If so, please join #TheFlaxMap and Facebook discussion group. It’s open to anyone growing flax or hemp in the U.K. or Republic of Ireland.

There are now a number of growers helping revive and reshore this industry and I set up the map last summer during phase 1 of the #HomegrownHomespun project so we could share, rather than duplicate the same research and resources. With preparations for the British Textile Biennial, the map had to go on a back burner for a few months but now, as our seedlings germinate, it feels like the right time to restart the conversation.

If you’re open to working together with other like-minded linen revivers please join The Flax Map discussion group with the following details so I can add your listing to the map:-

• Your/Project/Co Name
• What textile fibre crop you are growing and how much
• Whether you’re growing for a) personal use, b) a community project, c) academic research or d) as a commercial enterprise
• Location (postcode or town)

The post The Flax Map appeared first on Northern England Fibreshed.

A lot has happened since August 13th when a group of around 30 volunteers came to Higher Audley St in Blackburn to help pull and lay out our flax. It now feels like years ago but with 2022 looming, this seems the perfect time to remember the field to fabric stage of the Homegrown Homespun project.

On harvest day, we were live on Radio Lancashire and also had a brilliant time with BBC Radio 4’s Heather Simons and Ian Marchant recording ‘A Fabric Landscape’ – a programme dedicated to the Homegrown Homespun project which is available to listen to online.

Ian had previously discovered a diary from a 17th Century ancestor who worked in the linen industry, so had a special interest in our quest to reintroduce this heritage crop. He had a go at extracting woad pigment, breaking scutching and hackling some plants into fibre and especially enjoyed fashioning and modelling his own flaxen haired wig!

From Seed to Sewing Bee

Meanwhile, I managed to coax Patrick into a pair of marigolds to try some natural fabric dyeing after explaining a vision I’d had of him wearing a homegrown, hand-dyed hankie and us perhaps one day spotting him on TV with a little piece of our Blackburn indigo. I imagined our team would share a smile remembering the day we all stood in a field and mashed leaves into cloth together during our first ever harvest. As mentioned previously, I knew our woad crop had mostly failed but wanted to use what we had to share the fun of natural dyeing. It’s all too easy to write off disappointments as failures, missing other opportunities, so I bought some British peace silk and asked my mum (who loves hand stitching!) to roll the hems on 3 pocket squares/hankies. We used the fresh leaf salt rub dyeing method and discovered the unique shade of Blackburn Woad.

N.B. The fresh leaf salt rub method creates a teal rather than classic indigo blue due to other pigments such as chlorophyll and indirubin present in Woad leaves prior to extraction.

I subsequently hand embroidered each with the impromptu HH logo that emerged when dyeing aprons for our workshops and each project partner’s name, using indigo dyed thread, hurriedly posted his off to him in his 10 week filming bubble and sure enough, my vision was manifest – he wore it during the Great British Sewing Bee Christmas Special which aired on BBC 1 last week and we all tuned in and remembered standing in a field in Blackburn, mashing woad leaves into silk together during our first ever harvest.

Extracting Fibre and Dye

In the 10 weeks between harvest and the end of October when we were to showcase our results, we accomplished what we’ve since realised was a astonishing feat. Learning on the job, we discovered that flax farmers usually overwinter their crops to dry thoroughly following a 2-6 weeks retting, yet we had only 10 weeks to complete the entire plant to cloth process. Herein lay our compromise and challenge. We were advocating regenerative, slow fashion and textiles, yet had a great opportunity to raise awareness of these ideals by rushing to meet the exciting deadline of the British Textile Biennial – which we did, with a few edits and sleepless nights!

Retting was the first stage and it became evident that this is one of the crucial keys and skills (we didn’t yet have!) to a successful fibre crop. There was a panic due to large variances in our stem thicknesses, causing some stems to have rotten after just 2 weeks. We were advised to stook (see above) the entire crop and get it undercover. Better to be under retted than over! Our 5kg of seed yielded 96 stooks – a few of which were sent to Simon at Flaxland for processing. The rest are being stored and will go towards the stock needed for our 2023 upscale.

