I’d like to acknowledge the support I’ve had during this time including all those both regionally and internationally within the Fibershed organisation who’ve taken part in online and in-person meetings, especially members of our directory who’ve shared their local know-how and passion for ecologically restorative textiles.

In particular, a huge thanks goes to my friend Patrick Grant, without whose inspirational example I probably wouldn’t have taken on this challenge. Patrick’s willingness to collaborate with me and the SuperSlow Way team on the Homegrown Homespun project has brought this cause to a far wider audience – he even introduced King Charles to Fibershed back in 2020!

Three years in and NWEF have 3400+ instagram followers and wonderfully engaged audiences on Twitter and Facebook, many of whom are still following our journey to bring locally grown indigo linen jeans to market via Patrick’s social enterprise Community Clothing. The rationale behind the HH collaboration was to help our regional producers access natural dye facilities at scale by incentivising synthetic dye factories to begin transitioning to renewable alternatives. Great progress has been made in this regard and there is now at least one commercial dyer able to use all three ‘grand teints’ including the more challenging indigo. I’ll be sharing an update on other exciting developments in my next post that’s dedicated to the project.

NWEF have been featured in local and national press multiple times, most notably on the ‘Field to Fashion’ episode of BBC 1’s Countyfile and Radio 4’s Open Country ‘A Fabric Landscape’ show. It’s great that by the completion of our collaboration at the British Textile Biennial this October, we’ll have an even bigger community of like-minded creatives working towards the highest Climate Beneficial standards.

Introducing…

Mark Palmer has spent a lifetime in the food and farming industry. Originally from Wiltshire, he completed a degree in Agriculture at the University of Reading in 1986 and was initially involved in conventional farm management. He progressed to advising and managing a 400 acre organic vegetable farm in North Yorkshire, also working internationally with select crops while packing and processing vegetables for his own business. 

In 2015 Mark started working for the Soil Association as an inspector covering the North of England and Scotland, visiting and auditing all types of businesses from field to fork. He’s qualified to complete Red Tractor and Pasture for Life inspections and with his own company, Systems4Food he offers organic inspections, farm sustainability audits and advisory work helping farms progress down the agroecological pathway. 

He advised us how best to grow woad during phase 2 of the Homegrown Homespun project and helped design and test the pigment extraction kit. Due to the many lessons learnt during this process, we’ve since founded Homegrown Colour to continue exploring the upscale of British indigo and are trailing a one acre crop with an organic farmer during 2023.

Mark’s in-depth knowledge of Climate BeneficialTM growing principles will help British Fibreshed’s to create a verification process that’s equivalent to the USA’s but that is more appropriate to our ecology. With our ethics firmly grounded in soil health and biodiversity, we believe that in collaboration with the other UK Fibresheds, this will become the new benchmark for regenerative clothing in this country.

Anita Radini is an Italo-British Archaeobotanist and Experimental Archaeologist. She studied Natural Sciences and then Archaeology and her area of research concerns the complex interaction between people and the natural and built environments. 

In over 15 years of Arcaheobotanical work,  Anita has become interested in the loss of knowledge concerning the use of traditional natural materials in material culture as well as the disappearance of many varieties of plants used by people in the past. She also has a strong interest in the sustainability and ethically correct sourcing of raw material used in Archaeology for experimental purposes. 

In 2020 Anita began to grow flax at her allotment and since then, with Mark, has scaled up her crop. She is particularly interested in the open access seeds libraries and bringing back some forgotten varieties of flax. She now divides her time between North Yorkshire and Dublin for her new role as Ad Astra Fellow at UCD School of Archaeology, where she’s been awarded the prestigious Dan David Prize in recognition of her pioneering research highlighting the labours of the often invisible craftspeople and workers behind history’s ancient monuments and artwork. There she continues her work on under-used and almost lost varieties of flax and plant dyes. Anita believes that ancient and traditional crafts and small scale agriculture have great potential in reconnecting us to the environment. She will bring to Fibershed her knowledge of past traditions  and her network in the University, Museums and Re-enactment sectors.

