a second-hand linen sheet. Paint splattered in places, it is stiff and unyielding, hurting my hands as I stitch, and I start to dread working into the linen triangles. As a compromise, next I buy calico in the form of used dressmakers’ toiles – the new, unbleached cotton fabric has been stitched into a pair of trousers and a shift dress. Over several evenings, I carefully undo the stitched seams, dismantling the mocked-up garments to create flat, if unusually shaped pieces of fabric for the dye pot. As I cut through the stitches, I reflect on the emotional weight of undoing the work of another, unknown maker. The act of construction also entails forms of destruction (Arellano, 2022), what Dormor (2021, [no pagination]) refers to as the ‘labour of undoing’. Whether thinking about the creation of a textile piece, or the generation of new knowledge through research, there is an ethical imperative for researchers to attend to these processes of unpicking and remaking.

Many, working with patchwork and other textile metaphors argue the messy, complicated back of the cloth, ⁷ with its tangled knots, raw edges and areas of fray (Bryan-Wilson, 2017; Dormor, 2022), is useful for visualising and materialising the messiness of research in practice (Law, 2004; Sambamurthy et al., 2022). It is perhaps equally important as the smooth, neat, finished front - the version of our work we most often present. Smolka (2021, [no pagination]), for example, draws on seam metaphors to consider the construction of ethnographic narrative, and suggests we direct attention ‘to the loose threads that stick out at the fringes, reminding us that our patchworks are always unfinished’. In the piece I am constructing, the back is particularly important because the paper scaffolding pieces display my handwritten notes about the places, plants, and dye processes that combine to create each triangle (Figure 3). In their current form, the irregular, geometric block-like pieces seem to want to be handled and turned over. If they were bound into a quilt the paper would be removed and this information would be concealed. Through stitching, the way I imagine the work developing has shifted away from a completed, quilted piece and towards something multi-sided and unfinished, that invites exploration of its method of construction.

Figure 3.

The underside of the stitched fabric triangles showing the paper scaffolding pieces and labels.

Steeping

The third process is steeping, which can refer to both a period of soaking in liquid and becoming imbued with a quality or influence. Steeping is a critical element of immersion dyeing, and it introduces a different set of watery metaphors for thinking about research methods (see also Springgay, 2021). Though steeping is more specific to natural dyeing than the generalised textile processes of piecing and stitching, water plays a critical role in the extended lives of textiles. This includes the resources needed to cultivate and process water-intensive crops such as cotton, to the repetitive, embodied and gendered labour of laundering cloth.

Ethnographic research is often described as an immersive process (Hitchings & Latham, 2020), in which researchers strive to become saturated within a ‘cultural medium’ (Helmreich, 2007, p. 621). Steeping, I suggest, problematises the notion of immersion as a simple merging with or ‘soak[ing] up culture’ (Helmreich, 2007, p. 631). Steeping also captures something of the affective temporalities of doing extended and slowly paced research. It connotes an embodied sense of being totally surrounded (Helmreich, 2007), of waiting (Hall, 2022) and becoming captivated in ‘absorbing’ (Delamain, 2022, p. 1) novel information. But it also indicates that in turn, researchers change the places, communities or contexts in which they are immersed. Steeping, too, can be uncomfortable, in the related sense of stewing, which evokes the feelings of lonely ruminating and overthinking that can be part of doing research (Beattie & Zihms, 2024).

A basic immersion dyeing technique involves placing plant matter and water in a large pan and heating gently for at least an hour to extract colour from the steeped materials (Figure 4). The plants (flowers, roots, leaves, bark) can then be strained out, or left in the pan, and wetted fabric is then immersed in the dye liquid (Dean, 2018). The fabric, which has usually been scoured and pre-treated with a mordant to improve colour uptake and fastness (often an aluminium salt, sometimes in combination with tannins) then begins to take on the colour of the dye (Figure 5), which becomes fixed into the structure of the fibre. This immersion can last between an hour to several days, with longer immersions often yielding deeper colours.

Figure 4.

Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) flowers steeping in the dye pot.

Figure 5.

Cotton fabric immersed in a tansy dye bath, which will give a yellow colour.

There is an unknown, alchemical process at play within the container (Sofia, 2000) of the dye pot in the exchange between the cloth, water and dyestuff. Each patch created in this unhurried engagement with ‘watery volumes’ (Jackman & Squire, 2023, p. 2), is a merging of fabric, place, and process. These factors are again evoked in the act of stitching the pieces together, which prompts sensory recollections of the smell of the bubbling liquid and its heat on the hands. Springgay’s (2021, p. 212) writing on the embodied practice of hand-felting touches on the intimate, reciprocal comingling that can take place in fluid encounters with fabric: ‘To felt wool is a deeply bodily and affective process: you agitate the wool fibers with your hands, fingers, and whole body; heat and cold, friction and fuzz. Felting invokes the intimacy of touch.’ She suggests that ‘to practice intimacy requires being inside a research event; to being open to trans-connections and disjunctures.’ (p. 213)

In an optional, subsequent step, the dyed fabric can then be modified with acid, alkali, or metal salt solutions. This shifts the palette, sometimes dramatically, as in the case of adding iron which often darkens or ‘saddens’ (Dean, 2018, p. 59) colours to give grey-green tones. Dyeing one piece of cloth involves multiple, sequential steepings, including washing or ‘scouring’ (ibid, p. 34) the cloth to remove dirt and oils; mordanting to enable the dye to ‘bite’ into the fabric, itself a multi-stage process; to eventually immersing in dyes and modifiers, plus repeated rinsing and drying. Thinking about fragmented or ‘patchwork’ (Günel & Watanabe, 2024) ethnographic research through steeping metaphors suggests immersion can be at once absorbing and encompassing, while achieved through multiple dips. And though ‘dipping’ may sound like a superficial form of engagement, this extended process can in fact entail layers of laborious and time-consuming preparation and patience.

