Celebrating Craft and New Opportunities at Craft Festival Wales

From 11–13 September 2026, Craft Festival Wales returned to Cardigan Castle, bringing together makers, artists and audiences for a weekend celebrating creativity, craft and community.

For the second year, QEST was proud to work alongside Craft Festival Wales and prison education providers Novus Gower and Novus Cambria, supporting prison learners to explore craft as a pathway into creative careers.

A key part of the programme was a series of creative education workshops led by QEST alumna Justyna Medon for learners at HMP Parc in Bridgend. Justyna introduced learners to stencilling, block printing and pattern making, while also exploring the potential of craft as a form of enterprise. Through hands-on experimentation, learners developed their own ideas and created a collection of work inspired by themes of Welsh heritage, landscape and identity.

The workshops provided an opportunity to learn directly from a practising maker and gain an insight into the skills, processes and possibilities involved in developing a creative career.

At Craft Festival Wales, the resulting work was brought together as an exhibition at Cardigan Castle. The display included lampshades and fabric samples created during the workshops, alongside sketchbook samples and printing blocks used by the learners.

Exhibiting the learners’ work at Craft Festival Wales created an important opportunity to celebrate their creativity and share it with a wider audience. For the learners, the journey from experimenting with new techniques in the workshop to seeing their work presented in a public exhibition was an important achievement.