Special Events

🎨✨ Join us for the 2025 UCI Counseling Center Open House and Art of Healing Showcase. We’re excited to announce our showcase will highlight 17 UCI student artists and how their creativity can shine a spotlight on mental health awareness. 🌈 ⁠
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Show your support for Mental Health Awareness Month by stopping by our Open House and Art of Healing Showcase on May 22nd from 4:30pm-6:00pm.  

https://cglink.me/2eo/r1940096

ALL Friends Helping Friends Workshops are held in the Counseling Center Conference Room (203 Student Services 1 Building). 

Why Make Things? is an experiential workshop series developed to promote handmade crafts as not just hobbies but also as techniques for coping with and participating in life. With embroidery as the medium, each workshop targets a different reason for why making things is beneficial.

• Workshop 1, Stitch to Heal: Addresses making as a technique for managing emotions, promoting authenticity of the self, increasing well-being, and experiencing the flow state. Learn how to answer the question “Why Make Things?” regarding wellness and self-care.  Learn to recognize signs of the stress response and activate the relaxation response, and how making by hand can activate the flow state. We will explore the importance of play in the lives of humans, and how play makes you authentically you.  Participants are invited to consider the act of making by hand as a form of mindfulness and an act of self-care, helping practitioners slow down and be authentically present in the moment.
• Workshop 2, Stitch to Repair: Explores the magnitude and impact of pollution from the fashion industry and introduces sustainable alternatives to fast fashion, including ways to repair and extend the life of clothing.  Explore fast fashion culture, how it began, what sustains it, and its impact on the planet.  Learn how to recognize fast fashion brands what you can do to push back against textile waste.  Stitches taught in this workshop are darning and sashiko, each used to repair and reinforce clothing to lengthen its life and decrease the need for replacements.
• Workshop 3, Stitch to Advocate: Highlights making by hand as a way to advocate for social justice.  Crafting, specifically fiber arts, provides an avenue for people to use their voices to bring awareness to and/or express dissent with issues. It is a way to feel connected with one’s authentic self and to ground oneself in times of chaos, and a way to bring people together and express the strength of their collective voices. Examples of “craftivism” (activism through craft) will be explored, and participants are invited to consider ways to express their voices through the embroidery project associated with this workshop.

Workshops can be requested individually or in a group of any 2 or all 3.  Participants will be provided with materials (embroidery tools including needles, fabric, embroidery floss, embroidery hoops) and instruction on how to use them as well as how to do 1-2 embroidery stitches. Participants are invited to plan and begin work on a simple embroidery design during the workshop, and are expected to continue working on their projects as the workshop is presented.

Intentional time in the workshop is devoted specifically to introducing the materials and teaching the stitches. NO experience is necessary, and students who do not consider themselves creative and/or who have no previous experience with sewing or needlework of any kind are particularly invited to give this a try. We will focus on coping with anxiety and building frustration tolerance, and learn to appreciate mistakes and imperfection in handmade work. Fear and self-consciousness, frustration and self-doubt are crucial parts of learning new things and your experience of these feelings in this context means that you are on the right track!

For more information or to book a workshop, please reach out to Dr. Jessica Eldridge jessica.eldridge@uci.edu.