I’m Twig, a textile designer and handweaver working with natural dyes and heritage craft. My practice, Wyrd & Wyld, has grown from a fascination with the stories held within landscapes and the materials that come from them. Drawing folklore from the UK and the changing seasons, I create woven textiles that are rooted in place and tell a story that maybe went unheard for a long time.

I always begins outdoors, gathering and using local forage as my dye palette. This allows the land and seasons to shape the colours of my work. Rather than seeing this experimentation and variation as something to control, I truly value it as part of my process and it imparts a small record of a particular time and place.

Folklore very much sits at the heart of my work. I’m particularly interested in the strange stories that have travelled through many areas and generations: black dogs wandering old roads, witches that take the form of hares, spirits haunting farms and homes, fairies that sleep beneath the hills and other fragments of folk belief. Through weave, I interpret these stories in colour, pattern, structures and texture. Traditional and contemporary weaving techniques sit alongside one another within my practice, including double cloth, Welsh tapestry and network drafting. The result is a cloth this draws from textile heritage instead of recreating it.

I graduated from the Texile Design course at Falmouth University in 2026, specialising in woven textiles and natural dyeing. My graduate practice brought together these two interests in my projects: a Library in Thread and the Dyer and the Herbalist. They explore folklore, natural colour, wool and heritage weaving all through contemporary design. My work has since recieved recognition by Sanderson at New Designers 2026 and for the John Miles Legacy prize through Tex+ 2026.

Wyrd & Wyld is the beginning of my new chapter: a practice centered around storytelling, preservation and the reinterpretation of heritage craft.

The land remembers.
The stories remain.
I weave to honour both.

 
Copyright 2026 © Twig Searle