Neurodivergent Textiles: Sensory & Story in Cloth

Exploring ways that touch, texture, rhythm and repetition become languages for expression, self-regulation, and belonging. Participants use stitching, quilting, tactile embellishment to translate sensory experience into visual and textural form.

The class honors neurodivergent ways of perceiving, processing, and creating seeing craft as both communication and care. It’s an arts-based exploration normalizing movement, stimming, sensory preference, and emotion pacing as creative tools

Guiding questions:

✨ How do textiles speak when words falter?

✨ What sensory clues like texture, sounds, pressure, repetition, bring calm or focus?

✨ How do we honor neurodivergent perception through design, color, or stitch?

✨ What stories are embedded in how we handle fabric, choose materials, or arrange pattern and order?

✨ How can communal making honor different processing needs and attention rhythms?

Objectives:

✨ Explore tactical and sensory awareness via fabric and thread

✨ Learn 2-3 simple embroidery stitches as grounding tools

✨ Create a small "sensory map” using textures that feel regulating or expressive

✨ Reflect on how repetition and touch can support focus, narrative, self understanding.

📍Event Details

Sunday, February 15, 2026 · 1 - 4 pm

Limited to 10 participants.

$33

Additional Details:

Registration required. Registration closes 24 hours prior to the event.

The registration fee is non-refundable unless the event is canceled by the facilitator.

Parking Information

Shakti in the Mountains Website

✨ Led by Rebecca Tolley

Rebecca L. Tolley is a fiber artist, quilter, and academic librarian who works at the crossroads of craft, care, and neurodivergent magic. She treats textiles like both a spell and a rebellion—stitching together color, story, sensory delight, and a refusal to make anything that behaves too neatly. With a background in studio art and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, her quilts and embroideries draw on Appalachian and queer traditions of making-do, making-beautiful, and making-trouble. Her work celebrates wandering minds, unruly threads, tactile curiosity, and the wisdom that lives in the body.

As an educator, Rebecca builds creative spaces where people feel supported and welcome to explore their curiosity: deep care, good humor, and the freedom to stim, rest, experiment, and come as you are. Her workshops honor neurodivergent rhythms—slow starts, sudden sparks, gentle structure, and collective support—drawing from feminist and DIY punk lineages to show that craft can be both sanctuary and resistance. Students are invited to follow their instincts, break the rules that never served them, and stitch textile worlds that are tender, wild, and wholly their own.

Learn more about Rebecca here.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Shakti in the Mountains