At the start of 2020 I had never touched a spinning wheel. They were objects shrouded in folklore, encountered in fairy tales treadled by witches casting sleeping spells or imps spinning straw into gold. I could never have predicted that in 2022 I would be preparing to write my Masters' dissertation on flax and hemp processing equipment, or that I'd spend a significant part of the last two years on a farm growing, harvesting, processing, spinning and weaving flax into linen! A trip to the haberdashery was always a highlight of my job as a circus seamstress. I would catch the metro from Newcastle out to the warehouse in Palmersville industrial estate and linger in the aisles, imagining acrobats in glittering lycra, velvet jackets for hand-made puppets and dip dyed silk suits. Where the fabrics actually came from was a mystery to me, and it wasn't until I read the book Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess that I fully reckoned with the huge and devastating impact the industrial fashion supply chain has on the environment and the communities that serve it. In her eye-opening book Burgess exposes the harmful practices involved in creating and dyeing our clothes, and instead sets out to only wear natural fibres grown, processed, dyed, spun, woven, knitted and sewn within a 150 mile radius of her Californian home.
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