Emma and Andrew Groves have spent the last 15 years building a creative life in the Lake District. Now Fjällräven has commissioned them to hand-sew its event banners from leftover outdoor gear.
I don’t know about you, but there is an overwhelming urge to escape right now. We keep talking of the Lakes and finding a simpler life among the fells. But we never quite make it. So an email that landed in my inbox this morning reminded me of that dream because two creative people have managed to do it and are making a living out of being in the great outdoors.
They’re Emma Groves and her husband Andrew, and together they run Miscellaneous Adventures from the Lake District. Both come from design and illustration, and they set up their business 15 years ago as something to combine that background with their love of nature. Since then, there’s been branding work, workshops, talks and a lot of time spent outside. Not jealous at all.
It seems brands are noticing their niche, too. Fjällräven commissioned Emma and Andrew to create the signage for its 2026 Classic UK trek. It could no doubt have had some vinyl banners designed and printed in days, but opted instead for a slower, more human-crafted approach. The result is five huge fabric banners, each one cut by hand and stitched on a domestic sewing machine, then hung from a hazel pole among the trees in the Langdales. It’s a great sign (‘scuse the pun) when a giant Swedish outdoor brand bets on the human-made.
The project could hardly suit them better. The Classic is Fjällräven’s multi-day trekking event, and it was the original Swedish one, back in 2011, that helped point Emma and Andrew in this direction. The UK edition takes place each September, covering 50km over three days from Great Langdale to Muncaster, and they’ve had a hand in it since the very first one.
For the banners, the pair worked up the designs together, starting with sketches of the local scenery and simplifying the rivers, valleys, lakes, woodlands and mountains into bold shapes. Emma then turned every shape into a paper template, drew around it on fabric and cut it out by hand. Pins held the larger pieces in place, while the small shapes got “little blobs of glue”. Then she sewed everything using a technique called appliqué, which is a traditional form of needlework where pieces of fabric are stitched to a larger canvas to build up a picture.
The fabric itself comes from a collection of offcuts and donated material that Miscellaneous Adventures has gathered from outdoor brands over the years, and the green is Fjällräven’s own G-1000 – its cornerstone material. It’s pretty special that an old jacket or pair of hiking trousers becomes a flag for the start and finish lines of a major outdoor event.
But they weren’t as easy to create as they look. “I’m using a domestic sewing machine in a relatively small space,” Emma explains in their film about the project, “so fitting everything through the machine without getting in a tangle was quite a mission.”
Once the banners were up, Emma and Andrew took part in the three-day trek. In fact, they were the event’s ‘Nature Guides’ – there to help a couple of hundred hikers from all over the world connect with the landscape as they walked. They even handed out a nature bingo card listing eight species of wildlife to spot, with completed cards going into a prize draw. The idea is that you connect with nature by simply noticing what’s around you. If that sounds like something you’d love to experience, Miscellaneous Adventures has a Noticing Nature Slow Adventure workshop in the Lake District on 24 October.
What I mostly take from this story isn’t the reminder of where I’d love to live some day; it’s the continued reassurance that brands as big as Fjällräven are hiring humans to create something with craft. In Emma and Andrew’s newsletter, the couple thank Richard Smith from Fjällräven for “trusting in creativity and the handmade to inspire”. As Emma says, “It really was a dream project that combined our love of nature, creativity and adventure. To create something that reflects that was a great joy.”
Alongside Fjällräven, the pair have also been running workshops with Japanese brand Montbell. It seems they’ve hit on something that works both ways. They’ve chosen a life they dreamed of and simultaneously made themselves known as the go-to outdoor creative duo for these sorts of projects. I’m really happy for them. Honestly. Now I just have to figure out how to run Creative Boom from Ambleside, and all will be well.
