Who are you?
I like the term maker as it captures my two main activities: making clothes and accessories as well as making textile processing machines. I am really motivated by the possibility of vertical integration – where in one place you can transform a raw material (like flax) into an end product (like a pair of jeans). I am also part educator (I teach sewing), part natural dyer, and part activist (striving to create a different textile industry).
What attracts you to Fibreshed Scotland? When / how did you first hear about Fibreshed?
I believe that I first heard about Rebecca Burgess’ Fibreshed book in an online seminar, probably around 2020. It took me a while to actually read the book, but the general ideas and principles spoke to me straight away. That is the strength of the Fibreshed vision and ethos – local fibre, local labour, local dye.
What does regenerative mean to you?
For me the term “regenerative” is a very general, loose term that points towards a different, healthier, kinder way of doing things. I also don’t think that the term needs to be made more specific or enforceable through well defined criteria. A non-negotiable is that regenerative textiles must be made from natural fibres. In the process of making the textile, the utmost case must have been taken of all the actors involved: the soils, the plants, the animals, the humans…
What does a healthy fashion and textiles future look like?
A healthy future fashion industry looks like the one we are trying to build at Fantasy Fibre Mill. We believe that the globalized, extractive supply chains of present should be replaced by a distributed network of local production hubs, embedded in (and owned by) their local community, working with the locally available natural fibres and dyes. These hubs will be enabled by the farm-scale, open source textile processing machinery that we are developing. This should provide the adequate level of automation to sustainably supply the textile needs of the community served by the hub.