In addition to extracting fibre, I also needed to release the mystical blue dye from within our woad and Japanese indigo plants and it was great sharing this magical process with our volunteers.

Growing Slow Textiles

I can’t fully verbalise to those who haven’t experienced indigo pigment extraction and dyeing, just how miraculous it feels to see blue appear on fabric or yarn from green leaves you’ve grown yourself. What I can do is offer you a chance to share the experience with me next year as I’ll be guiding a group through a 9 month ‘Growing Slow Textiles’ holistic immersion into flax and indigo. Details to follow but for now, if you click the link, you can join a holding page on Instagram where I’ll announce it soon.

British Textile Biennial

On an incredibly tight schedule, coordinating a team in various parts of the country, our flax plants were hand-spun in time for the start of the month long British Textile Biennial last October. This took Carole Bowman (weft) and Amanda Hannaford (warp) about 70 hours over 3 weeks.

The weft yarn had arrived the day before it was due to be dyed, so got a swift but vigorous double scouring as I prepared materials for the workshop. I don’t think anyone realised as they were all enjoying indigo dyeing wrapping cloths but my face dropped when the HH weft came out of the vat! It was changing colour only slightly – a lot less than usual. It evidently hadn’t scoured enough – had it been under retted so still clinging to some of its lignins and pectins? I spent another day after the workshop re-scouring and dyeing so it was just right for the weavers to start the following Wednesday.

Weaving Warp and Weft

We’d amended from an adult pair of jeans, to toddler sized dungarees based on the time our spinners could allocate, yet once the weaving started new challenges presented themselves. Even with a £15K state-of-the-art loom kindly provided on loan by MMU and two of the best weavers in the country, Kirsty McDougall and Sally Holditch, it proved incredibly difficult to weave with our homegrown, hand spun linen warp. I’m not a weaver and the terminology baffles me but words I do understand like ‘sticky’ ‘fluffy’ and ‘tangled’ were used a lot – along with some expletives! However, the ‘ends per inch’ were adjusted, prayers and incantations uttered and by some miracle of talent and persistence, cloth was woven.

Brave Beetling

A decision then had to be made whether to risk subjecting this fragile cloth to the vigorous beetling process which in this case would involve dampening, then pressing and rolling with a pipe or wooden rolling pin. This transforms ‘loom state’ warp and weft into a coherent, draping cloth. Opinions were divided – so we went for it! How else would we know the cloth’s potential?

Our Historic Cloth

Having thought we’d developed a unique, hand spun cloth, we were stunned to discover a newly published book ‘Jeans Before Blue Jeans’ by Marzia Cataldi Gallo showing an almost exact version of our denim on the front cover. This caused us to pause for thought about the significance of what we’ve made and reconsider cutting into it.

Denim consultant, historian and lecturer at Central St. Martins and the Royal College of Art, Mohsin Sajid commented, “this is a watershed moment in the industry. I believe you are the first to home-grow indigo linen denim, at least since Levi’s introduced synthetic indigo in 1897, if not longer, so you should be really proud. You’ve proved the concept and raised so much awareness about how hard these processes were and how much we take fabric for granted.”

Despite one of the purposes of Homegrown Homespun being to eventually bring indigo linen jeans to market, we decided to let the uncut material speak for itself. Patrick requested I embroider the outline of a trouser leg pattern to indicate our intent and acknowledge how far we got in our original quest.

The cloth is being exhibited in Blackburn Museum until 16th January 2021, so if you can, go along and see it.

Spreading the Word

I’ve been asked to speak about my work on the HH project quite a bit lately so am including links to catch-ups. I was interviewed in episode 4 of Amber Butchart’s ‘Cloth Cultures’ podcast about linen and was then part of the Making Matters x Levi’s Digital & British Council panel discussion she subsequently hosted at Blackburn Cathedral. I took part in the (unrecorded) Fashion Open Studio COP 26 event, ‘Renaturing Fashion’ and the RSA’s ‘The Evolution of Fashion’.

I’ve also been a guest speaker and lecturer at Tauheedul Islamic Girl’s School, Blackburn College, Liverpool John Moore’s University and Edge Hill University’s Sustainability Festival.

