From Wool, With Love
Wool is everywhere around us, yet much of the wool produced by Dutch sheep is treated as waste. Once part of a thriving local textile economy, Dutch wool has become disconnected from the places, animals and people it comes from, travelling through increasingly globalised systems of production and consumption. The Soft Spot turns our attention back to this overlooked local material.
A fleece carries more than fibre: it holds a sheep, a field, a season, the labour of caring for animals, and generations of knowledge about working with natural materials. By staying with the material and learning how to transform it by hand, the project reconnects wool with the landscapes, skills and relationships from which it emerged.
The project begins with something soft, ordinary and easily overlooked — and asks what becomes possible when we start paying attention to what is already here.
In Shared Hands
The Soft Spot returns wool to the commons — and further, into a shared making practice. Workshops invite people to wash, card, spin, dye and weave together, making space for different kinds of knowledge, from inherited craft skills to first encounters with fibre. A constantly evolving, mobile, modular Wool Field Kit allows the practice to move through Nieuw-West and beyond, into community spaces, gardens, streets and gathering places.
The tools themselves are part of the process: made, adapted and tested through use, they keep the practice ever-changing, accessible, low-tech and open to experimentation. There is no single expert at the centre. Knowledge, care and agency move between hands, generations, cultures and materials — an ecofeminist practice of recognising interdependence rather than hierarchy.
Over time, these encounters come together in a growing wijkdeken (community blanket) — a collective textile carrying the colours, gestures, stories and contributions of the people who make it. A shared fabric that asks a simple, bigger question: what does it truly mean to share warmth and belonging on the same ground?
From Fibre to Future
A single fibre is never just a fibre. It carries a sheep, a field, a season, a farmer, a set of skills and a history of labour, trade and extraction. Following wool through its transformations opens a path from the intimate to the systemic — from the material in our hands to the landscapes, economies and relationships that shape our lives.
The Soft Spot uses making as a way of asking larger questions: What do we value? Who gets to shape the systems we depend on? Which forms of knowledge survive? What happens when local material cycles disappear? And what could change if we paid closer attention to the relationships already holding these systems together?
As local wool disappears from use, so do parts of the knowledge, skills and heritage that grew around it. The project traces these absences alongside what remains: materials, practices, memories and ways of making that can still be shared and transformed. The wijkdeken becomes part of this process — not a reconstruction of a lost textile tradition, but a new layer of local heritage made in the present, opening questions about what we choose to carry forward.