Launching the Northern England Fibreshed

We feel we have a dynamic combination of skills covering the many different aspects of textiles as agriculture, academia and craft and are excited to announce that we’ve been invited to launch this new iteration of the Northern England Fibreshed during this October’s British Textile Biennial. We’re now inviting local textile growers, makers and educators to read through our criteria then apply to join our Producer’s Directory. There will be an opportunity for those with Fibreshed standard products to collaborate on this event.

It will take some time to update our website and social media platform but please note that our new region will cover both North West and North East England so please get in touch if you’re growing or making textiles using local, natural fibres and dyes and are based in one of the following counties:-

• Cumbria
• Lancashire
• Merseyside
• Cheshire
• Greater Manchester
• Yorkshire (North, East Riding, South and West)
• Tyne and Wear
• Northumberland
• County Durham

The post Welcome to the Northern England Fibreshed 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.

Growing Jeans

On Friday 23rd April 2021, the Homegrown Homespun project planted it’s first textile crop of flax and woad on disused land beside the historic Leeds to Liverpool canal, in the middle of Blackburn. Homegrown Homespun is a collaboration with designer Patrick Grant, his social enterprise Community Clothing, the British Textile Biennial and North West England Fibreshed. We were joined by flax farmers, Simon and Ann Cooper from Flaxland along with a small army of helpers who tried their hand with his vintage seed drill, pruned foliage and cleared an enormous amount of rubbish. Over 150 bags of litter were picked up by the local (and not so local) community who came out in force to support us on the day.

This site had been used for fly-tipping and whilst the central, grassed area was already clear for our crop, we wanted to make the surrounding woodland safer and more accessible for dog walkers by not only removing debris, but by creating paths and giving the trees a prune which revealed the canal view.

As these crops will need protecting from footfall, we were very grateful to the construction students at Blackburn College who fitted fencing, in part donated by our project manager Alex’s Dad Jan from OEP Building Services.

Restoring Britain’s Textile Heritage

Flax is still an agricultural crop in this country used to produce linseed but the fibre variety hasn’t been grown commercially since the 1950s, when the last processing equipment was decommissioned by the Sandringham Estate. Prior to that, the British Isles had a rich heritage of linen production dating back at least 5000 years to the Bronze Age. In the 18th Century, the British Isles produced around 50 million yards of linen cloth per year, which required hand processing 9000 tonnes of plant fibre.

Woad, our native source of indigo pigment, was also grown prolifically but along with the majority of other natural dyes, died out with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when 18 year old chemist, William Henry Perkin accidentally discovered synthetic dyes whilst experimenting with coal tar.

So after thousands of years of British textile heritage, generations of inherited skills were all but lost as the crafts of linen spinning and natural dyeing were consigned to hobbies. We owe a debt of gratitude to figures like William Morris, who’s Arts and Crafts Movement emerged in rebellion against the deskilling caused by mechanisation. He, along with indigenous cultures worldwide, who held on to their ancient traditions and those influenced by them, have made our project possible.

A Ground-up Revival Bringing Fashion Down to Earth

Today, this loss of hand making skills and reliance upon offshore, mechanised manufacturing, means that most of us have forgotten where our clothes come. But just as people have become more educated about food provenance, so people are now asking #whomademyclothes – a hashtag started by Fashion Revolution after the Rana Plaza fashion factory collapse in 2013. 

Patrick has already done an enormous amount of work raising awareness for regional, sustainable fashion practices and gave a great TEDx talk that’s well worth a watch to find out ‘Why We Should All Feel Uncomfortable in Our Clothes’. I’m not sure he envisaged actually planting his own though but seemed to thoroughly enjoy it!

Fibershed believe the question of provenance needs to go deeper than manufacturing – all the way back to the soil beneath our feet. Clothing doesn’t begin in factories, it starts either with farming or mining and currently 70% of all clothing produced annually is derived from extracted fossil fuels (i.e. non-biodegradable plastic that pollutes landfill.) We must now choose whether the clothing we buy comes from non-renewable petrochemicals or climate restoring plants. Fibershed are bringing the fashion industry down to Earth, quite literally by asking #whogrewmyclothes.