Making Provenance Fashionable

So, to summarise this first 2021 phase, the Homegrown Homespun indigo linen denim is 100% made in England with the blue weft yarn being the produce of our first flax and woad harvest this year in Lancashire. Our deliberately ambitious plan to grow an entire pair of jeans sought to expose the difficulties of working ethically and sustainably in a country with no facilities to process its native arable textile crops. 

To highlight the fashion industry’s huge potential to sequester carbon from our over-heated atmosphere back into our depleted soil, a team of experts and volunteers worked entirely by hand; growing, spinning, naturally dyeing and weaving the way our ancestors did. We sought to prioritise the regeneration of our local environment and the people who rely upon it, so willingly adapted and amended our outcome to reflect the many lessons that coming back into balance with the ecosystem offers humanity. 

The shift in human behaviour needed to evolve from being an extractor species to a restorer species means the fashion industry must also shift from selling products regardless of their provenance, to instead making ethical, regenerative processes fashionable. As Fibershed help launch #MakeTheLabelCount we see the emphasis shifting away from the veneer of a deceptive product advertising campaign to purchasing decisions based on supply chain transparency.

We believe this cloth epitomises the beautiful struggle of all those involved who are committed to ‘being the change’. The love and hopes of so many are woven into this humble fabric and the task now begins to create the midscale facilities required to upscale to full production via Community Clothing in time for the 2023 British Textile Biennial. 

The post Homegrown Homespun: Field to Fabric appeared first on Northern England Fibreshed.

Seed to Harvest

It’s just over 100 days since we planted our flax and woad seeds at the Homegrown Homespun project in Blackburn and we’re approaching our first harvest. Although we’re just entering a new phase in this ‘farm to fashion’ process, it feels like a good time to document the life cycles of these plants, the challenges we’ve encountered and how we’ve responded to this experiential learning so far.

We entered into this project knowing we faced key obstacles; a lack of linen processing facilities in the U.K., natural dyeing being predominantly at an artisan level so limiting its use commercially, and how to implement carbon farming principals as novices.

We were deliberately ambitious by aspiring to grow a pair of jeans so we could honestly document our successes and learning opportunities (what some may call ‘failures’!) By doing so, we hope to raise awareness of socially and environmentally harmful economic and political systems that make it cheap and easy to produce fossil fashion but expensive and difficult to make ethical, sustainable clothing.

Our flax crops at both Blackburn and Monkley Ghyll Farm have been a delight to witness through their short lifespan. Planted without any chemical inputs, with just a plough, a vintage seed drill, people power and no watering, flax really lives up to its name Linum usitatissimum – meaning most useful, and we could add resilient and low maintenance.

Our ancestors were old friends with flax. Grown since time immemorial, yet since forgotten by the U.K. as a commercial crop, this is a sort of homecoming for the plant allies generations before us relied upon for clothing. As with the pre-industrial textile crafts we shared in workshops during the summer half term, witnessing the growth of these heritage crops invoked a different era; a time when people had more time.

Flowering Flax Meditation

In light of this week’s IPCC report into climate breakdown, the planet urgently needs humanity to slow down it’s lifestyle, consumption and use of fossil fuels. Regenerative fashion is not the latest greenwash trend to perpetuate economic growth. These agricultural principals come from indigenous wisdom and require slow, nuanced, emotionally literate, systemic change. This will take time.

For this reason, and so we could fully appreciate the beauty of our crop, I put my yoga teacher’s hat on and offered a flax meditation in the field at Blackburn, on a gloriously sunny morning as the plants were reaching full bloom. We watched and listened to the crop dance on the breeze, looked closely at the delicate flowers and strong stems, then did a simple breath awareness exercise. We breathed their breath, they breathed ours and so we were connected. In July, the flax grew from ankle to waist high, flowered, formed seed bolls, then quickly began its decline so it was lovely to tune in more deeply with this transient process and take a pause from the undercurrent of climate and pandemic anxiety so many of us are feeling.

