Blog post written by Katie Pollard @Borrowed_Colour
This time last year during Fashion Revolution week, we made a visit to the North West of England, to attend an annual event held by Sewing Cafe Lancaster at the Storey Gallery.
We were invited to come and create ‘Other World’s’, joining a range of speakers and workshop leaders to imagine alternate, improved versions of our textile (and more general) futures and to learn about the work of several local groups, businesses and artists exploring these themes.
This included looking to the past to uncover stories through song, imagining alternative ‘parallel presents’ and hopping in a time-machine to our imagined better futures.
Before delving into this, I’d like to explain a little about the event hosts and the various exciting projects that they are involved in.
As described on the website “Sewing Cafe Lancaster is a grassroots project that advocates for an ethical textile industry and regenerative textile practices”. There is an inspiring team behind the project, most of whom we were lucky enough to meet and spend some time with over the weekend and the passion for their cause was clear.
Kiki Callahan
We met creative problem solver Kiki Callahan who has been helping to coordinate the Fashion Revolution Week event with Sewing Cafe Lancaster for the last few years. She is interested in perceptions of waste; and is Co-director of Relic Plastic, a local plastics recycling company that provides a range of services such as plastic shredding, product design, sheet materials for purchase and product manufacturing. The company also works within the community and education sector to raise awareness of waste and consumption and teach people about their process.
Victoria Frausin
Victoria Frausin is the coordinator of the Sewing Cafe. She is currently studying for a PhD at Lancaster University in Waste Colonialism and is a community artist and activist. She wants to “challenge our reliance on exploitative and environmentally damaging mass produced and disposable textiles, teaching people to once again value clothes as our grandparents did”. One of the ways she does this is by engaging people in social textile activities whereby people are able to learn new skills in sewing and mending as well as connecting with other local people. One such project is a weekly sewing circle for refugees and asylum seekers.
She is an independent researcher for Textile Dynamics lab, which is a collaborative project working with people from Lancaster University, a councillor from Lancaster City Council, as well as several other individuals. Victoria told us that the project has been set up to tackle the issue of textile waste, saying ‘we are producing so much waste so fast, that our clothes spend more time in landfill than they do in our wardrobes..so what can we do about it?’ The idea is to encourage researchers to understand more about what is happening with textile waste – where it is coming from and where it ends up. She states ‘There is no waste in nature – it is manmade’ and explains that this is the basis for the work of the group.
She is also the instigator of Sew and Sow libraries, a project which initially began during Covid19, and was a collaboration between the Sewing Cafe Lancaster and Food Futures which involved the installation of several wooden boxes around Lancaster which contain both haberdashery items and plant seeds.
Virginia Edwards
We heard a little more about this project from Virginia Edwards who, with an interest in ‘mending as an act of revolution’ has taken the project under her wing. Her husband hand-made the boxes and maintains these when they need repairs. The idea of the project is to enable people to share mending and gardening items locally and people can add to or take from the boxes whenever they have something they need or something they would like to donate. Many of the boxes are self sufficient, each has a ‘guardian’ to check on it. If people have larger amounts that they would like to donate they can contact Virginia who will go and collect and store these extra items. The idea is that people can share surplus, and it gives people the ability to get just a little of what they might need, rather than having to buy a larger amount of something they don’t really need.
Enda O’Regan
Enda O’Regan introduced the Textile Care Collective, another project set up by the Sewing Cafe in 2020. The idea of this initiative is to raise awareness around the processes involved when making an item of clothing, and to connect people to the source of their clothing. They brought a group of local makers, knitters, spinners and farmers together to consider how connections between these people could be strengthened, how people can work together and what impact this may have. One of the aims of the project is to create a brand which celebrates local, ecological making processes. Edna explained that it is important that ‘people can recognize each stage of the process – can see exactly what happens – it is amazingly revealing the time it takes to make things’
The idea is to give both the makers involved in the project and consumers a greater appreciation of these processes – and also to highlight the connection between soil and textiles – looking closely at the full cycle, right through from the animal or fibre that a textile originates from, to the end product.
Enda explains that one of the benefits of forming the group has been the knowledge exchange. Each person has their own areas of expertise. And they are enjoying learning from one another. They have already had a workshop on preparing and washing fleece and plan to hold future spinning and felting workshops.
One of the group members keeps a small amount of sheep including a South Down called Noddy. A couple of the collective went to meet the sheep and bought back some fleeces that had been sitting in the barn not being used. The fleece was washed and prepared by one person, spun by two spinners and naturally dyed by others using carefully foraged or grown dyes from Claver Hill community garden as well as food waste. They have also worked with Alpaca fibre sourced from Ripley School Lancaster and other local sites.