Waiting (Hall, 2022) is another crucial dimension of steeping. Palmer and Fam (2023, p. 297) posit that in transdisciplinary collaboration, ‘literature and art offer us moments to stop, to pause and think differently about the ways in which we interact with our environments and others, human and nonhuman’. They outline the ‘pause’ as a ‘transformative experience in which there is a suspension of thought, so that subjectivity is temporarily altered through changed relations with the world.’ (p. 299) There is an interesting play on the notion of pause as suspension here, which also could also relate to the dispersal of particles throughout a liquid, as in the dye pot, and a suggestion that the slowness, even stillness needed to make and appreciate art, can itself be transformative (see also Sambamurthy et al., 2022).

Importantly, this is an attentive form of waiting. As I examined my first set of dyed and modified fabric samples, I noted the colours becoming less intense with drying, patchy where the dye had become concentrated in the creases, or where the mordant had been applied unevenly. I attempted to rectify this by flattening the fabric with an iron before it was immersed, intermittently checking, stirring, and agitating, squeezing the fabric between my hands to massage mordant and colour across the cloth. The fabric is not simply left to steep. Rather, like slow research, this process requires an attentive pause, an active engagement interspersed with waiting, stillness, and getting on with other things.

Conclusion

This paper asked how methodologies come to be assembled from multiple parts, and how tactile, textile metaphors could help articulate this process. Drawing together ethnographic reflections from research exploring natural textile dyeing, I suggested three fabric-based metaphors, piecing, stitching and steeping. These process metaphors may be useful for those grappling with the sense of messiness, proliferation and unease that can accompany the early part of a research project or questioning how to begin piecing a study together.

First, piecing draws parallels between the early stages of constructing a textile piece and a research study. Both, I suggest, are shaped by movement, positioning and responsiveness (Research UAL, 2022), and I term this phase ‘methods in motion’. The piecing metaphor emphasises the researcher’s creative role in overseeing and (re)arranging the methodological pieces in response to information, material qualities, and aesthetic factors. It also highlights the affective combination of anxiety and excitement early in a project where there are multiple possibilities to explore, decisions to make, and false starts to reconcile, which are discussed less often in neat depictions of methodology in academic writing (Hitchings & Latham, 2020).

Second, I explored stitching as both an embodied practice, and a way of imagining committing to the methodological design and starting data collection. Through stitching, the fabric of the piece comes together and takes shape. Something new is created, dependent on the dexterity and repetitive labour of the stitcher-researcher. Stitching and starting research can be frustrating (Shercliff, 2019), and are not straightforward processes of connecting neat, crisply tessellating pieces, such as those invoked in the carved gemstone planes of Mason’s ‘facet’ analogy (2011). Rather, both include softly accommodating and imperfect joins, areas of fray, tangled knots, and the possibility of unpicking.

Third, steeping considers the construction and colouration of the individual pieces that make up a patchwork. This extends existing thinking about research through textile making (Günel & Watanabe, 2024; Smolka, 2021) by introducing a set of watery metaphors and fluid encounters with fabric. Steeping, a process more specific to natural dyeing, problematises the notion of immersion in ethnographic research as straightforwardly ‘soaking up’ (Helmreich, 2007, p. 631), prompting closer attention to what is exchanged reciprocally between the liquid and the thing immersed. The multiple ‘dips’ that create the fragmented, dyed pieces of a patchwork are reimagined not as superficial forms of engagement, but as requiring active and attentive forms of waiting.

In following the threads of patchworking and piecing methodologies, this exploration of textile processes also holds potential to contribute to discussions of connective epistemologies and ontologies (Mason, 2011) and feminist citation practices (Ahmed, 2017). It reframes common depictions of research that draw on building metaphors, with knowledge creation presented as discovering and infilling a gap, like a missing brick in a wall (Collins, 2016). The generation of new knowledge here is reconceived as moving, modifying and stitching existing parts together in new configurations, perhaps unpicking and reworking, thinking about where the edges of one piece can be newly connected with another.

While I have focused on the first year of an extended study, as Hitchings and Latham (2020) suggest, there is potential to return and compare early methodological reflections with what is later produced. For example, I have already begun thinking about whether there is potential for the pieces of cloth that I have made individually to be joined with those made by or with participants. How would differently constructed pieces sit in relation to one another, and what could this reveal about the tensions in combining autoethnographic and collaborative ways of working?

Mindful of Mason (2011) and Tadaki et al.’s (2023) calls to think carefully about the implications of metaphors, it is important to consider the specific tactile and visual qualities of the patchworked fabric I have created and discussed in this paper, and their limitations. For example, I have worked with one repeated, geometric shape, whereas patchworking could proceed through a less orderly, more improvisational approach, involving irregular shapes and joins, or patterned cloth. Patchwork can appear flat, and its construction is slow and laborious. Though describing textiles as flat elides the textural qualities, architectural construction of woven fabric, and joining of multiple layers, different metaphors might allow for a more topographical spatialisation of research in metaphorical thinking, or may be better suited to research that proceeds at alternative tempos. In focusing on stitched and dyed textiles, this paper has considered but one form of making. Researchers may wish to think about their own research with and through varied textile processes such as knitting, crochet, embroidery, or indeed, other diverse craft forms. How might a woven methodology compare with one moulded from clay, for example? What I hope I have demonstrated here is that following the metaphors generated within creative practice can yield insight into the ways we imagine research.