Our Humble Blue

The Blackburn woad crop on the other hand, has failed and I’m deliberately using that triggering word even though it’s not really true. Had we been growing for commercial purposes and the crop hadn’t produced the required profit on demand, it could be deemed a failure. However, we’re attempting to pioneer a regenerative ‘parallel structure’ where, as the Earth Logic plan recommends, we ‘put earth first’ within a currently broken system and are growing for educational purposes in this prototype year. We will of course need to make this project commercially viable if we’re to fulfil our aim to see an HH garment sold via Community Clothing by 2023 but for now, our lack of plants offers some great lessons that expose topical issues around herbicide and pesticide usage in agriculture. In the photo above, the grass we’re sitting on is where our woad plants should be!

In Blackburn, our seed broadcasting method wasn’t well suited to large woad silicules but in the absence of an agricultural scale drill, we improvised! Our ‘bucket on wheels’ relied upon the seeds being rolled into the ploughed land before wind and birds could get to them but our contractor arrived three days late.

In addition, it transpired that our commercial woad growing advisor used glyphosate herbicide to prepare his fields prior to planting and with only 1% of the world’s farmers being organic, he’s of course not alone. Glyphosate (a probable carcinogen) is used by the majority of farmers worldwide to increase yields and transitioning away from the easier option of chemical inputs is for many, a challenge requiring knowledge of ‘the old ways’ – indigenous farming techniques that have inspired organic, permaculture and regenerative principals.

Having observed the slow germination (also due to a later/colder than usual spring) I adopted my allotment method of woad growing and transplanted some seedlings to Blackburn, so between our two sites we have enough to dye a garment as planned and will consider alternative planting and weed suppressing ideas for next season.

A Year to the Day

As we harvest both Blackburn crops this Friday, it will be almost exactly a year to the day that I shared this pictorial stream of consciousness (right) with Patrick! He had phoned the week before agreeing to a collaboration and thanks to a newly found drawing feature on my iPad, I was able to order my excited explosion of thoughts visually. I’d tentatively suggested we produce an indigo linen mending kit and he’d boldly countered that by suggesting indigo linen jeans.

I’ve been reluctant to share these musings as I later discovered that a certain political party was appropriating the word ‘indigenous’ for it’s own offensive purposes. Yet, I stand by the true essence of this word so want to share this seed of an idea that grew with Patrick and Laurie’s considerable help, into Homegrown Homespun.

Honouring Indigenous Wisdom

Fibershed understand and do great work raising awareness of the intersectionality of the environmental crisis which is inextricably linked to racial and gender bias. Founder Rebecca Burgess emphasises that Fibershed is a lot about building better relationships, both with each other via shorter supply chains and with the Earth by respectfully using only natural materials.

In the US, the presence of indigenous culture is more evident than here in the U.K. and many regions are renaming places by their pre-colonial names. This article expands upon the deep care, wisdom and intimacy with the natural environment that native land stewards have kept alive and that we now see filtering through Westernised concepts like regenerative agriculture.

Indigenous cultures make up just 5% of the world’s population yet protect more than 80% of global biodiversity – National Geographic

It’s harder to define indigeneity in this country, unless we discuss our pre-Christian, pagan culture eliminated during the Witch Trials, especially since this country then proceeded to eliminate so much of the world’s other indigenous cultures but this is a tangent beyond this post’s remit. However, common to all these philosophies is reverence for nature, so if we’re to truly implement place-based, regenerative manufacturing systems we must also drop the hierarchical, linear concept of humanity’s superiority over it’s life support system and restore a circular, holistic relationship with all forms of life.

So, instead of dictating our demands upon nature with an extractive mentality, we are responding to our environment and its lessons with the HUMility of HUMans who need to remember their place in the ecosystem. Just as the etymology of these words comes from HUMUS – soil – so we need to come home to ourselves and come back down to Earth. We need to become indigenous.

Harvest – Friday 13th August

Having spoken about respecting cultural diversity it seems only fitting that our harvest falls on a day stigmatised by some as unlucky due to it’s association with the lunar calendar and paganism. Yet in pre-Christian times, flax, spinning and weaving had it’s own Goddess, Arianrhod who I’m sure will be smiling as we tend to her plants on this auspicious day.

