We Are the
Weavers
Gathering
A women’s autumn retreat on the edge of Dartmoor, inviting connection with sacred land and the ancient arts of spinning, weaving, singing and storytelling
8th - 14th November, 2026
at Embercombe in South Devon, England
In this time of great unraveling
when the world appears
to be coming undone at the seams,
we are called to join the reweaving
of a new and beautiful story on Earth.
Our Vision
We gather under the New Moon at Lunar Samhain in a wide circle of women to craft, sing and dream with the land. Together we honour ancestral life ways and create with intention and meaning.
Join us for a week-long gathering where we journey with spindle, loom, dyeing cauldron, story and song on the beautiful land of Embercombe.
Our time together centres on the quiet magic of crafting in community. Surrounded by 50 acres of rewilded woodland, lake, meadow and hillside, we root into place, slow down, and receive the nourishment of working with fibre and our hands.
These crafts, alongside song, storytelling and connection to the land, are part of our oldest ancestral legacies. They offer a grounding response to the frenzied pace of modern life. Held within the energy of Samhain and the new moon, this is a space to unwind, restore and find inspiration.
We held the first in-person “We Are the Weavers” gathering this past May in Washington state, USA, and we are excited to host this second edition in Devon, UK.
We continue to shape and grow this space with the spirit of new beginnings, guided by our wise and well ancestral grandmothers and the commitment to create from the heart.
This Is For You If:
- You feel called to spinning, weaving, natural dyeing, felt making, wool work or mark making, and want to explore both their practical and intuitive aspects
- You are drawn to group singing and the healing power of storytelling
- You feel excited by the experience of staying in a yurt with two other women - warmed by the fire in a Devon valley at the end of autumn
- You enjoy walking on the land in all seasons
- You appreciate homemade, organic, locally sourced food
The Skills We Will Practise
Our time together follows an organic flow from raw fibre to finished fabric. There will be opportunities to work with a range of traditional tools, including Viking-style warp-weighted loom, rigid heddle looms, handcrafted Dartmoor oak looms, drop spindles, spinning wheels and simple hedgerow spindles. We will also explore working with earth pigments and natural mark making.
Carding & Preparing Fibre
Spinning on Drop Spindles & Wheels
Seasonal & Medicinal Plant Dyes
Beekeeping & Weaving Lore
Celtic Land Traditions
Weaving Womb Belts & Altar Coths
Sewing & Embellishing
What's Included
- All workshops and materials for the week
- 6 nights accommodation in shared yurts (3 women per yurt)
- All meals for the week, plus coffee & tea
- Access to the land and facilities at Embercombe, located in a 50 acre valley on the edge of Dartmoor
Where We'll Gather
Embercombe is an educational charity and retreat centre set within a 50-acre rewilding site on the edge of Dartmoor. It offers immersive experiences in nature, rooted in both personal and collective transformation.
Their work brings together inner exploration and meaningful action in the world, guided by a commitment to future generations and the wellbeing of all species.
The land itself offers a rich and supportive setting, with woodland, meadow, hills and a lake for swimming. Accommodation is in yurts, with access to a large indoor barn and smaller indoor spaces for more intimate sessions. Nourishing vegetarian meals are prepared using organic and locally sourced ingredients.
At the Gathering
We will be joined by a team of cultivated teachers and guest guides, offering a range of immersive teachings and classes that are rooted in the practical and symbolic nature of Making.
Classes
The daily rhythm will be spacious and balanced, with two main sessions each day alongside free time for resting, crafting and exploring the land.
Morning & Evening Activities
Mornings and evenings will include optional intuitive movement practices, gentle walks, and time for singing and crafting by the fire.
There will be a dedicated quiet space for rest, reflection and silent making, honouring the inward turning of the season.
Accommodations
Included in each registration is indoor accommodation for the week in a shared yurt. Each yurt is complete with 3 cosy beds, a wood-fired log burner and firewood, and energy-efficient solar lighting.
There are shared bathrooms available nearby the yurt village with compost toilets & running water. Full bathroom facilities with hot showers are available in the main Centre Fire building.
At registration, you will be prompted to answer a few questions about your sleeping preferences so that we may group participants by similar habits (i.e. early wakers). Mothers with babies will be grouped together in yurts.