So far the group have created 3 signature garments using these fibres; a top, a pair of gloves and a cowl designed by Victoria Frausin. All use local wool, labour and plant dyes.
The end aim is to sell the products and the money would go to three different care structures including charities which support the homeless, refugees and women seeking refuge.
Katrina Burnish
Katrina Burnish told us all about her experience with plant dyes and how she and others have developed The Natural Dye Project at Sewing Café. It was interesting to hear her speak about her journey into natural dyes. Delving into one of her old college books from years before, she found some natural dye samples and was surprised to find that their colour was still bold and impressive. This sparked Katrina’s interest and it kickstarted a big learning journey. She said that seeing these samples got her thinking in ‘this massive evangelical way’. She thought ‘This is it, we’ve cracked it, this could change our whole thinking about textiles and colour, let’s do it as much as we can and learn as much as we can’.
It was only as the group started to experiment with natural dyes that they found that the slowness of the process altered their thinking. She went on to say ‘no-one is ready to get rid of chemical dyeing’ but that perhaps their application is better suited to individual and small group use.
So this is the direction that the project has taken. It is about working together locally, being ever inquisitive, delighting in process and the local environment and embracing imperfection and change.
Katrina talked about the concept of Wabi sabi, a Japanese philosophy which is accepting of transience and imperfection. She sees it as meaningful to their work with natural dyes, and I can understand why, knowing of the unpredictable and in some cases ephemeral nature of plant dyes. Some plants and processes are more long-lasting than others. A memorable example of Katrina’s take on this concept for me was her suggestion of embroidering into a Hapazome print. Hapazome is a hammering technique whereby plant colour is transferred to cloth. This process is super satisfying (we enjoyed having a go at Katrina’s workshop), yet has a more ephemeral finish. Understanding that at some point the design will fade and change, Katrina offered a creative solution to prolong the life of the design, whereby the stitching remains, offering a trace of what was there before. Rather than seeing the shorter lasting effects of some natural dyes as a problem, Katrina talked about adding to naturally dyed cloth over time, as one thing fades, simply give it a new lease of life by adding a fresh plant print or dye, creating a continually shifting textile with a personal backstory which we in turn feel a greater connection to.
Another idea which Katrina mentioned which I’d love to see a modern day adaptation of, was the Tudor sleeve. At this time women wore bodices with separate detachable sleeves. Tudor women may well have kept the bodice throughout their lives as they could be adjusted. The sleeves were the statement piece, which changed the outfit.
Again the message is.. how do we keep our textiles going? How can we keep changing them and adding to them, keeping them in circulation.
There have been various community growing and skill-building projects and the project now has 6 growing beds at Claver Hill Community Garden. Two of these are demonstration beds which anyone can access to learn about dye plants and what can be grown. One of the key things they are keen to learn is which plants fair best in the Lancashire climate.
There was a great growing tip from Claver community garden. They have built a box from pallets at the centre of their polytunnel. They fill this with fresh horse manure and it heats the polytunnel. This means they can start seeds of in February, which are initially put on top of the horse manure box to sprout, and then moved to a nearby table to continue growing.
As Katrina talked I could relate to so much of what she was saying; the questions and dilemmas that arise through the learning process, but also the great joy that it can bring to be slowing down, connecting to your local environment and engaging in slow natural process. It conjured up great images for me when Katrina spoke of ‘searching out some absolutely delicious pigment from the hedgerow or your garden’. She talked about how experimenting is a big part of natural dyeing and described it as a journey during which you are ‘thinking , seeing and just totally delighting in your environment’
She spoke about the use of mordants which are used to pretreat fabric to help to fix natural dyes making the colour more long-lasting. Often metal salts are used for this purpose, and this as Katrina mentions, poses a dilemma. Should we be bringing chemicals into the mix, when working with natural dyes? On the one hand, fabric can be dyed with no pre-treatment, however this in some cases would mean using far more plant material and achieving less bright / shorter lived colours. On the other hand if you add a small amount of mordant, this would prolong the life of the dye and give richer colours. There are of course natural alternatives for preparing cloth, but these too can come with their own predicaments. As Katrina rightly pointed out, there are no right or wrong answers, but the important thing is to ‘be mindful about what you are doing and why you are doing it, and stay open to new things that you can try’. Aluminium lactate for instance is a fairly new mordant offering, which could be used in place of aluminum acetate, which is a by-product of the sugar and starch industries, that would otherwise be thrown away.
Katrina was dressed in a jumper and trousers that were dyed with onion skins and avocado stones for the event and talked about her personal dream ‘that I can walk from my house to town in a full naturally dyed outfit. Shoes may be a problem – but I’m on it’ At this point she showed us some felted slippers made from raw fleece that she has been working on. We look forward to hearing about her progress!