We’ll pull the flax up from the roots, laying it on the ground to ret, then harvest our small patch of woad. The unique shade of our Blackburn indigo can be seen in the sample above as I tested it for pigment last week. I had a grumble at the time as I’d brought along another sample previously dyed the traditional way in a reduction vat, forgetting that when dyeing with fresh leaves, the colour is always a teal green/blue. I had a great reminder when Kirsteen, one of our volunteers commented that it was still a very beautiful colour as I realised I wasn’t practising what I preach! Of course, our plants will decide what colour they’re going to be and that’s the beauty of letting nature take the lead. As a group, we’ll dye 3 British silk handkerchiefs with fresh woad leaves by mashing them all together in a bowl.

Thanksgiving

We’ve just entered the harvest season know by our ancestors as Lammas or Lughnasadh and it’s time to give thanks for all that we’ve sown, grown and reaped this year.  

So what have I learnt from my deepening relationships with these two crops? I’ve known and loved woad for a while and it can be a tricky character. It likes its space, but not too much. Like a grumpy Green Man who makes himself hard to love, it will yield its beautiful blue but only after initiation. 

Flax on the other hand has been easy to fall in love with. It’s a beautiful mix of strength and fragility, yet only strong in community. If it were planted alone without the support of its friends, it would fall over. Standing together, flax grows into a sweet paradox of gentle grace and determination. Welcome home to both these plant allies!

There’s a lot more to share about our spinning, weaving and prototype garment development that I’ll save for the next post when I’ll also share what events we’ll be offering during the British Textile Biennial along with pictures of our harvest.

If you’d like to join us for our first harvest tomorrow, we’ll be in the clearing beside the car park at Jan’s Conference Centre, Higher Audley St, Blackburn, BB1 1DH from 10am. Please register by emailing Uzma@SuperSlowWay.org.uk first so we can keep track of numbers. Please bring your own packed lunch, water, gardening and rubber gloves (if you’d like to help dye the cloth.)

The post Homegrown Homespun: Harvesting Humility appeared first on Northern England Fibreshed.

After relocating back to the North West after a long time in London I was struck by the countryside so close to town. Everywhere seemed so green and lush and there were so many sheep! We began meeting people and many of those lived and worked on farms with livestock, mostly sheep.

I learned that the local, stony ground near the fells at the beginning of the Trough of Bowland wasn’t really suited to arable farming. The stars were aligned for what happened next really. My grandma had taught me to knit as a child – and I loved everything about it. It kept my hands and mind busy, gave me a creative outlet and I loved the colours and textures at my fingertips!

I was looking for work now our youngest was starting nursery. Having worked in the public sector in London for 10 years I was ready for a new adventure and something that would be flexible around family life. Our local wool shop closed – and that was the push I needed to try my new venture – selling British wool, locally sourced where possible – promoting natural, sustainable fibres, grown in our community.

Which was easier said than done! But I was able to gather a selection of British yarns – and some rare breed single farm yarns and set up my stall on our local charter market, twice a week for 18 months! It was a brilliant but a hard time. I loved proving nay-sayers wrong who had told me I wouldn’t be able to sell pure wool in Lancaster. I met so many people who were already wool advocates and many more who were interested and wanted to switch to natural fibres, especially home-grown ones.

I had a lot to learn. I was no expert but wanted to explore with a grass roots, hands on approach. I was talking to shepherds at the school gates and found out more about breeds and fibre – one way to learn on the job, so to speak, was to have my own yarn line produced from local flocks.

So that’s what I did – and still do. The most enjoyable parts were visiting farms, meeting the shepherds and their sheep – learning more about farming and how the animals were looked after. After ringing almost all the mills in the UK I discovered there was a lot more to it than finding the right fleece. Many of the spinning mills wanted very large quantities, a lot more than a single flock could produce. Most would only take fleece that had been scoured and carded – and there are only a couple of scourers in the UK processing nearly everything. Understandably they wanted big quantities which wasn’t something I could manage with my first lot.

