Madlug project
We are passionate about providing industry partnerships for our creative textiles programme for care experienced children and couldn’t imagine a better partner than Madlug. Madlug are on a mission to eradicate bin bags being used as luggage from foster children lives. Hundreds of children every day in the UK are forced to pack all their belongings into bin bags when moving home.
This un-dignifying process can often result in children’s belongings being lost of mistaken for rubbish in what is already traumatic situation. Madlug are determinded to change this, for every single back pack they sell they donate a piece of luggage to a child in care and have donated over 130 000 luggage bags so far.
The children started the project by interviewing Dave Linton the Madlug founder online. What a inspiration he was, speaking with such candid humility about his own childhood and why he is driven to bring an end to foster children being being given bin bags to move home. For most students it was the first time they had interviewed a business person and Dave created so much space for them to build confidence and find their voice as they asked questions like ‘were you a foster child?’ ‘did you go to uni?’
The creative process began! Students were tasked to create a digital embroidered badge with the theme of ‘belonging’ imagining a child as their client who is experiencing transition such as moving home, starting a new club, joining a new school. They experimented and developed ideas in their sketchbooks.
Then the initial designs were developed into tech friendly designs, simplified with scale and colour considered.
The students then created their digital embroidered designs on the Janome Memory craft 550E with the technical support of the Janome team who kindly digitised the children’s designs.
Students learnt how to thread the machine trouble shoot if needles break and fix these issues. Once the badges were complete students would cut the badge out place and hand sew onto their Madlug rucksack.
The project ended with a online presentation to Dave where students showed Dave their final products, spoke about their development work. and exhe has made such a lasting impression on the students and not a week goes by without them talking about him and it was great for the students to experience a hypothetical situation of designing for a brand like Madlug.
Students confidence with public speaking grew throughout the interview and hear are some of the questions to Dave:
“How do you chose who gets the bags?” We send them to social workers and foster carers direct. We work with charities, west Midlands police and foster parents can reach out to us.
“When will you sell abroad?” Our mission is to eradicate care experienced children in the UK ever moving home with a bin bag so until that happens we wont go abroad, the number of times foster children move home is around 40-50 000 a year so untill we reach those numbers we wont be looking to go abroad although it is a global issue.
“Do children in homes get them (residential homes)?” YES absolutely!
It was such an honour to work with Madlug and Dave Linton, Virtual School Derby and Janome on this project to be ambitious with the students about their creative outcomes but as always the best part about any creative project with care experienced children is the lasting realtionships they create with each other.
None of this would have been possible without the support of the following partners:
Virtual school team Derby, for trusting and providing space and resources to bring these ideas and partnerships to life.
Janome and their technical team for donating digtial expertise, threads and equipment to make the badges- what a experience for the children to digitse their own designs.
Our amazing sewing volunteers Jo, Heather and Hannah none of this would be possible with out you your patience is priceless!
Madlug team, Nicola, Chris and Dave thank you all so much for your generosity of time and expertise.
Matt Ball photography for gifting your time and skills to capture these moments so beautifully.
If you are a textiles based business interested in partnering with our education programmes focussed on increasing childrens accesibilty to the arts please contact us here.
