In our Spring 2008 issue Vermont Commons published Part I of Jeff Bickart’s article on “Localwear,” in which the Craftsbury-based author described his quest, begun in 2004, to learn to make clothing “from domestic and wild plant and animal materials raised, grown, or gathered not too far away from home.” Bickart wrote, “Burrowing into the depths of . . . this subject brings awe at the ingenuity, the cleverness, the technical excellence of my pre-industrial predecessors; modern machines are not capable of doing what knowledgeable and clever human fingers can do.” Here, we present the second and concluding part of his article.

Washed wool is not really ready to spin.  No matter how careful the washing, inevitably there are clumps and matted fibers.  These can be teased open with the fingers, or with an evil-looking tool, armed with hundreds of steel spikes, called a picker.  Then the wool needs to be combed or carded.  The former is the older process, the latter the newer.  Both are straightforward, and with both the purpose is to open the wool further, allow more “trash” (bits of vegetation and dirt) to fall out, and organize the fibers.  Processing before spinning can easily take one-fourth of the entire time needed for a project. Many, or most, owners of fiber animals choose to send their fiber out to be processed.  There are a number of small mills in the U.S. that will do small batches of sheep wool, llama fiber, or whatever, returning to the owner roving (for spinning), batts (for felting), or finished yarn.  

How about a local textile industry?

Is it unreasonable to imagine the redevelopment of regional textile industries powered by the source of energy – water – that originally drove the settlement patterns of, for example, New England?  And to imagine those industries sourcing their raw materials regionally, as well?  

Not that we don’t have to proceed carefully.  No one, of course, would want to see Vermont’s hills once again 80-percent deforested to support vast flocks of sheep. No one wants to see the harsh disruption of riverine ecosystems that accompanied the intensive development of water power, and no one wants to wear wool year-round, anyway.

But is it not simply responsible to vigorously investigate what we could be producing here?  Flax and linen, for one thing.  The United States produces zero fiber flax commercially.  The industry (not that there ever was much of one; we lacked the specialized skills needed, and which still make Europe a center of linen production) is dead.  As soon as the cotton gin was invented, making it possible to quickly clean great amounts of raw cotton (and feasible to plant vast acreages, then “necessary” to import slave labor), fiber flax acreage began to decline, and linen began to vanish.  Flax processing is more difficult, time-consuming, and labor intensive than cotton.  But it’s a great fiber, and linen is wonderful.  

In our living room is a spinning wheel, a flax wheel, with the year that it was made, 1844, carved into it.  It has been in my wife’s family since then.  We have a square yard of linen woven from thread spun on that wheel by my wife’s great, great, great grandmother.  It seems unlikely that anyone will bother to save for that long the t-shirt made in China that I am, unfortunately, wearing now.  

The flax plant produces what is called a “bast fiber”: fiber from the stems of herbaceous plants.  Cotton is a seed fiber.  Flax grows well here: this past summer I planted my first crop, 225 square feet. I pulled it up in September, and it’s now in my barn waiting for warmer weather so that I can begin the first step of processing it – retting, to weaken the connection between the fiber and the stem. There are four more bast fiber plants here, three of them wild – but calling for selection and the development of cultivars – that warrant investigation. They are nettle, dogbane, milkweed, and hemp, and they grow – well, like weeds.

And this is another example of how local common sense is made impossible by being a part of the United States: hemp, Cannabis sativa, is a fiber plant of such great excellence that is madness not to grow it.  It thrives on poor ground and under adverse conditions; it produces an enormous quantity of fiber.  It could be an important crop for Vermont farmers. But anybody who tries to grow it will end up in federal prison, and likely lose all his property, because some cultivars have been developed for high levels of THC. But as Michael Pollan describes in The Botany of Desire, marijuana (the drug plant) and hemp (the fiber plant), although the same species, are not at all the same thing.
Perhaps we will soon come to our senses.  There is now legislation introduced in Vermont (H. 267) to allow the growing of industrial hemp in the state, and there is movement on this issue in other states as well, especially North Dakota.

Growing colors

A person ought to be stuck dumb with admiration every time he walks past a plant.  Here’s just one reason: magical hidden color. In my garden for the past four seasons I have grown Polygonum tinctorium – Japanese Indigo, or Dyer’s Knotweed.  A sprawling plant with fleshy stems and pointed-oval leaves, it contains within a secret: brilliant, luminescent blue that can be released through a fairly simple procedure that takes about four hours.  The blue produced is the same as that derived from, for example, the classic subtropical Indigo (a legume, Indigofera suffruticosa) and the northern European plant, Woad (a mustard, Isatis tinctoria, which I also grow).  Japanese Indigo is a close relative (congeneric, in fact) of the obnoxious, ineradicable, invasive Japanese Knotweed (often called bamboo), but is itself a tender annual that dies at the first hard frost. The dye precursor is in the leaves of the plant.  Started indoors in early spring, it is set out in June, and soon takes off. The leaves may be harvested once the plant has put on some growth; new side shoots will appear at every point from which a leaf has been plucked.  The dyeing procedure is best described in the book, A Dyer’s Garden, by Rita Buchanan.  You may dye washed wool, skeins of yarn, or whole pieces of finished cloth.  The stunning magic is at the end: the skein of yarn is lifted from the dyebath; it is yellow; then, seconds after contacting the air, it flashes over to a deep, rich, jaw-dropping blue.

I grow other classic dye plants: madder, weld (combined, in succession, with indigo, a fantastic green is obtained), yellow bedstraw.  But it’s not necessary to cultivate to get color: the commonest roadside plants may give pleasing results: from goldenrod one can easily obtain good yellows, for example.  Natural dyes can, with careful combining, give an astonishing range of colors, shades, hues – see Natural Dyes, by Gwen Fereday, to have your socks knocked off – and they all work well together.  