We are a global organisation made up of regional communities of textile artisans, specialising in these (somehow now) niche hobbies of natural fibre and dye crafts. But in a world dominated by synthetic cloth and colour, our simple, small-scale use of renewable materials is collectively creating an important rebellion.

Incentivising the Reintroduction of Textile Crops to British Agriculture

Last Monday 17th May, Simon, Ann and I travelled up to Monkley Ghyll Farm in Halton to plant our reserve crop, using seed generously donated by Mallon Linen in Northern Ireland. Simon and Ann are both farmers and artisans who’ve helped keep the heritage of flax alive in the U.K. and whilst regenerating urban land, in the textile heartland of North West England is vital, for the upscale of production, we also hope to make textile crops viable once more, so called out for farmers wishing to trial flax and woad. Susan and Gavin Crawford are also farmers and artisans who generously offered to foster our crop on their land.

We had such a great day, even through a sudden downpour and where thrilled to see their neighbour’s tractor arriving on cue to cover over the seeds as we finished planting. We all have our finger’s crossed that these crops will thrive at both sites.

The seeds of a more regenerative future for the fashion industry have been sown. However, for the Homegrown Homespun team, the real challenges are yet to come! How do we make this sustainable product commercially viable within an economic system that favours mass overseas production and exploitative global supply chains all subsidised by (artificially cheap) fossil fuel use? Can the awareness this project raises help replace lost natural fibre and dye processing equipment, making textile crops viable for farmers again? Will we have a prototype pair indigo linen jeans in time for this October’s Biennial? With the kind of fantastic support this project has received already, we very much hope so!

Happening Next: Weeding and Workshops

Now the weeding begins! We welcome volunteers at our Higher Audley St site in Blackburn every Friday from 10am – 12pm and will be having one big weeding session at Monkley Ghyll on Friday 11th June from 12pm – 5pm although spaces are limited for this session so please enquire to email below to be added to the volunteers list (rather than just showing up.) Earlier the same day, I’ll also be planting a dye garden in Blackburn, so if you want to make a full day of it, feel free to join in with both activities.

This half term, Super Slow Way, the organisers of the British Textile Biennial would like share how much fun heritage textile crafts can be, so Lazy Kate Textiles and I will be teaching free taster workshops where you can try spinning, dyeing and weaving for yourself while helping us create a piece of community art. 

Hand Spinning

Monday 31st May 2021 10am – 12:30pm and 1:30pm – 3:30pm

Natural Dyeing

Wednesday 2nd June 2021
10am – 12pm and 1pm – 3pm

Hand Weaving

Friday 4th June 2021
10am – 12:30pm
1:30pm – 3:30pm

If you’d like to join in with one of these activities please call or email : Uzma: 07922 487950 / uzma@superslowway.org.uk There’s also a Homegrown Homespun Facebook group volunteers can join for updates.

The post Homegrown Homespun – Sowing Regenerative Fashion appeared first on Northern England Fibreshed.

In addition to offering sewing workshops, we have set up a group to highlight the feasibility of using natural dyes in Lancaster and Morecambe as a way to care for textiles and raise awareness of the toxic effects of chemical dyes on the environment and health.

We believe a better world is possible, we work to cross the borders of textiles by creating partnerships with different local groups working with agriculture, education and recycling. 

To inspire a model for what we should wear we have developed products with upcycled cotton which in 50 years or so ( if well looked after) can return to the soil and decompose harmlessly. You can support and buy our lovely products, including the amazing cowls at www.SewingCafeLancaster.com. All our labels are printed with walnut on cotton left over from curtain and roman blind linings from Tatty Gem.

We have been developing the idea of a natural dye garden at Claver Hill community growing food project, since 2015. It became reality during the first covid 19 lockdown, when our professional natural dyer, Katrina Barnish had the time to explore different techniques with our botanist Gina Frausin, who did research on our local plants. Our gardeners and dyers Enda O’Regan and Kathy Barton supported by Victoria Frausin and the rest of Sewing Café Lancaster’s team made the arrangements and made it happen.

