Farm to closet
One student’s exploration into the slow fashion movement.
Story by RACHEL BUSELMEIER
Photos by KELLY PEARCE
It’s not easy and no one asked her to do it. It’s not for credit, it’s not for Etsy, it’s for herself. Erin Ruark is going to spend most of the year producing a single piece of fabric.
It starts with a patch of flax. In mid-May, Erin worked with Fairhaven Professor John Tuxill to plant a patch of flax in Fairhaven’s Outback Farm. The patch is about the size of two bathroom stalls. It’s packed densely with bright green stalks that pop out from the sparse cabbage bed and berry patch next to it. Erin will harvest the flax before they’re matured and weave them into cloth.
“I try to wear linen whenever I visit the flax,” Erin says, motioning to the tan overalls she hopes to replicate her homegrown flax. She grabs the ends of each stalk tenderly, checking their progress. By mid-September, the plants will have grown over four feet and taken a golden brown color.
Once the plants have matured, Erin will cut the stocks and allow them to rot for a few weeks as part of a process called retting. By allowing plant to decay, Erin will be able to pull the strong bast fibers from the gooey insides of the plant. Using a wooden knife, she’ll scutch it into a more pliable form.
“They start to look like old lady hair,” Erin says, pulling out what could be the remnants from her shower drain.
She twists the fibers with her fingers and works her way down the line to produce a thin yarn. While traditionally this is done by hand, Erin has her own spinning wheel that makes her look like she belongs in a pioneer day festival. From the wheel, the yarn goes to the loom and finally, Erin will have the fabric most crafters start with.
Erin wants to make a reusable bag but admits a dish towel is more realistic. She needs a lot more real estate to produce enough fiber for a whole outfit.
The local nonprofit diverts fabric waste from landfills and educates community members on more sustainable ways to produce and recycle clothing. The store serves as a hub for many of those involved in Bellingham’s textile community. The Ragfinery scene is less like a senior center and more like a moonrise yoga class taught in a food co-op. Many crafters make their own fabric and natural dyes with everything from wool to onion skins. The question no one seems to get tired of asking, “What are you working on?”
Erin began volunteering at the Ragfinery her freshman year. She became such a fixture in the store that when there was an open position, the staff handed her the job. In the fall, Erin will teach a class on processing flax at Ragfinery where she’s been working since April.
“She has a wealth of experience, especially with fiber and textile art, knitting, spinning yarn and felting and she brings a ton of creativity and enthusiasm to our organization,” Ragfinery Manager Shan Sparling says. “We are so glad to have her here.”
Textile seems less like a hobby and more like a tethering point for her seemingly limitless curiosity. It wasn’t until Erin graduated from high school and took a gap year that she realized many people were working in her area of interest.
“I was able to meet a lot of textile artists and I was like, wow, I’m meeting all these people who share my passion, which didn’t happen so much in highschool. Not a lot of 15-year-olds knit,” Erin says.
Erin started raising silkworms last year using a peace silk technique to harvest the silk without killing the worms. The cocoons are a little smaller than a film canister and range in color from yellow to white depending on how much slobber the worm used to build its cocoon. She hopes to combine her silk and linen to make an outfit. Her current project is less about producing on a massive scale and more about her own education in sustainability.
Americans throw away 70 pounds of clothing per person in the landfill every year, enough fabric to build a life size voodoo doll of a snotty kindergartner. That’s up 40 percent from their 1999 results, according to a 2009 study by the EPA. Although thrift shopping has become more popular, the trend hasn’t been able to offset stores like Forever 21 and H&M. Many fashion industries pollute the air, exploit laborers in developing countries and make huge profits from their methods. Fashion is about change, but now instead of changing at the pace of decade or eras, it’s changing at the pace of an Instagram feed.
“By making more conscious decisions about the clothes they buy, how much they buy, where they buy it from, the quality of what they buy and what they do with it when they are done with it, consumers could come close to eliminating this problem,” Shan says.
Erin plans to build a homestead that doubles as an education center and produces sustainable goods. The homestead will teach children about the biological and environmental factors surrounding the plants and fabric while examining the social and political connotations of sustainable production methods.
“When you read stuff about the garment industry it can get depressing, you feel like there’s nothing you can do,” Erin says. She anticipates that experiments like her flax and worms will prove otherwise.
In a time when there are unlimited choices of what to wear, many people equate taste with self-expression. What you choose is who you are. Erin hopes to change this idea from something based completely on aesthetics into a more conscious decision about how and where the garment was made. Real self expression isn’t choosing one shirt off the rack over another, it’s weaving yourself into the actual fibers of what you wear.
Culture now is about borrowing from the past, from those around you and making it your own. Remixing. So why do we accept the most generic, cheaply produced pieces of clothing as fashion? Fighting existing power structures doesn’t always require a banner, sometimes it’s as unglamourous as choosing not to buy something new. “You don’t have to sacrifice style to participate in slow fashion,” Erin says, “I hope people start looking at the labels on their clothes and asking where was this made? What does nylon come from? What does polypropylene come from?”
The amount of work Erin will put into producing her flax garment seems tedious, maybe even masochistic, but that same labor goes into every piece of clothing. Her impact is more than a piece of cloth, it’s an example of how to examine and improve.