Iris

Iris trained in textile arts before a research trip to a Miao embroidery village rearranged her career: what she had taken for a craft was, in fact, a calendar — of festivals, dye seasons, loom times and feast days. She has been travelling that calendar ever since, building friendships with makers and inheritors most visitors never hear of.

Her journeys are timed to living traditions: the Ice Festival before the queues form, a torch festival in a mountain township, a dye vat steaming in a courtyard workshop. Nothing is bought in a souvenir shop — what you take home, you watched being made, often by hands that let you try.

"A craft is a person, not a product. Sit at their bench for an afternoon and the object you carry home becomes a story you can tell — and the festival around it becomes the reason you will come back."