Creating Calm

As part of our 2025/26 school project, students explore the benefits of fibre crafting on their mental health.

Students defined their emotions through conception exercises and expressed them visually by creating felted characters who represent these feelings. They then assessed and evaluated the effect of creative expression on their personal well-being by interviewing each other. To complete the project, the students used AI to animate their characters and to create and produce short animation films.

The project finds its origins in the research on craft psychology and its positive effects on well-being, which lacked evidence for the teenage age group. This project provides a platform to develop a range of positive mental health coping strategies which are appropriate to the interests and needs of teenagers.

Furthermore, we found in our school that well-being and long-term behaviour modification measures based on department recommendations were not sufficient. The techniques we employed did not appropriately and sufficiently relate to the interests and real needs of teenagers.

We are again invited to introduce our project to a European-wide audience as part of the “Wool4Health” and “Therapeutic Knitting” presentations at European Wool Day on the 28th of March 2026.