Then I talked to Paul Crookes at Halifax Spinning Mill – he was so knowledgeable and agreed to spin my 60 kilos of Poll Dorset fleece. I was able to go and meet Paul and he showed me around. There was so much to take in.

When the yarn arrived back with me and I opened the box it was nerve wracking and exciting! It was a big investment – I wanted to support farmers and try and raise the value of wool so paid double what the Wool Board was able to give.

The spinning process is rightfully costly, so much work goes into every skein. What if I didn’t like it though??! I knew the properties of the fleece I was having spun, the down wool is crisp and bouncy and we had this yarn woolen spun so it would be full and well, proper woolly!

I wasn’t disappointed at all – working with this wool was like knitting with my landscape. It created a fabric that was so warm with great stitch definition. Not only that, it totally connected me to the sheep and everyone who was part of the process. 100% traceable – I could see these sheep as I took the kids to school.

We’ve continued to have yarn produced, focusing on local farms, looking at native breeds such as the Lonk and more recently have combined breeds which has made getting those larger quantities whilst remaining with local Lancashire and Cumbrian farms, possible.

Methera is a blend of four breeds – Cheviot, BFL, Shetland and Zwartbles, worsted spun to a 4-ply weight. It makes an excellent, soft but strong yarn, delicate and woolly! The Zwartbles gives it a natural grey colour and a fantastic base for colour, giving it a lovely depth. Being able to make clothes from a fully traceable yarn grown and spun in the North West is something that makes me really happy and hopeful for the future.

I came across Fibershed on social media – based in the USA, I was excited to read about a movement that was doing something positive to help the environment and support an ethical workforce.

Being part of North West Fibreshed is fantastic – a brilliant community with the same goal of being able to source our textiles and fibre from our local landscape. There is so much to learn. I’m looking forward to developing my business and learning more about creating products that work alongside our environment.

The post Kate Makin of Northern Yarn appeared first on Northern England Fibreshed.

This article is a celebration of natural materials, the environment that produced them and the people who’s skills transformed them into a beautiful banner, on site at the Homegrown Homespun project in Blackburn recently. It’s a celebration of creative enjoyment, community spirit and the hope of a regenerated planet, but also a chance to reframe perceptions about the value of textile crafts.

With the announcement last May that the government plans to further cut arts funding to universities by 50%*, it’s evident that we’re in the midst of what Dr Vandana Shiva calls, a ‘monoculture of the mind’ – the valuing of subjects and occupations that perpetuate a Western academic, scientific and economic model. Just as we are experiencing a loss of biodiversity in the natural world due to humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, so for many years, our educational curriculum and subsequent career choices have been narrowed and biased towards subjects that uphold our society’s current economic system – a system that is accelerating humanity towards climate breakdown. 

With this crisis literally reaching fever pitch in many parts of the world, humanity urgently needs to divest from plastic/synthetic usage by choosing local, natural materials. It will take a multi-faceted approach to remedy these issues; top-down changes to international laws and governmental policies, and ground-up changes to educational curriculums and individual behaviour.

The Homegrown Homespun project (a collaboration between the N.W. England Fibreshed, Patrick Grant’s Community Clothing and the British Textile Biennial) seeks to contribute to this process by reintroducing flax and woad textile crops, sharing tuition in ‘field to fashion’ processing and tackling gaps in our skills and manufacturing infrastructure.

Textile crafts connect farms to fashion and people to natural materials, and textile education is crucial if we’re to reshore our industry and raise awareness amongst consumers about the difference between renewable and non-renewable materials. The Pre-Industrial gateway crafts of hand spinning, weaving and natural dyeing offer an insight into an era when humanity lived in closer connection with the natural environment. Practicing them builds a relationship with and reverence for the natural environment while invoking ancestral muscle memory that connects us to a time when people had more time. This feels inherently good and creates gentle opportunities to discuss the otherwise heavy topics of climate change and fast fashion, in a creative, hopeful way.

The Homegrown Homespun Community Banner

During the summer half term holiday in early June, the Homegrown Homespun team offered textile workshops to our dedicated volunteers. We’ve been so supported by the local (and not so local) community who’ve litter-picked, pruned, weeded and planted with us at our flax and woad growing sites in Lancashire during the last 3 months, it was a pleasure to share some of the crafts our ancestors would have used to turn fibre into coloured cloth.

