I want to emphasise that, where textile are concerned, I am merely an enthusiastic beginner trying to find my niche in the wider ecosystem of people & projects doing fantastic work in this area. At the moment, my main contribution is through my hands (I knit for Textile Care Collective) and through my work, where I try to raise awareness of these issues and inspire others to get involved. If this is valuable I’ll carry on doing it as I think this is a story that desperately needs to be heard...
So why textiles? How did I get here? Since my early 20s I’ve been somewhat obsessed with local & sustainable food both personally & professionally. I teach on it, I practice it in my own life through the ways in which I grow, cook & shop, & I do all that I can to create the social & political conditions for it to flourish right here where we live through fabulous organisations like North Lancashire FoodFutures.
With my focus squarely on food, I hadn’t thought about textiles, despite having had ample opportunities to do so: I was taught to knit at quite a young age and, during my first ‘proper’ job after university I wrote the fashion column for the magazine I was working for at the time. However, while my Mum and Granny taught me the mechanics of knitting, they didn’t tell me anything about yarn – knitting was all about following a pattern to create a finished garment and I’d just work with what they gave me – the acrylic from the local household store. It was the same with the fashion column: my focus was entirely on the finished garment and how it looked on the model. It never occurred to me to think about the textiles themselves since fashion and knitting were hobbies to me & not something to connect with my passion for sustainability. I certainly didn’t think of textiles as industrial or agricultural products, despite the fact I grew up in farmed landscapes surrounded by sheep.
The gateway to my making these connections was twofold – through the work of Sewing Café Lancaster I started to learn about the environmental and social impacts of the fashion industry. I also joined a local knitting group run by Northern Yarn primarily to help myself through a rocky period of mental health. As I started to heal, I noticed that my lovely fellow group members talked almost as much about different kinds of yarn as they did about the pattern or the final garment. I was mystified by this at first: as a novice knitter who had only ever worked with double-knit acrylic, it made no sense to me why people would be so obsessed with the different properties of yarn. I got that you might want to choose different colours and, as my skill level grew, I just about understood why different patterns might need different weights of yarn (chunky, for example, as opposed to DK). But was there really more to it than that?
Apparently there was… As I continued my journey of experimentation, making and learning with others, I started to realise that different types of yarn had very different properties that impacted markedly on both the knitting experience and the finished product. Thus cotton behaved very differently from acrylic, which behaved very differently from wool, which was different from silk, etc. etc. And this was only at the most rudimentary level of understanding: the properties of different fibres could be influenced further by how and where they were grown and processed. Wool, for example, could vary tremendously depending on the breed of the sheep, the health of the animal and the way in which it was spun. In other words, in order to understand why different fibres do what they do, you have to go back to source and follow that fibre through the web of relationships – human, more than human and technological, which have produced it.
The first time this penny really dropped for me was when Kate Makin from Northern Yarn organised an evening at the museum – which pulled together some fantastic speakers (Maria Benjamin from Dodgson Wood, Zoe Fletcher from the Woolist and Andrea Meanwell an upland beef and sheep farmer and the farming officer for the Lake District National park authority): For the first time, I made the connection with what I’d been doing in terms of food. Textiles, too, were agricultural products and if you wanted to understand the connections between fashion, craft and sustainability then you also needed to understand the lives of the farmers, animals and landscapes that have produced them. In making these connections, I observed similar patterns to what was happening in food systems – namely, the degradation of local livelihoods and environments in service of profitability for multinational supply chains and the craziness this produces, such as farmers resorting to burning their wool in the fields because it costs them more to shear their sheep than the money they’ll get for their fleece. Thankfully, I also saw similar voices of courage and resistance: inspiring women like Maria, Andrea, Kate & Zoe plus organisations like Fibreshed and Sewing Café working to literally re-knit the relationships between farming, sustainability and fashion in ways that provide hope for rural communities going forward.
My point in writing all this is to say that we miss so much if we think of our landscapes as single use entities: the wisdom of indigenous communities throughout the world together with holistic, systems based approaches to landscape such as permaculture and agroecology all show us that land is not only a resource for food production. Rather, if cared for properly in the spirit of restoration and reciprocity, it also generously gives us textiles, medicines, fuel, and many more things besides. To quote the inspirational scholar and activist Robin Wall Kimmerer:
“What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from understanding multiple meanings of land? Land as sustainer. Land as identity. Land as grocery store and pharmacy. Land as connection to ancestors. Land as moral obligation, Land as sacred. Land as self.” (P.337 of Braiding Sweetgrass)
Contrary to the dictates of Western capitalism which maximises production for a single entity and, in doing so, risks ruining the rest, these different land uses are not mutually exclusive so why would we not manage our landscapes in a way which enables all these things to thrive? I’m hugely grateful for the work of the many thinkers, growers, crafters and activists who have helped me realise that the kinds of binaries I inherited through my scientific education (farming or wildlife, people or nature) are both untrue and unhelpful and so I’m trying to find my way back, figuring out how I can co-design with the people and places around me to help us meet our varied needs through relationships of mutual flourishing and reciprocity.