Tuesday 16 March 2021: Abi is talking about accessibility and the Sew Enabled community.

Abi lives in Hampshire with her husband and two dogs. She has been sewing since 2014, and tries to make all her own clothes. She also knits, and partakes of other textile-based crafts.

Abi has ME, tenosynovitis, asthma, and is neurodivergent. She started Sew Enabled because she realised that there weren’t easy resources available for people with all kinds of disabilities to find accessible sewing shops, websites, and patterns that could easily be adapted.

Sew Enabled is an online community working to share accessibility needs and they’ve published their first blog post about Textile textures by Jennifer of Jersey Cat Fabrics. There’s more research underway and you’ll be able to read these posts as they are published on their blog.

The next blog post to come is being developed by Samantha of the Purple Sewing Cloud. Samantha will talk about her accessibility work in the next Sewcialists podcast. You can see the details of Samantha’s accessibility work at the Australian Sewing Guild’s first online Autumn Sewing Celebration on 27 March 2021.

Abi talks about accessibility for fabric descriptions, accessibility in stores, sewing machine features and pattern design accessibility. Pattern testing with people who have accessibility needs is a good way to start and Sew Enabled can assist pattern designers find testers for them. It’s a win/win way to develop great patterns with accessible features for so many more sewists.

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They have 4 team members – Andie Wells, Melissa Mora, Tasha and Abi. If you want to join their community for support or to help their work, go to their contact us page today. Make sure you follow their Sew Enabled Instagram account. The Sew Enabled team are actively looking for people to contribute about their accessibility needs so get in touch with them today. Have you made any changes to make sewing more accessible for yourself or for others? What adaptions have you made to make sewing more accessible?

Make sure you go to the Sewcialists blog to read the accessibility articles and guest post we’re developing for March and April 2021.