Homegrown Homespun

Origins

It’s difficult to say when this idea began. When I planted my first dye garden back in 2015 or when I realised I couldn’t source embroidery thread that hadn’t travelled half way around the globe. It was certainly catalysed when I founded the North West England Firbreshed in March 2020. To raise awareness of the Fibershed organisation and regenerative textiles, I suggested a collaboration to my mate Patrick (a well-known advocate of sustainable British fashion) over a greasy pizza in Blackburn, just a few hundred yards from where the project was subsequently to take root.

In August, after I’d passed on a copy of the book, ‘Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists and Makers for a New Textile Economy’ and a number of aligned documents including ‘The Nature of Fashion’ by the Biomimicry Institute and the ‘Earth Logic Plan’, Patrick called to accept the offer of a collaboration, asking what I hoped to achieve with the NWEF. My response was to get fibre and dye crops growing in the U.K. again while developing some midscale processing equipment to make it viable.

My suggestion was to grow indigo and linen for a denim mending kit, Patrick’s counter offer was to grow jeans!

At this time, rising awareness of the international Fibershed movement amongst the British fashion industry catalysed interest in taking textile production back to the soil in this country. Fibershed founder, Rebecca Burgess had initiated the original ‘Grow Your Jeans’ project in the USA in 2015 using locally grown cotton, so it was fitting that this collaboration sought to revive our native cellulose crop, linen, which already had thousands of years worth of almost forgotten heritage on these shores.