Workshops Life e. V.

Headbands, candle glasses and Christmas traditions – Workshops at Visioneers

In the past few months, we cooperated with the non-profit organization Life e.V. in order to host several different workshops for young women with refugee history. The participants are taking part in a course program at Life e.V. in which they improve their German and get prepared for professional life through workshops on different topics.

Our first workshop in October was all about getting creative. With a knotting technique called Macramee we decorated old glasses and made colourful garlands from leftover pieces of fabric. And even though the knotting and the sewing up sometimes required quite a lot of concentration and patience, the participants were motivated and in a good mood – and the results were quite impressive!

A few weeks later we hosted a sewing workshop together with fashion design student Marilyn, who normally is in charge of the creative-afternoon for adolescents. During two mornings we were taking measures, cutting, marking out, sewing, unstitching, and went on sewing and decorating. For some women it was the first time using a sewing machine, others were experts already, but all of them were able to take home some unique and very beautiful results. On the first day, we worked on colourful headbands adapted to the own head size, and on the second day on some fancy leather bags.

The third workshop was all under the theme of “Christmas”. We talked about the Christmas story, heard about traditions and customs from different countries and tried them out very practically, and learnt the relations between Santa Claus, the Christ Child and St Nicholas. All three workshops focused not only on the elaborated program, but also on getting to know each other, learning German and the mutual exchange. While we were eating all together or during the coffee breaks we had the opportunity to start conversations and also learn some things from the very open minded participants. Apart from that, we also found it important to convey that it is not the perfect result that matters, but the whole learning process together with other people.

No matter if with needle and thread or hearing about the Christmas story – we had a lot of fun with the workshops and are looking forward to more cooperation the next year.