Grief Threads: Santa Fe
A collective ritual of hand-sewn memory and grief mapping
Grief Threads is a sewing workshop for moving with grief—old grief, ancestral grief, current world grief—and transmuting the heaviness we carry via soft, supple creative practice.
Grief Threads is a place to make your grief visible, and to hear what it has come to teach you. To be a student of collapse and stitch the fragments into something new and fortified.
Together, we’ll gather around a communal scrap pile and learn to create free-form textile collages—maps of our inner weather. We invite our grief to shapeshift with thread, cloth, and scrappy ritual. Not to fix or erase it, but to give it form for a moment. To move it through.
Making art with our hands—especially together—is grief transmutation. It’s spiritual hygiene. A way of clearing what has been weighing on us, and letting new meaning emerge through gesture and cloth.
This offering is for grief that is lived with, not freshly ruptured. Please reach out if you are experiencing acute, recent loss to see if this experience will be suitable for you.
✦ What’s Included
A guided, somatic arrival to root us in body and togetherness
Creative invitations to meet your grief through fabric, touch, and art-making
Hand-sewn grief collage techniques using shared and personal cloth
A ritual of offering: bring 1–2 meaningful textiles of your own—and something ready to give away. Old clothes, household scraps, fabric with memory or none at all. These become part of a communal scrap library, where you’ll stitch with both the known and the unknown.
Optional sewing circle time on Sunday, July 27 - time to be determined by the group, at SOLA Dojo
No art or sewing experience necessary—making is a birthright not just for experts.
✦ For You, If You’re:
Holding grief that doesn’t have a clear destination
Longing for a ritual that’s embodied, communal, and poetic
Desiring the quiet clarity of handwork and collective presence
Ready to alchemize something tender—slowly and together
✦ Details:
📍 Location: School of Liminal Arts Dojo, Santa Fe
📅 Date: Wednesday, July 23
🕰 Time: 5:00–8:30pm
🎟 Cost:
$133 – true cost
$88 – supported tier (limited seats)
🧵 What to bring:
Please bring 1–2 fabric items of personal significance—something from your life, your history, or your memory that you feel ready to include in this ritual. This could be an old garment, pillowcase, tablecloth, handkerchief—anything.
Also bring a few items that are not significant to you, but are ready to be offered into the community scrap pile. These will be shared with the group, creating a collective palette of mystery and transformation.
All additional tools and materials provided.
✨ Optional studio return: Join us again on Sunday, July 27 to continue your piece. Details shared after registration.
🎫 Capacity is limited to 16 participants. Advance registration required.
✦ About Your Facilitator:
Melissa Word is a movement artist, somatic coach, and death doula whose work centers grief, ritual, and embodied creative expression. She supports individuals and communities in navigating transitions, tending to loss, and reclaiming their aliveness through hands-on, heart-led practice. Melissa’s workshops blend poetic presence, intuitive structure, and a deep respect for the body’s wisdom. Grief Threads is one expression of her interdisciplinary work—where art-making becomes ritual, and the ordinary becomes sacred. Read more about her practice here.