Handmade Fans: Textile Art, Craft Heritage and Menopause

Unfolding Beauty is a series of handmade textile fans by UK artist Lois Blackburn, exploring the historic craft of fan making through contemporary themes including menopause, mental health, care and bodily comfort.

Fans have existed in many forms around the world since around 3000 BC. Few objects combine function, ceremony, storytelling and decoration as elegantly as the hand fan.

Across cultures, fans have been used for cooling, communication, ritual, status and performance. Today, however, fan making in the UK is listed on the Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts, meaning the traditional skills are at risk of disappearing.

My work explores how this historic craft can still speak to contemporary life.

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Contemporary Fan Making

Since 2021, I have been self-teaching fan making techniques, responding quite literally to my own menopausal hot flushes. Drawing on over 35 years of experience in embroidery and textiles, I began experimenting with ways to transform this everyday object into a hand-crafted artwork.

My fans celebrate and reinterpret historic fan-making traditions from around the world, combining them with contemporary textile practice.

I create:

• Folding fans
• Cocarde fans
• Fixed fans

Using materials including silk, paper, reclaimed textiles and found materials, each fan is carefully folded, stitched, embroidered and decorated by hand.

Every piece is a one-off artwork — intimate, tactile and portable.

Artworks About Care, Bodies and Climate

While fans are practical objects, they also carry stories.

Many of my handmade fans explore themes including:

• menopause and the lived experience of hot flushes
• mental health and emotional wellbeing
• care, resilience and adaptation
• climate, heat and bodily comfort

Through humour, colour and decorative techniques, these works transform a small everyday object into a conversation piece about the body, ageing and survival.

Ultimately, the aim is simple: to bring a little comfort, beauty and joy.

Fan Making Workshops

Fan making is also a wonderful hands-on activity for workshops, community groups, museums and creative events. It is accessible, adaptable and encourages playful experimentation with materials.

I offer fan-making workshops and artist talks for galleries, heritage venues and groups.

If you would like to try making a simple fan yourself, the short demonstration below shows an easy paper folding technique.

(Filmed on a cold winter’s day — hence the gloves!)

What paper will you use?
I’d love to hear how you get on.

Follow the Project

To see more examples of my handmade fans, textile fan artworks and fan-making experiments, and to follow new work in progress, visit my Instagram page. To sign up to my newsletter, or enquire about workshops or exhibitions, please fill in the form below.

Keywords: handmade fans, fan making, textile art fans, embroidery fans, folding fans, contemporary craft, endangered crafts, menopause art, textile workshops.