Thread Ends Studio is an egalitarian, worker-owned textile studio founded by fibre artists Lucianne Canavan,
Lilly Frances Beards, and Caitlin Binks.
Based at Islington Mill, Salford, we brought our individual woven textile practices together in 2023, and formally founded Thread Ends in 2026.
We operate a shared workspace with communal materials, frame looms, rigid heddle looms, table looms, and a computerised dobby floor loom.
The studio serves two primary, interconnected purposes:
Artistic Practice
providing a collaborative creative environment supporting the members’ individual and collaborative textile practices
Community Engagement
using our knowledge and resources to facilitate public workshops focused on community wellbeing and promoting heritage crafts
Lucianne Canavan is a multidisciplinary fibre artist with sustainability, community, activism and wellbeing at the core of her practice. She is a Manchester School of Art graduate, where her final project ‘On The Mend’ combined woven textiles and mending to produce a workshop series proposal for creative wellbeing. Lucianne has continued exploring the relationship between slow stitch and creative and sustainable wellbeing through her studio practice and workshops.
Lilly Frances Beards is a weaver and textile artist whose work utilises industry-waste yarns, bold colour, and the structural logic of the loom to explore identity, technology, narrative, and feeling. After a childhood shaped by the internet and a diagnosis of autism in her early 20s, Lilly began making work drawing a thread between the systems of weaving, computing, and the autistic brain. Each is a tool that finds strength, beauty, and liberation by embracing, and subverting, order and predictability.Caitlin Binks is a fibre artist inspired by her and her peers’ experiences with sexism, discrimination, community and safety. She believes in a strong connection between textiles and making as a community or making for well-being, and is passionate about keeping traditional ‘women’s art’ techniques alive. Her work tends to juxtapose difficult experiences and words alongside the soft, comforting and colourful nature of textiles.