Children & Teenagers
Babes in arms who are not yet crawling are welcome at this gathering. There’s no exact cutoff age, since this milestone varies between children, though generally babies 6 months and younger would be welcome. There is no booking fee for babes in arms, though each child must still be officially registered at booking.
Teenage girls (13 years and older) are welcome when accompanied by an adult guardian; the booking fee for this age group is listed below. Girls in this age group are welcome to join any workshops.
Maker's Market
There will be space to share and exchange handmade goods, details to be confirmed.
We are reweaving,
gathering the threads of soul,
singing over bones,
all fibers spun into the whole.
We are reweaving,
gathering the threads of soul,
singing over bones,
and coming into Life again.
– “La Loba” Song by Hanna Leigh
Photo by Annyea Healy
Our Schedule
Here is a general outline of our schedule for the week, which is subject to change. A detailed schedule will be available at the gathering.
Sunday, 8th November
Arrival from late afternoon, settling in and opening circle in the evening.
4:00pm – Arrivals Begin
6:00pm – Dinner
7:30pm–9:30pm – Opening Circle
Monday, 9th November – Friday, 13th November
Daily workshops, sessions and free time woven throughout the week.
8:00am–9:00am – Self-Serve Breakfast
9:30am–10:30am – Full Group Session
11:00am–1:00pm – Small Group Morning Craft
1:00pm – Lunch
2:30pm–5:30pm – Small Group Afternoon Craft
6:30pm – Supper
8:00pm & Onwards – Fireside Gathering
Saturday, 14th November
8:00am–9:00am – Self-Serve Breakfast
9:30am–11:30am – Closing Circle and Ritual
12:00pm – Departure
Meet Our Guides
Each practice is shared with intention and respect by our guides.
Hanna Leigh
Hi! My name is Hanna Leigh, (IG: @hannaleighsong) and I am a Singer-Songwriter, Voice Doula, Weaver, and Devotee of this precious, living Earth. I was raised in California (Chumash territory) though in recent years have spent extensive time residing on ancestral lands in the Celtic isles. My people migrated to the U.S. several generations ago from England, Scotland, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands.
This organization, Weaving Remembrance, was birthed through my own passion to to reclaim ancestral wisdom and grow in intimate reciprocity with this miraculous earth that sustains us.
I feel passionate about inspiring folks to connect with ancestral crafts, particularly spinning & weaving. These practices have brought much magic & goodness into my life, and I feel they are important anchors for the turbulent times we are in. Come join us in the practical magic of reawakening to these old ways!
Rosemary Riedel O'Brien
Rosemary Riedel O’Brien is a multidisciplinary craftswoman devoted to the ancestral arts of weaving, spinning, and natural dye.
For over seven years, she has worked intimately with these traditional practices, cultivating a body of work that honours both heritage and the living rhythms of the natural world.
Her creations are rooted in a deep reverence for earth, spirit, and the unseen threads that connect all of life.
As a Soul Craft Mentor, Rosemary shares the sacred language of fibre through both online offerings and in-person workshops.
She guides others in creating meaningful, handwoven medicine shawls, womb wraps, blankets, and altar cloths—objects imbued with intention, story, and symbolism.
Her teaching invites a return to slowness, presence, and embodied soulful creativity.
Living and working on a smallholding on the western edge of Dartmoor, she balances her creative practice with motherhood and a life closely intertwined with land and season.
Through her work, she seeks to preserve ancient wisdom while weaving pathways for connection, healing, and remembrance in the modern world.
Laani Takahata
Elisabeth Phillips
Elisabeth (@ealasaid_weaves) is a medicine woman and textile artist living in the Outer Hebrides specialising in traditional spinning and weaving practices. Using locally sourced wool, natural fibres and ethically foraged nature pieces, her visions and intuitive creations are deeply rooted in the elements, nature and universal energies.
Elisabeth has been deeply committed for many years to different weaving practices; from helping people “weave” their health back together aided by her 30 years of clinical neuroscience and mentoring experience and holistic plant and natural medicines practice; to recent years using body work and ancestral crafts as an act of connecting to self, nature and community.
