A short summary of your project

We're raising £5,000 to fund research about how crafting can benefit wellbeing! We want to know how and why craft can help people maintain or improve their wellbeing, and develop resources to help people get started. 

Who are you?

Emma is a Psychologist in the Centre for Innovation in Mental Health, University of Southampton, and spends some of her time researching wellbeing and creativity, as well as lecturing in Mental Health.

Anne is a Psychologist in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, and she spends some of her time researching wellbeing and yarn crafts, as well as lecturing in Translational Health Sciences.

Emma and Anne started researching crafting and wellbeing together in 2018 as part of the Yarnfulness Project .

Your story

Recently, there have been multiple media reports suggesting positive benefits of yarn-based activities. Crafts such as knitting and crochet have been said to promote good mental health and wellbeing, leading to comparisons with mindfulness and meditation, which have shown similar benefits. Some people think these creative activities could even be used to improve well-being and mental health – and could be recommended by medical professionals as part of the “social prescribing” of creative activities. We need more research and evidence to support these suggestions.

• Pilot work we have already conducted indicates it is relatively easy to recruit participants to these studies, but keeping participants involved in studies over time is really difficult.
• Research is also often skewed towards older female participants. We would like to conduct research to better understand knitting and crochet over time and their effects on wellbeing. We would like to recruit a more diverse sample of individuals and retain more participants in longitudinal studies. This will support both staff and student research projects.

Where will the money go?

To achieve our goals, we would like to crowdfund financial support for:

• study advertising online
• online study hosting
• participant payment

If we hit our target we would also spend money on

• data analysis
• open access publishing, to ensure our results are accessible to members of the public.

Rewards

• In return, we have developed patterns that will be available for backers!
• We will include all the names of backers on our public engagement website, and link to this acknowledgment in our publications where possible

Images and video

Find us here

Instagram

Website

Help us succeed!

• You don't need to give money to help us succeed! Please share this project with anyone you think would support us – on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, by email, telephone, in a chat over the fence or on your blog.
• In fact, share it with everyone you know as we think it's a great idea, and the more people who know about it, the more likely we are to make this research happen.
• And we know we said you don't need to give money to help us, but we'd love it if you did! Please sponsor us and help make this happen.