Woven Into Me: How My Love Affair with Fabric Found Its Way Home

My obsession with handwoven fabric didn’t just appear one day; it was literally woven into me long before I even knew it. In my 20s, I started flying back and forth to Ghana, trying to reconnect with a country my parents had quietly drifted from. After my dad passed when I was 16, that longing to rebuild our roots only grew stronger. But it wasn’t until my 30s, under a warm Ghanaian night sky, that everything began to make sense.

Picture this: me on a balcony with my cousin, talking for hours about family, legacy, and all the stories that never made it across oceans. Then came the plot twist: my dad’s lineage traces back to Yaa Asantewaa (yes, the warrior queen), and my mum’s side hails from northern Ghana, where weaving isn’t just a craft, it’s culture. Suddenly, my deep pull toward handwoven fabric didn’t feel random at all. It was heritage calling me home.

While everyone else was busy swooning over bright kente, I was falling for the raw, earthy rhythm of northern weaves and fabrics that felt alive, textured, ancestral. Long before “weave” hit the fashion spotlight, I wanted to make it seen, celebrated, and worn as proudly as Ankara. Blending these traditional weaves with Western silhouettes became my way of expressing the British Ghanaian experience, a dialogue between two worlds, stitched with identity and pride. So no, my love for weave wasn’t just a style choice. It was a reconnection, a rediscovery of self, one thread at a time.