After years of deep soul grief and inspired by her three year, self-led Celtic shamanic soul pilgrimage living in her van throughout sacred energy centres and inspiring communities of the UK (including the Outer Hebrides, Scottish Highlands, Anglesey, North Wales, Glastonbury, Dartmoor and Cornwall) Elisabeth now heals and creates from her traditional croft cottage home studio in a tiny island in the Outer Hebrides. Her practice intuitively brings through alchemically woven prayer and remembrance cloth for use as ceremonial and ritual pieces or simply to connect the wearer to self and the land. Deep immersion and rooting within the rich diversity of the moorland, sea, local Gaelic community and traditions that surround her Hebridean island home provides Elisabeth with a constant and powerful thread to tend and honour the grief of what was and what is to come, as part of necessary individual, community and nature healing.
Linda Lemieux
Willow and rush basketry, rush chair seating, willow and rush grower based on Dartmoor, Devon.
She has been working as a basket maker for over thirty years. Her making practice is deeply rooted in place, ecology and respect for the land, with her home on Dartmoor a constant source of inspiration. Making with her own material has always been important to her, alongside teaching and tending both the land, and young people to follow in her footsteps. Particularly close to her heart is teaching children heritage craft skills and nurturing an appreciation for the wealth of natural material on their doorstep. Her teaching is not purely technique focused, and aims to cultivate a reciprocal relationship between the maker and the wild world that has given us this ancient craft.
She makes baskets that are unique, beautiful and useful. Her influences include her early teacher Joe Hogan and the Irish west coast styles, including creels and skibs. Her designs arise in response to the colour and variety in her willow, and a desire to keep these qualities alive in the finished basket. She believes in leaving the door open for quirks and surprises during the making process, in letting the material have its voice.
Her wide variety of teaching experience includes work with Exeter University, Schumacher College, The Old Way, and various annual children’s camps as well as privately run courses at her home workshop. She is a Yeoman member of the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers and a founder member of Basketmakers South West.
Mae Bird
Mae Bird is a singer and weaver of songs and cloth, originally from West Yorkshire. She is devoted to hearing the songs of the land, sky and waters around her and creating spaces to share the magic of the wild.
Mae has been sharing her songs and holding singing workshops for over 12 years in many lands, and now after 5 years of studying fibre arts she is excited to be adding spinning and weaving to her offerings. After a journey of deep reclamation of belonging and sovereignty though the spinning and weaving of cloth using materials from the land around her, she is passionate about passing on sparks of inspiration for others to embark on their own journeys of making and mending life.
Lily Aisbitt-Waugh
Lily Aisbitt-Waugh is a multidisciplinary artist working through the medium of hand weaving, spinning and natural dying. Lily’s work explores archeological reconstruction cloth, working with her husband Toby Aisbitt-Waugh to build replica weaving looms from across history.
Lily’s work is inspired by the origin stories of cloth creation: exploring ways to enter this craft at its most intuitive and instinctive vantage point. Her work is one of the visionary weaver.
Lily works from her remote moorland weaving studio on her 1000 year old Dartmoor smallholding. She walks her communion with this ritual landscape into each of her tapestries, shawls and blankets. In deepening her passion for heritage crafts Lily also practices traditional animal skin tanning, beekeeping & traditional land guardianship skills such as scything.
Scarlett Butters
Scarlett Butters is an artist, illustrator, printmaker and maker rooted on Dartmoor in Devon. Since childhood she has explored art making and crafting as a way to express her love of the land and unravel liminal worlds. Over the years her materials have become more localised, for example working with watercolour paints she has made from rocks and soil in her bioregion.
Learning practices within textile and fibre arts both with teachers and intuitively, spinning and weaving have particularly informed her image making process in the way it has helped entwine her more to a feeling of ancestry, folklore and the animacy of life.
She feels passionate about the way land based art and craft practices can help entangle us directly with the web of life with our precious hands, in a practical, intimate, communal and deeply imaginative sense.
Tor Woven
Tor works intuitively in collaboration with many guides and allies, from plant kin and their dyes, to well- in- spirit Ancestors and their wisdom. Together, they honour each of Life’s initiatory thresholds, each rite of passage. Together, they weave love, protection, and trust for the times of great transformation in ones life and of this ever changing world.
