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

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)

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. 

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.

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

Our idea seems simple: grow flax for linen and woad for indigo on disused urban land in Blackburn, working with the local community to make a pair of jeans during this October’s event. Then, create the manufacturing infrastructure enabling our prototype to be upscaled into a full production of ‘Homegrown Homespun’ jeans to be launched by social enterprise, Community Clothing during the next Biennial in 2023 who’s theme is sustainability.

However, there’s much more to this story! So, whilst I’m only introducing the outline today, over the coming weeks I’ll be documenting the process and sharing more about the research, development, potential benefits and challenges that lie ahead.

Origin and Evolution

I’m a natural dye artisan and teacher trying my best to work ethically and sustainably, yet restricted by the globalised system I function within. The more I learnt about my craft within the context of intersectional environmentalism, the more I realised that due to lengthy international supply chains, it was pretty much impossible to guarantee the creative work I did wasn’t contributing to human or environmental exploitation and this made me deeply uncomfortable. To do something about this, I decided to volunteer as an affiliate of the international organisation Fibershed who are devising solutions by creating ‘soil to soil’, regionalised textile systems that use ‘local fibre, local dye and local labour’.

I founded North West England Fibreshed in the heartland of British textiles last March, with the intention of incentivising the reintroduction of textile crops so I could eventually mend my jeans with British linen, dyed using our native indigo plant, Woad. Easy! Until I discovered there are no linen spinning facilities in the U.K. anymore, therefore no arable textile crops, since our entire industry was off-shored over 60 years ago!

So began a fascinating learning process; taking on an allotment, growing more fibre and dye, extracting my own indigo pigment, discovering the ancient heritage of linen growing in the U.K. and learning linen processing and hand spinning, but I’ll write more about this over the coming weeks.

While taking my own textile practice back to the soil, I also began training in regenerative textiles with Fibershed and sharing research with Patrick Grant, director of multiple clothing enterprises and judge on the BBC’s ‘The Great British Sewing Bee’. Again, the collaborators on this project warrant a separate post but suffice it to say, Patrick has been a champion for regional, sustainable fashion for many years. He’s at the forefront of ‘fashion for good’ so was interested in the potential benefits of regeneratively grown textile crops, not just socially and economically but ecologically too.

The Fibershed organisation advocate for short, transparent supply chains by directly linking farms to fashion and through their extensive research, have highlighted the fact that when grown within carbon farming principals, textiles could become ‘Climate Beneficial’. Their standards are fast becoming the new benchmark for a more ethical fashion industry because garments produced using these rigorous principals give back more than they take from the environment, so helping reverse the climate crisis by reducing transportation costs, while eliminating human exploitation and replenishing soil health and biodiversity.

Their revolutionary idea of reshoring and decentralising the industry brings hope to the destructive fast fashion system that currently relies on the exploitation of (predominantly) women in the global south, as well offering alternatives to extracting polluting fossil fuel derived synthetic fibres and dyes. 

The challenge was how to communicate all this and more via a project? Last August, we devised a plan to grow our own indigo linen jeans, and began to gather a dream-team of collaborators including Laurie Peake and Jenny Rutter of Super Slow Way who host the British Textile Biennial, of which Patrick is a patron. Following months of fantastic zoom meetings, yesterday we had our groundbreaking moment as our plot of land was ploughed ready for planting on our launch day this Friday 23rd April.

The Homegrown Homespun Project

And so it begins! The soil is prepared and has been tested by soil scientists from RegenAgri – an organisation aiming to ‘secure the health of the land and the wealth of those who live on it’. They, along with experts from Cranfield and Lancaster Universities, will be advising us on how to implement carbon farming techniques that sequester carbon from the atmosphere, back into the soil. I’d recommend watching the film ‘Kiss the Ground’ for more information on how this seemingly simple action could quickly remedy the climate crisis.

We’ve also begun improving this disused council land beside the famous Leeds-Liverpool canal by litter picking and pruning from 8am – 4pm yesterday. This is an area of social deprivation, in part caused by the decimation of the textile industry, so it’s especially fitting to be starting this project here. The sun shone and lots of people from the nearby community came by to say hello and offer support, for which we were very thankful! The site already looks better!

This Friday we’ll plant flax and woad seeds with the help of Simon and Ann Cooper from Flaxland, then in 100 days, we’ll begin harvesting before sharing the making process, which will involve some wonderful old terminology; retting, breaking, scutching, hackling, then spinning, dyeing, weaving and sewing during October’s month long event. 

It’s a special honour for me to be hand dyeing this historic garment and I’m looking forward to sharing the magic of indigo extraction and vat dyeing with a larger audience. I’ve already begun sampling using homegrown linen and woad. The samples below were kindly hand spun by Carole Bowman who was involved in the 1220-2020 flax growing project at Heron Corn Mill last year.

We hope to then display our prototype pair of indigo linen jeans and raise awareness of the need to reshore and regenerate our previously world-renowned textile industry – only this time on more equitable terms using renewable energy.

At a time when humanity is facing the devastating effects of climate change and loss of biodiversity, regenerative fashion initiatives like this can offer much needed hope. Everyone who wears clothing must now choose whether it comes from imported, non-renewable, fossilised carbon e.g. the ubiquitous polyester – or locally grown, renewable carbon, from plants like flax. One option pollutes throughout the entirety of its lifespan, the other has the potential to reverse climate change.

Fashion is an investment in the system that produced it, but so often our purchases support poor quality, exploitation and pollution, all cleverly concealed by an expensive advertising campaign. The team holding this healthier vision for the future of fashion recognise that changing the old paradigm may take time, experimentation, trial and no doubt error, but they also know that nothing will feel better next to the skin than clothing that has regenerated a local ecology and economy

Follow our Story using the hashtag #HomegrownHomespun