We have planted around 20 species. We also had a natural dye camp out where we dyed with invasive species and leftovers from Clevar Hill. The material that we use to dye includes 100% cotton donated by Green Lancaster at Lancaster University. We first offer these to refugees, but if they are not claimed they go to the natural dye bath and are transformed into something else. This exemplifies conviviality by connecting different groups of peoples, plants and recycled material.

We permanently collaborate with Food Futures Network and a group in the Yorkshire Dales that is committed to propagating Purging Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica L), the larval food plant for the beautiful Brimstone butterfly that is not good at natural regeneration. In August we extracted the seed from this year’s crop and used the pulp and skins to create shades of green and yellows dyes.

Also following a donation of a tonne of onion skins from Organic Plus project, Ryton Organic Gardens at The Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), we made an amazing bath of green dyes.

We work and will keep focusing on the questions of how we can encourage people to look after the textiles they already have and how we can bring together a local community to practice the skills of buying less and caring more –  because a better world is possible.To find out more about our products and other projects that involve recycling and composting, such as Reusables for disposables, Sew&Sow libraries, The Lancaster Textile Care Collective or Refugees and asylum seekers drop-in, get in touch via sewingcafelancaster@gmail.com or at our website www.SewingCafeLancaster.com

The post Introducing The Sewing Café Lancaster appeared first on Northern England Fibreshed.

Now, 6 months later, I’m reflecting on these first preparatory months and am opening up this ‘News’ feature on our (yet to be officially launched) organisation website. Over the coming weeks, this will become a place where our producers can share how they’re working with (or working towards) the high standards of textile/fashion production stipulated by the Fibreshed ethos.

This first post is an introduction from me, Justine Aldersey-Williams, Regional Coordinator and founder of this affiliated branch. In addition to this role I am a textile designer and teacher at The Wild Dyery, specialising in natural fabric dyeing.

I’m happy to admit, I’ve been on a steep learning curve since founding this Fibreshed and want to speak to other textile professionals like me, who might not have a background in farming or sustainable fashion, because there should be no barriers to getting involved in this much needed movement.

So, if you know a little about Fibreshed, enough to know you want to get involved but feel a bit daunted by all the new concepts and terminology, what follows is an absolute beginner’s guide, including an overview of what a Fibreshed is, why I’m volunteering and what our community hopes to achieve. 

What is a Fibreshed?

If you’ve never heard of a Fiber/Fibreshed (spelling dependent on where in the world you are) here’s the official definition:-

“A Fibershed is a geographical landscape that defines and gives boundaries to a natural textile resource base. Awareness of this bioregional designation engenders appreciation, connectivity, and sensitivity for the life-giving resources within our homelands.” – fibershed.com

The Fibershed strap line is ‘local fibres, local dyes and local labour’. As an ethos that remembers our indigenous past, when humans better understood their place within our ecosystem so lived in harmony with natural resources, it should be profoundly simple to implement. Yet when placed within the context of a globalised, capitalist, colonialist economy, this simple strap line exposes how distorted our way of living has become and the challenges we face changing things.

In the midst of climate breakdown, the fashion industry continues to be one of the world’s main polluters, driven by our economy’s need for perpetual growth from finite planetary resources.

While our U.K. industry has been decimated by offshoring, garment workers in the global south are forced into slave labour and suffer the worst effects of environmental pollution. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone involved, including the consumer who buys poor quality, cheap clothing, only to have it perceived as ‘out of fashion’ after one wear, upon which it will likely fall apart and be discarded anyway.

• 70% of all clothing is derived from polluting petrochemicals¹
• 60% of all clothing produced is disposed of within the same year it is purchased² creating a truck load of waste per second³
• In the past 50 years, employment in the U.K. textile industry has dropped from 1.6M to 50K causing social deprivation particularly in N.W. England⁴
• In 2013, 1134 garment workers died in Bangladesh after an unsafe fast fashion factory collapsed⁵

Fibershed is fast emerging as the highest standard for a new fashion industry that remedies social and environmental exploitation by empowering regional economy and ecology.

