Sat 30th May 2026

This year we will be celebrating the achievements of two Dorset women working in the world of natural Fibre, one an ethnobotanist and one a knitwear designer and also a weaver from Devon.

 

Anna Lewington founded RushWorks in 2006 in order to revive and pass on the knowledge and crafts of rush cutting and rush work as practised historically along the River Stour in north Dorset. Keen to reconnect people with useful plants and traditional skills, RushWorks was first set up as a community project involving local people and children @goldhillorganicfarm in Child Okeford. Focussing mainly on basketry today, Anna cuts rushes every year from the Stour and holds workshops on request at her studio in Sturminster Newton.

 

Anna is an ethnobotanist, her passion for plants and people developed as a postgraduate student at St Andrews University, studying Amerindian languages and culture and focussing on the botanical knowledge of an Amerindian group in Peru.  She went on to survey medicinal plants in Ecuador and visit communities in Chile and Brazil whose knowledge of local plants has shaped their lives. As a result, Anna was invited by Kew to write ‘Plants For People’, a study of the ways in which products from plants support our modern daily lives. First published in 1990 and then revised and reprinted in 2003, Tim Smit described the book as ‘a complete inspiration to the Eden Project’.

 

Dividing her time between rush work and research, Anna has written a number of other books including ‘The Plant People’(2022), a children's adventure story, and most recently  ‘Birch’, about the uses and wider cultural significance of birch trees.

Anna is keen to reconnect people with useful plants and traditional skills.

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Sarah Burnett cut her fashion teeth in the early 1960s, first working for Biba and then Ossie Clark. She moved to Dorset in 1972 and in the 40 years from 1976 to 2016, together with her team of local handknitters, designed and made some of the best known quality knitwear in Great Britain under the name of The Natural Dye Company. Her workshop was a converted cowshed in the farmyard at Dovecote, Stanbridge, Wimborne. 

 

Silk, wool and cashmere yarn, spun specially for her in Yorkshire, was dyed by Sarah, using only natural dyes. The Crafts Council toured a UK retrospective exhibition of her work in 1989. A year later she wrote Passion For Colour, Designer Knitting with Natural Dyes. Her knitwear is avidly collected by her many admirers. Thanks to the variations in the natural dyes, each piece is unique.

Sarah moved in 2022, and now lives on a small farm in the beautiful Marshwood Vale, West Dorset.

 

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We will also be joined by Ali Spindler, a weaver from Devon. 

Some years after studying law Ali gained a PhD in Constructed Textiles and Apparel. In January she co-founded Waeve and is planning to set up a dye plant growing enterprise to provide sufficient natural dyes for the 6,000 tons or so of wool that is processed.