The cloth envisaged was to be a community banner; hand spun, naturally dyed and woven outdoors over 3 days before being hung between our two guardian Sycamore trees at the entrance to the site in Blackburn. It was an ambitious plan given there was no running water, shelter or electricity available but as you see above, we manifest our vision!

Day 1: Hand Spinning

I enlisted the help of Cathy Wright and her team at Lazy Kate Textiles to help us transform a bag of locally reared Blue Faced Leicester fluff into yarn for stage one of the task. We had the perfect weather conditions and surroundings enabling us to remain Covid-safe while gathering with others (a rare treat in itself), to enjoy some outdoor creativity.

The slow, repetitive movements required coordination and concentration which naturally shifts attention to the hands, away from the over-thinking mind. Many felt this was a tonic from the stress of their everyday routines and enjoyed the soundtrack of chatting and birdsong. To transform fluff into a usable thread required getting the feel of this natural material; it’s idiosyncrasies, it’s personality if you will – it involved developing a new skill, relationship with and respect for wool.

Inspired by Gandhi, who visited Lancashire 90 years ago, we experienced ‘swaraj’ – self rule (or sovereignty) and ‘swadeshi’ – the economics of place, while hand spinning. He coined these terms during India’s independence movement that sought to liberate his country from British rule in the 1930s and 40s.

At that time, cotton was exported from India to be processed into cloth in North West England, then sold back to India at extortionate prices. In protest, Gandhi encouraged Indian citizens to hand spin and weave for themselves, therefore empowering them to boycott British goods. This self-sufficiency decimated the textile-reliant East Lancs area, so on September 25th 1931, the mill-owning Davies family invited Gandhi to Darwen to see the poverty stricken region for himself. 

Gandhi had great compassion for the employees, yet when he visited Garden Village – built by the Davies family for their mill workers – the poverty there didn’t compare with what he’d witnessed in his own country. He stuck to his boycott and India regained its independence from Britain. 

In seemed fitting to begin our week of workshops with hand spinning at a time when this country’s workforce needs reskilling if we’re to reshore our previously thriving industry here in the heartland of British Textiles.

In his brilliant book, ‘Soil, Soul, Society’, Satish Kumar asserts that “globalisation is the antithesis of swadeshi” and “the economy dependent upon long-distance import and export was an economy for profit and not for people.” He also emphasises that empowerment relies on working with the head, heart and hands and that our education must especially “give dignity to working with our hands.” An “exclusive emphasis on intellectual pursuits makes people dependent on goods produced far away. These goods have to be transported using enormous quantities of fossil fuels. As and when fossil fuels run out and people have lost the ability to make and manufacture, we will be extremely vulnerable.” – Satish Kumar

Humanity has always been hard-wired for self-sufficiency. Perhaps this is why it’s so rewarding and meaningful making something with your own hands. As passive consumers we are denied the self-esteem our own empowering skills create.

None of our participants had spun before yet somehow it resonated with all of us. Perhaps because not so long ago every household in the U.K. would have grown linen or reared sheep for wool and hand spun it into their own clothing and household textiles. During the era of subsistence farming, which almost completely died out after World War II, most families grew food and textile crops, so these new (to us) skills were a part of everyday life.

Day 2: Natural Dyeing

For the colour, it was over to me for stage 2: naturally dyeing our yarn. Everyone had a chance to tie-dye a tea towel using techniques inspired by the Japanese craft, shibori. We also had our hand spun wool from Monday to dye and I brought along an old cotton bedsheet to upcycle into fabric yarn which gave everyone chance to hone their patterning skills.

We toured the site foraging for local dye plants to add to our yellow and red pots supplied by the heritage dyes, weld (Reseda luteola) and madder (Rubin tinctorum.) We added Blackburn natives nettle, bramble, cherry and hawthorn leaves along with onion and pomegranate skins some of the attendees had been collecting, and rhubarb roots and chamomile flowers from my allotment crops last year.