Local economics

I do not wish to dwell on the environmental and social costs of our current way of clothing ourselves.  Cotton (of which the United States is one of the world’s largest producers) is drenched in insecticides, herbicides, defoliants, and fertilizers; despite being a commercial crop with high water requirements, it is commonly grown in arid areas, requiring irrigation.  In places like Uzbekistan, its production involves the use of forced child labor.  And here, cotton is artificially cheap, its production subsidized by the federal government through the Farm Bill, providing hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the biggest growers (and depressing the international price, helping to keep millions of poor cotton farmers, in Africa, for example, in poverty).

Making clothes locally or regionally faces one of the same challenges as local food: higher cost.  We’ve gotten used to cheap imports for our basic essentials, and we’ve gotten used to having extra money for… extras.  One hundred years ago, average people weren’t spending $7,000 and more on toys – recreational equipment like snow machines, ATVs, jet skis, powerboats, or other non-essentials like $3,000 outdoor grills, or travel by air across continents.  Even the poorest Americans now expect to be able to do this, even when it is only possible by amassing staggering credit card debt. Income at one time was consumed in the purchase of food, clothing, shelter, fuel, and so on.  We’ve also gotten used to having lots of clothing.  There’s probably no way to get around the problem of higher cost for local products.  But we can make other decisions about where we spend our money, and, of course, it costs very little to knit a hat oneself.

Felting

By far the easiest way of making big pieces of cloth pretty quickly is by felting.  This is not the “felted knit” that has recently become so common – knitting some garment extra extra large, then putting it into the washing machine for a few hours to shrink to the right size (one hopes) by application of hot water, soap, and agitation.  But there are some similarities: the hot water, soap, and agitation. This is making felt as the Mongolians make it for house walls.  All that is required is wool, water, and work, and this is how I made the felt for the vest and the coat mentioned above.  

The washed and carded wool is laid out in two or three layers, oriented at right angles to each other, on a piece of cotton sheet – for the garments above, taking an area of about 42” x 65”.  The wool is sprayed with hot, soapy water, and then the wool and sheet together are rolled up around a heavy iron bar, and secured with cord.  The bundle is rolled back and forth on a floor for a couple hours, from time to time unrolling it and flipping or rotating the felting wool.  Within the first ten minutes of work, the fibers have begun to tangle enough that the wool can be moved as a unit without its falling apart.  Continuing the rolling, moistening the felt each time the bundle is undone, makes the felt more solid, and shrinks it, so that in the end it is about 25 percent to 30 percent smaller in each dimension.  

After a while, the felt is worked in a large tub of hot water, to shrink and strengthen it further. This is called “fulling.”  At the end, the piece is rinsed to remove the soap, and set out to dry.  It can then easily be cut to make pieces for a garment pattern; and the edges don’t come apart, as when cutting woven fabric.  Felt is generally dense, and it doesn’t drape all that well, unless made very thin, but it is exceptionally warm.

Tanning

What else could we do here?  Well, I have written, so far, only of fiber, animal and plant.  There are also skins to be had.  At one time, the Northeast was rich with tanneries, making leather. There was, of course, a cost, with hemlock forests leveled for their tannin-rich bark.  However, we do produce a lot of dead cows around here, and thousands of deer skins are just chucked into the woods every fall.  Tanning is hard work, but there again is the choice: re-learn the skills and do for ourselves, or be helpless consumers of other people’s labor.  

Now if you want to talk about obscure clothing arts, consider this making of leather.  It would take far too many words to describe here just how to do it, but with know-how, a few simple tools, some brains (literally—but there are substitutes that work), and serious hard work, one can transform a stinky, bloody deer skin into soft, breathable, pleasingly smoke-scented, luxuriant buckskin.  Start to finish, it takes eight to 10 hours of work to do one hide.  The same process can be used for most other animal skins and furs.

Once again, the pleasure of personally turning raw materials into an excellent piece of clothing, but here also the pleasure of making something good out of what is, unfortunately, usually considered waste.  Very few hunters want the skins of the animals they shoot, and if one finds the guys who in the fall are butchering deer or moose for hunters (since most hunters, apparently, don’t do this either), one can generally get all the skins (and leg bones, for other purposes) that one wants, since they’ll probably be tossed out anyway.  One contact, in one fall, can secure enough skins to clothe one’s family.  And skins can also be “bark tanned,” producing a typical grain-on leather perfect for belts, sheaths, quivers, and so on.  This process is in fact easier than “brain tanning,” and I have done it with both deer skins and the skins of stillborn calves from a nearby dairy farm.     

There is a peacefulness to be found in this work.  After a few hours of initial frustration in learning, spinning becomes a meditative pleasure, the rhythm of foot and hands working together, almost without thought, the wool sliding through the fingers, the wheel turning and the flyer a blur, the yarn filling the bobbin.  Or knitting needles and that ball of handspun: the simplest tools possible, just sticks and strings making loops one after another, drawing them through each other, something to wear taking shape.  Or the flash of the shuttle, back and forth, the harnesses moving up and down, the thump of the beater setting into place the last weft pick, a broad piece of cloth forming row by row in front of the weaver.  

In this world that daily seems to be falling apart, when bad news surrounds and engulfs us, this return to older, slower ways of doing things – not to “simplicity,” because these ways are fabulously complex—offers refuge, and satisfaction, and the feeling that one can actually accomplish something, at home, that is entirely good, and necessary, and, in its quiet way, absolutely essential.

Jeff Bickart lives with his family in Craftsbury and teaches fiber arts, botany, ornithology, and organic crop practices at Sterling College. He may be reached at jbickart@sterlingcollege.edu, where you can obtain references on the textile arts as well as (free) seeds for Japanese indigo and woad.