So I posted on Instagram yesterday about my Big Adventure, but like. Wow. I barely scratched the surface of just how cool it was. (Hint: the stuff was cool, the people were even more interesting.)
I get that for everyone involved, this is a labor of love. Our local fibershed is very much luxury goods at this point. I was thinking about it because on Sunday I went to the boutique where my Middle-Little sister works, and I looked at all the expensive clothes, and there was one jacket in particular that caught my eye-- from five feet away, it looked like it was made of tightly-quilted solid black cotton, all quilted in fantastic wiggly patterns, with large chunky details (like a fold-over asymmetric lapel, and a chunk of the bodice, and the cuffs) in what looked like needle felted wool.
But it wasn’t. The body was poly-acrylic, printed with kinks to look quilted in that pattern, and the chunky bits were just printed polyester. It was still a lovely jacket, but it was, well. Plastic, through and through.
If you made a jacket like that of quilted cotton and felted wool, it’d be $350 at least, if not more, and not machine-washable; the plastic version was like $150 and I think was machine-wash cold hang to dry. But I would be so much more likely to splash out any money at all on a really quality piece like that, especially if it was local, than I would on the imported plastic one. (Like hell would i pay $150 for a plastic jacket. Oh my god.)
But the idea of a local fibershed is something I’d been thinking about a bit, and it was so wonderful to speak to these people who also felt the same way. As MJ drove us around, we were passing historic markers for the Battle of Saratoga on the left and the right-- that’s where that shit went down, all in Schuylerville, and everyone there knows at least a bit about it. And they all were aware that this region produced a lot of flax and hemp in days of yore, and processed a great deal of cotton, shipped up the Hudson from the port at New York, mostly imported from the South-- and didn’t they have mixed feelings about the Civil War, too, MJ was very frank about that. They all knew why that cotton was so cheap but it being so cheap meant there was room to make a good living on the markup from processing, and losing that meant a lot of the mills went out during and after that war-- but, isn’t that better?
The flax we lost last of all, to the rapidly-changing market after WWI, and today nobody has any idea where to get industrial-scale flax-processing equipment in this country. Mom’s got records of patent after patent for such things, all filed by management at the Cable Flax Mill in the town she’s historian of, but we don’t know how they worked or how to replicate that. Anyone who makes linen clothes or goods buys in finished cloth from the Baltic.
(How do I explain to my Dude that I want to go visit his ancestral homeland but only if he learns the language well enough to ask them for a flax mill tour??)
ANYHOW I have more to say but I have to go hang out with Farmkid.