The moment of the big reveal, having waited patiently for bundled creations to cook, is always a thrill. Each pattern is unique and unrepeatable. During this fun process I shared a little about the ancient history of natural dyes, the effects of their more recent synthetic alternatives and how to use renewable colours to extend the life of home textiles and clothing rather than buying new.

We tried itajime, a folded and clamped resist, ne-maki, utilising marbles and string to create circular patterns, arashi, a rain-effect design involving a drain pipe and freestyle creativity, using pure imagination and whatever was left lying around!

There is a luminosity you only experience with living, plant dyes and I’m pretty sure it can also be seen in the eyes of everyone who transformed a white tea towel into a psychedelically patterned and coloured one – which I’ve since heard are being made into more precious items because “they’re too good for dishes!” 

The tea towels were to take home and keep but our hand spun yarn was dyed along with the extra cotton sheeting which would bulk out the final banner. As we had no running water on site, the extra panels were taken home to be rinsed, then torn into strips and twisted into rope.

Day 3: Hand Weaving

Cathy, Jessamy and Sophia from Lazy Kate Textiles returned for our final day of half term workshops on Friday 4th June with 6 rigid heddle looms and 17 smaller looms with letter templates spelling out HOMEGROWN HOMESPUN. Some of our regular Friday volunteers were literally roped in to making fabric rope and once again we were blessed with glorious weather in the magical woodland oasis we’d created in the heart of the city.

There was a real sense of investment in our mission with some participants returning from previous sessions. The enjoyment was palpable and some lovely new friendships made. In particular it was great to see our youngest team member and mascot, 2 year old Quinn gradually gaining the confidence to come out of her shell with this new group of people. We had great fun playing hide and seek while Mum Zara wove her own hand spun and dyed yarn into a panel. This is what our project is all about. Working together for a happier, healthier future and these workshops seemed to epitomise just that – a creative community enjoying the natural environment. 

These heritage crafts may be slow, therefore currently deemed commercially unviable but that’s their virtue in a system speeding towards ecological disaster. We must slow down (or preferably stop) the extraction of carbon releasing fossil fuels, our usage of polluting plastics (including synthetic fibres and dyes) and the pace of our consumption. Slow is good – and beautiful! 

That said, with the power of community, in just 18 hours, over 3 days, we had hand spun, naturally dyed and hand woven 6 panels ready to be stitched into a banner.  There’s so much love, joy and hope within the lovely colours and textures! The next task was to stitch 6 into one, avoiding the foraged twigs and including the woven letters. This was a task that couldn’t be shared with the community due to social distancing rules, so Cathy and I stepped in. 

In ‘Earth Pilgrom’, Satish Kumar writes, ‘through making we transform matter, and in turn matter transforms us.” By spinning fluffy wool into yarn, we were transformed into spinners. By transforming lengths of yarn into a banner, we were transformed into weavers and by learning which plants produce colour on cloth safely, we were transformed into natural dyers. 

Mechanisation was the boon of the Industrial Revolution. It sped up manufacturing, consumption of materials and generated immense wealth for some people. Yet many now realise that when machines replaced hand crafts, they deskilled, disempowered and disconnected people from their understanding of natural materials, nature and therefore themselves. Offshoring exacerbated this effect by removing so much manufacturing from this country’s consciousness, then a reliance on fossil fuel derived versions of our previously renewable materials caused climate breakdown.

We must urgently teach the next generation the value and importance of natural materials (and by association, the natural world) and to do this we must reinstate the creative arts and crafts of self-sufficiency. While we may never fully return to a hand made manufacturing system, these dexterous, empowering skills are crucial if we’re to inspire the next generation back into supporting a reshored textile industry. 

Our half term workshops were a way to say thank you to our dedicated team of volunteers who’ve braved all weather conditions to support the Homegrown Homespun project. Yet, they were also a way to highlight the value of the creative arts. The banner that emerged is a lovely example of the Fibershed motto, ‘local fibres, local dyes and local labour’ and highlights just how beautiful the regeneration of the planet can be.

Justine Aldersey-Williams, July 2021.

Visit the Homegrown Homespun page for more articles about the project.

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