Celia Burns
Celia Burns was born in Somerset. She taught machine knitting at Silai for 12 years. In 2002 Celia went to Bolivia to teach women how to machine knit, with an organisation called CLEM (Community of Freedom and Hope for Women), which was set up by women to enable them to make a livelihood.
"I met somebody and we decided we'd run a shop selling machine knitting yarn, because we were both into machine knitting and so we ran a shop for quite a few years. We started off in what had been a department store at the bottom of Totterdown, which was then bought and let as small units. So we started off in there and then found shop premises in Broadwalk, and then when there was a downturn in the market for wool, haberdashery, machine knitting and everything else we managed to sell the shop. I did a few little funny things after that, I've always done various things, I used to do fabric printing, teaching fabric printing and machine knitting down in Folk House. Then Aroona, whose mother-in-law used to come up with her to the shop, said they had the sewing skills and they wanted the knitting skills, so I was lucky enough to get the job.
That came about because we had a Methodist minister called Maggie Stringer who came to see us to see how Silai worked as we were an all women's organisation with hands on skills. She saw the knitting machines and thought it would be good for the women of CLEM to learn to knit. So, I was able to get some machines that were donated to us and we carried the machines with us. We took out the machines, we took out the yarn. I noticed that these women had a light in their eyes, they were alive, because they had a project and they could actually earn a little bit of money, they had a purpose."
