We did it! We grew a field of flax in the centre of Blackburn and turned it into a piece of naturally dyed, handwoven linen fabric. The Homegrown Homespun project is an ongoing collaboration between myself, Justine Aldersey-Williams of The Wild Dyery, and founder of the North West England Fibreshed; Patrick Grant, designer and judge on the BBC's Great British Sewing Bee and director of social enterprise Community Clothing; plus arts commissioning organisation The Super Slow Way, who run the British Textile Biennial. Our aim is to reintroduce flax and woad textile crops into Britain. We hope that demonstrating the connection between fields and fashion will create an opportunity to discuss the otherwise heavy topics of climate change and fast fashion in a creative and positive way. Inspired by a conversation between Patrick and myself over a pizza, the Homegrown Homespun project was conceived just a few hundred yards away from where the adventure was subsequently set to take root, on a disused piece of council land beside the Leeds-Liverpool canal in the centre of Blackburn. When Patrick accepted the offer of a collaboration, he asked what I hoped to achieve. I replied that I wanted to get fibre and dye crops growing again in the UK while helping develop some midscale processing equipment to make local cloth production viable. My suggestion was to grow indigo and flax for a denim mending kit - Patrick's counter offer was to grow jeans! At this time, there was rising awareness of the international Fibershed movement amongst the British fashion industry, and interest in taking textile production back to the soil. Fibershed founder, Rebecca Burgess, had initiated the original 'Grow Your Jeans' project in the USA in 2015 using locally grown cotton, so it was fitting that this collaboration sought to revive our native cellulose crop, flax, which already had thousands of years' worth of almost forgotten heritage on these shores.
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