Imagine a reshored textile manufacturing system that starts with regeneratively grown fibres and dyes, offering farmers additional income while building healthy soil and biodiversity. A system that is framed within the ‘post-capitalist’ principals of ‘Doughnut Economics’ and produces clothing (and employment) in a fully traceable way that eliminates environmental and social exploitation.

Fibershed are making this a reality and we’re not alone. I’d recommend watching the film ‘Kiss the Ground’ for more information about how regenerative crops (including textiles) could quickly help reverse climate breakdown. Also, the film ‘Gather’, which highlights the role indigenous caretakers have played in preserving our remaining biodiversity, while guiding humanity back into reverence for our planetary life-support system, Mother Earth. For a broader context on why localisation is crucial, another film ‘Economics of Happiness’ by the incredible team at Local Futures (who also have a site full of brilliant resources) is a must.

Why I’m Volunteering

As the great poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said, ‘when you know better, do better’. I was lucky enough to be immersed in eastern philosophy for 12 years as a professional yoga teacher prior to resuming my career in textiles. Whilst there are undoubtedly cultural appropriation issues in the way this wisdom has been interpreted by western society, I am grateful to have been guided to a sense of union with all of life that has deeply affected how I work.

This feeling of yoga (root ‘yug’, meaning to yoke or unite) is hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it, yet it naturally engenders reverence for all living beings; human and non-human. It homes people in the elemental truth of who they are; earth, air, fire, water and spirit, in a way that echoes the beliefs of indigenous cultures all around the world. Once this remembrance of the Earth as our bigger, life-sustaining body has been realised, it becomes impossible to destroy.

For me, this awareness has completely dictated how I work. After setting up my natural dyeing company The Wild Dyery in 2015, at a time when horrific revelations about the climate crisis were emerging every day, I decided to stop making and selling textile products. I felt there was already enough stuff on the planet and couldn’t trace my supply chains or guarantee I wasn’t promoting social and environmental exploitation. Instead, I decided to teach botanical fabric dyeing online and at my studio, in the hope that it would encourage people to revive their old clothing with natural dyes, as a way to slow the consumption of fast fashion.

I also became a volunteer for the global reforestation charity, TreeSisters and donate a percentage of profits from my online courses to tree planting initiatives. But when I became aware of Fibershed, I started to see a way I might one day be able to create textiles within a system that helped the environment and it gave me much needed hope!

I still offer a comprehensive online training in natural fabric dyeing but hope one day to be able to get creative with natural fibres and dyes grown in my region. The only way I see this happening is by volunteering as an affiliate for Fibershed. I have an exciting challenge ahead, but am already collaborating with some exceptional people who feel just as passionately as I do about this cause.

What does N.W. England Fibreshed hope to achieve?

Since the 1400s, the North West of England has been a world renowned centre for textile manufacturing. In 1821, Manchester alone had 66 cotton mills⁶ and even today, 3/4 of the country’s textile processing facilities are in the North West. 

We have an incredible textile heritage that still defines our communities and landscapes, but which also carries the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade that fuelled colonialist capitalism and as a result, the social and environmental crises we face today.

Could a regenerative Fibreshed system repair some of the damage caused?

I believe so. 

Right now it might seem impossible, but this is the aspiration of a growing number of textile professionals based in Cumbria, West Yorkshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire, who aspire to use regeneratively grown fibres and dyes.

I hope this has been a useful introduction to our new Fibreshed. Over the next few weeks, producers already listed in our directory will introduce themselves and their work. There will also be news of some exciting projects happening in our area. If you are based in the region, work with natural fibres and/or dyes and want to join our community, please get in touch.

References:

¹ http://fibershed.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Fibershed-Clothing-Guide-first-edition.pdf

² Remy, N., Speelman, E. & Swartz, S. Style That’s Sustainable: A New Fast-Fashion Formula (McKinsey&Company, accessed 11 December 2017)

³ A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017)

⁴ https://communityclothing.co.uk/blogs/news/a-letter-from-patrick-grant-founder-of-community-clothing

⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Dhaka_garment_factory_collapse

⁶ https://www.englishfinecottons.co.uk/journal/heritage/potted-history/

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