Discover more about the RSN and find out why we’ve been the international centre of excellence for the Art of Hand Embroidery for more than 150 years. We’ll also introduce you to key guest speakers in our engaging live talks.
Easily accessed via Zoom, all of our talks are embellished by captivating images and are followed by live Q&A sessions.
| Please read the important information at the end of this page before booking a talk. Thank you. |
A Royal Victorian Christmas
Royal Collection Trust, Curator of Paintings, Lucy Peter.
Wednesday 10 December 2025, 7pm UK
Join us this festive season as we delve into stories of how Christmas was celebrated during the reign of Queen Victoria.
From family traditions to some of the delightful gifts that still remain within the Royal Collection, the details of a Victorian Christmas will be brought to life by Royal Collection Trust, Curator of Paintings, Lucy Peter.
Image © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust
With Gold Embroidered Gorgeously: The Greensleeves Project
Historians, Tamsin Lewis and Bernadette Banner.
Wednesday 14 January 2026, 7pm UK
Almost 450 years after the song first caught the attention of the Elizabethan public, the Greensleeves Project has brought historians, musicians and makers together to ask:
who was Greensleeves – and what might she have worn?
Join historian and musician, Tamsin Lewis and fashion historian and YouTuber, Bernadette Banner to find out more about this fascinating project which reconstructs and records the gifts given to My Lady Greensleeves.
The earliest surviving text of Greensleeves dates from 1584. It’s a long song, with 18 verses, written in a somewhat stalker-like fashion, by a man who showers his would-be beloved with gifts, including many items of clothing and accessories. Greensleeves’s gifts document not only the clothes of the 1580s but also the fabrics, embroidery, and many other aspects of material culture.
The extraordinary wealth of evidence contained in the song has formed the basis of this ambitious reconstruction of sixteenth century dress, which is supported by the Society of Antiquaries. The reconstructed items of dress have been made by a team of established historians and practitioners, each taking responsibility for one or two pieces.
Mending as Embroidery: A history of beautiful stitch repair
Cultural and Dress Historian, Kate Sekules
Wednesday 28 January 2026, 7pm UK
One of the most creative embroidery formats is the practical kind that also preserves valuable or sentimental cloth. Visible mending is a modern trend but has a hidden history as long as that of textile itself.
Mending scholar, author, and teacher Kate Sekules explores forgotten pathways of repair from the neolithic to the Iron Age and into the future. Meet Kate to find out more about this timeless and fascinating subject.
Kate researches and teaches mending as an academic and practical discipline. She is completing her doctoral dissertation, A History and Theory of Mending at Bard Graduate Center, NYC. She is assistant professor of fashion history at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and of “Mending Fashion” at Parsons School of Design (BA) and BGC (MA).
Kate has presented research at over two dozen symposia internationally, lectures widely and runs frequent events and repair clinics. She is author of MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto (Penguin, 2020).
Image credit: Sara Kerens
Stitching in the City: A History of Lace in New York
Lace and Textile Historian, Elena Kanagy-Loux
Wednesday 11 February 2026, 7pm UK
New York City may not be front of mind when considering the history of lace and needlework, and yet, it was home to multiple little-known lacemaking initiatives over several centuries.
Join Elena as she surveys four centuries of history of lace production and consumption in New York City, up to the present-day revival in the popularity of lacemaking amongst fibre artists and hobbyists.
From the arrival of the first colonists on the ancestral land of the Lenape, Dutch merchants offered imported laces for sale, and English settlers brought their bobbin lace tradition to the Northeast.
Waves of immigrants to New York city brought a diverse range of lace techniques with them, and lace schools were established alongside decentralized and often exploitative cottage industries in the tenements to harness their skills. As the popularity of antique lace collecting grew amongst the Gilded Age elite, so too did the number of philanthropic industries training impoverished women and girls to earn a living through lacemaking, and retail establishments opened in the city to sell both antique and new laces.
Image credit: Rose Callahan
Exploring 17th-Century Embroidered Boxes
RSN Curator of Textiles, Dr Isabella Rosner
Wednesday 25 March 2026, 7pm UK
Toward the end of their needlework education, many well-off girls in circa 1650-1700 England embroidered tabletop boxes called cabinets or caskets. These boxes held everything from sewing and writing supplies, to gems and jewellery, to tiny treasures in secret compartments.
Embroidered boxes are informative, thought-provoking tools through which to understand girls’ embroidery education and spaces of ownership.
In this lecture Dr Isabella Rosner will survey the history of these early modern caskets and cabinets, focusing on the variety of extant boxes, their compositions, and how they served as instruments of ownership, privacy, and agency for their makers and owners.
Isabella will also reveal embroidered casket panels from the RSN’s own collection.
Image credit: Cabinet with personifications of the Five Senses, 17th century, The Met Collection
Important Booking Information
Please note that these Talks are live online events and are not available to watch immediately afterwards. If you cannot watch the live event — or if you want to watch again in the future — some of our talks are re-released at a later date On Demand. Please note that there is a separate fee for Talks on Demand.
Bookings for live RSN Online Talks close at 3pm on the day of the event and are NON-REFUNDABLE. After booking, you will receive your unique Zoom invite by email 24-48 hours before each event (3 hours if booked on the day). The invite should arrive ‘from’ [email protected] – we strongly recommend that you add this address to your ‘Safe Senders’ list to ensure safe receipt.
If you do not receive your invite by the above deadline please first check your ‘junk/spam’ mail folder to ensure it hasn’t been routed there by mistake. If you still do not have the invite, please email [email protected] no later than one hour before the event is due to start. Please include your order reference number.
Each place booking and subsequent Zoom link is unique to ONE customer and ONE device only. If you wish to book multiple places on behalf of additional attendees please provide the name AND email address of any additional attendees in the ‘Additional information’ section of your order at checkout.
All RSN Live Online Talks are scheduled and advertised in UK local time (GMT or BST depending on the time of year). If you are outside of the UK please check your local time, particularly if your location changes to/from Daylight Savings Time on a different schedule to the UK during March/April or October/November. To check and convert times please visit TimeAndDate.com.
All RSN webinars include live Closed Captioning (subtitles). These can be disabled if not required.
If you require additional assistance, please refer to our FAQ page. Thank you.
Missed a previous Talk?