Made by Women

Made by Women was the project that first laid the foundations for what would become Common Threads Press from 2019-2021.

I (Laura Moseley) began Made by Women as a zine series celebrating women artists and creative practitioners whose work and lives had been overlooked or underrepresented in dominant art histories. Each zine focused on a woman from the past, bringing her story into conversation with the work of a contemporary woman artist. Through illustration and writing, the series offered an accessible and collaborative way of encountering women’s histories, while also asking how those histories might be revisited and reimagined from a contemporary feminist perspective.

The zines were deliberately small and affordable, designed to function as both publications and objects. Each A6 zine was printed on white card and housed within a card case, creating a collected set that could be handled, shared and displayed. 

I ran Made by Women for around a year, during which time the project developed an audience online and began to establish relationships with cultural institutions and booksellers. Its first stockist was Tate Modern, which was an important early indication that there was an appetite for small-scale, independently produced publications that approached art history through a feminist and contemporary lens.

Following this first year, I began to think more broadly about the role of independent publishing in recovering overlooked histories. The project gradually pivoted away from focusing specifically on women artists and towards craft histories, material practices and the political and social histories embedded within making. This became the basis for Common Threads Press, which I subsequently established as an independent publishing project focused on craft, community and activism.

In this sense, Made by Women was the precursor to Common Threads Press: it established many of the principles that continue to underpin the press — using accessible publishing formats to bring marginalised histories to wider audiences, connecting historical research with contemporary creative practice, and treating publishing itself as a space for feminist, collaborative and critical cultural work.

As the project developed, Made by Women expanded beyond individual artist biographies to explore wider and often overlooked histories of women in art and design. This included publications focusing on LGBTQ+ women in art history and women of the Bauhaus school.

Made by Women's final publication under that name was titled Women Artists at Home: Extraordinary Stories of Women Artists and Their Homes, that was a fundraiser supporting Solace Women’s Aid’s #StaySafeAtHome campaign, an emergency appeal to support women experiencing domestic abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The project would not have been possible without the generosity and enthusiasm of the many illustrators, writers, artists, collaborators and stockists who supported Made by Women in its early years. I am particularly grateful to everyone who contributed their time, creativity and ideas, and to the independent shops, galleries and institutions that took a chance on the project and helped it reach new audiences. The support of these early collaborators — including our first stockist, Tate Modern — gave the project a life beyond its initial conception and provided the foundations for what would eventually become Common Threads Press.