Her work with the ancient crafts of Spinning and Weaving are a remembrance of the sacredness of both Living and Dying.
Dajana Hermeic
Dajana (she/her) is an artist, hedgerider, queer mama bear, activist, and community organizer of Rewilding and Practical Animism in the northern Netherlands, including Buitenlander Ancestral Skillshares and Root Riot Foraging. Born in Bosnia during the time of Yugoslavia, she spent her early childhood in wartime but among wildflowers, by rivers and forest hills, where her grandmother taught her traditional threadwork and rural herbalism. These early teachings became the foundation of a lifelong kinship with plants and other animals. Following the Bosnian War, Dajana arrived in the Low Countries as a child refugee together with her mother and siblings. Experiences of displacement, Belonging, other-than-human Kinship, and Home have since become central themes in her work.
Her practice as a spinner, weaver, and felter blossomed through the reclamation of her heritage and the animistic exploration of the histories and ecologies of her adopted homeland, as well as through her work with local sheep herds & shepherds. Through her teachings of Animistic and Magical praxis, Threadwork, and Ancestral and Prehistoric skills, she invites people into forms of biocentric activism that are rooted in place and relationship. Her work is informed by folklore, Anarcha-Eco-Feminism, Indigenous and Queer ecologies, the Palestinian-led BDS movement, and her experience working with both refugees and wildlife protection in the North.
Together with Dajana, you will meet local plants such as Nettle and learn about the gifts they share, including the making of thread. We will explore the Distaff &Sspindle as both practical and magical tools, discovering their place in traditional craft and folklore, before creating our own spindle by hand
Frequently Asked Questions
No prior experience is needed. All levels are welcome.
We envision this gathering as a space where everyone is learning from one another, gaining wisdom from each other’s life experiences.
Women of all ethnicities and cultural backgrounds are welcome at this gathering.
There is space for 50 women & teenagers, including instructors & support staff.
A suggested packing list will be provided after booking.
All materials for workshops will be provided, though if you have any materials (yarn, fibre, drop spindles, etc.) you would like to bring, you are welcome to do so.
Dogs are not allowed at this event. Please leave your furry friends at home for the week.
No. This gathering is designed as a full week-long ritual immersion, and registration is for the entire event, therefore, our request before you book is to make a full commitment to be present on the land from the Opening Circle to the Closing Circle.
Because of this, we are not offering day passes.
All meals are prepared from scratch in the Embercombe kitchen that creates organic, vegetarian, seasonal, freshly made plant-based food. Vegetables are sourced as locally as possible, supporting local CSA’s and organic organisations.
Breakfast is served between 8am-9am. This consists of a selection of cereals, warming porridge with a variety of toppings and fresh fruit.
Lunch (served at 1pm) is usually light and consists of a different seasonal soup each day, home-made bread, with a fresh, crisp salad.
Dinner (served at 6.30pm) consists of a warm larger meal, such as a chard, potato and chickpea curry with basmati rice and dairy-free mint and cucumber yoghurt.
A self-serve coffee & tea bar will be available.
The kitchen at Embercombe can accommodate a wide range of dietary requirement if we know about them in advance. Please note however, they have a small kitchen and are therefore unable to accommodate severe allergies due to the risk of cross-contamination.
No, there are only indoor spaces provided.
Our venue’s address is: Embercombe, Higher Ashton, Devon EX6 7QQ.
This is approximately a 4-hour drive west of London and a 30-minute drive southwest of Exeter.
The closest railway station is Exeter St. Thomas.
Our refund policy for this gathering is as follows for cancellations made:
Before 1st September:
Full refund minus £50 admin fee
Between 1st September – 1st October:
50% refund
After 1st October:
No refund
Register Here
Bookings made before Lughnasa (7th August, 2026) are discounted as follows:
Please note that prices are listed in GBP (£). For those booking from the United States, contact us to setup payment with USD ($). Payment plans are available and can either be sorted at checkout using PayPal, or you may contact us by email to setup a custom payment plan with a debit/credit card.
For any questions regarding booking, please contact us by email at gathering@weavingremembrance.org.