To reference and adapt Barbara Kingsolver's newest book on localvore living...

Animal.

Vegetable.

Pants.

Or underpants.

Wool? Easy, but scratchy and hot. Linen? Difficult, but surely
softer and cooler, as well as high-class. Linsey-woolsey?
Perhaps a good compromise. Just say goodbye, alas, to comfy
cotton, not to mention practical elastic waistbands. To be brief,
as soon as I stepped into this project my unmentionables became not so,
and indeed a topic of much technical discussion among my circle of
“fiber friends.”

Accounts of “My year of…” (eating only local food, not
shopping, not buying stuff made in China, being celibate, subsisting on
brown rice and miso, living like the Amish without electricity, running
a 26 mile race every week, …) are almost coming together as a new
literary genre. Indeed, I myself was well on my way not long ago
to completing such a marathon—drinking only water for a full twelve
months—when after nine, I quit, treatment for serious illness having so
killed my appetite that I had to resort to the tasty juices of exotic
fruits in order to try not to lose too much weight. (And just
when I was starting to fantasize about my book tour.)

But “localwear”? In March of 2004, I thought to myself,
“Well, I can probably get the clothing made in a year, then that’s what
I’ll wear exclusively for the next year. No problem.”

Almost four years later, I’m still learning how to make stuff, still
assembling the wardrobe, and I’m still wearing mostly clothing that
came from who knows where, at no-doubt horrific environmental and
social costs.

The fact is, of course, that as long as people have stood upright, with
hands free to carry stuff, they’ve carried stuff long distances.
Obsidian from Yellowstone to all over, chert from the Great Lakes to
the Atlantic, salt across the Sahara, silk and tea and pepper from the
mysterious Orient, nutmeg and cloves from the islands of southeast Asia
to Europe… We always have and always will endeavor to acquire
from far away necessary or desirable raw materials and finished goods
that are not available where we live. Nothing inherently wrong in
that. However, as hardly needs to be pointed out after the
frenzied attention given to food in 2007, this trade now has become
extraordinarily senseless, absurd, and destructive, possible only
because of coal, petroleum, and natural gas; and the further lifespan
of our modern sort of global trade is really quite limited. If the
average bite of food travels 1,500 miles (a figure often given) from
field to plate, and dozens of times more calories of fossil fuel energy
are used to produce, process, and move food than the food itself
contains, what can the figures be for the average cotton t-shirt?
No doubt that shirt is racking up some serious frequent flyer miles,
but it’s pretty clear that the jumbo jet is going to crash and the
container ship is going to sink and, as Jim Kunstler never tires of
pointing out, “we’ll have to make other arrangements.”

So, then, making my own clothing from domestic and wild plant
and animal materials raised, grown, or gathered not too far away from
home, processing them here, and assembling them into clothing using
every possible sort of textile art. Here’s a list: sheep, llama,
alpaca, Angora goat, Cashmere goat, and angora rabbit; flax; common
milkweed, dogbane, and stinging nettle; cow, goat, sheep, and horse;
moose, deer, bear, coyote, beaver, skunk, woodchuck, muskrat, otter,
fisher, and mink. In practice, I don’t much care for trapping, so
that has knocked out much of the last group, except as road
kills. Here’s another list: finger-twisted and thigh-rolled
cordage, spinning with a drop spindle, and spinning with a spinning
wheel; felting by rolling, and felting by rubbing; knitting;
crocheting; weaving: tablet weaving, inkle weaving, backstrap loom,
warp-weighted loom, rigid heddle loom, and floor loom; braiding, with
nearly countless subdivisions; sprang; bark tanning and brain
tanning. And another: hand cards, drum carder, picker; Viking
combs, English combs, paddle combs, and diz; rippling comb, flax brake,
skutching sword, hackles, and distaff; drop spindle, spinning wheel,
lazy kate, niddynoddy, skein winder, and ball winder; and knitting
needles, crochet hooks, and a fascinating collection of tools for
weaving. Then there are madder, yellow bedstraw, woad, Japanese
indigo, weld, goldenrod, tansy, hollyhock, dyer’s coreopsis, sumac
leaves, hemlock bark, and lichens.

And so: knitted wool hat, felted wool hat, felted llama fiber hat,
felted wool vest with deer antler buttons, felted wool/mohair coat
(dyed shades of blue) with cherry buttons, knitted gray-brown and blue
wool sweater, knitted and felted wool mittens, two pairs of wool/mohair
socks (one pair blue, the other blue and green); all of the yarn
handspun, almost all from hand-prepared (washed, carded) fiber, and the
dyeing done with plants grown in our garden and with plants gathered
nearby. Miles more handspun yarn, waiting to be turned into
something. A braintanned buckskin shirt and buckskin pants, from
deer shot in the area. Eight deerskins tanned with staghorn sumac
leaves, not yet made into finished items of clothing or accessories.

All of this takes rather a lot of time: starting from the raw
fleece(s), and teaching myself all the skills as I went, my first
knitted hat took 27 hours to make; my first knitted sweater (including
dyeing some of the yarn), 147 hours; my first pair of socks, 49 hours;
my felted vest, 42 hours, and my felted coat, 59 hours. Making
buckskin pants, starting with five raw white-tailed deer skins, 70
hours, and the buckskin shirt, 35 hours – and I’d already made lots of
buckskin before these particular projects.

Beyond all these and the rest of the localwear not mentioned
(not nearly enough, really, to live in for a year in all weather
conditions) are the numerous articles made from non-local materials
(for example, cotton warp and weft for tablet weaving) purchased to
speed up the learning of various techniques before launching into a
project with, say, some of the precious handspun. These lists
show the complexly woven and richly textured fabric, as it were, of
clothing production. The cultural heritage of all peoples,
knitted together to make shelter for the body. Human history
reaching back thousands of years, past even the domestication of
animals in the Middle East around 8000 BCE, to the Palaeolithic or
earlier, whenever it was that humans first figured out how to spin
plant fibers and to throw the rough skins of animals over their
shoulders. To explore this is a rediscovery of culture, and
indeed, a rediscovery of being human.

It's not that we’ve entirely forgotten how to make clothing for
ourselves. After all, who doesn’t know a knitter or a crocheter
who can turn out a hat in short order? Cozy handmade scarves are
all over the place. Handmade mittens and sweaters and socks
aren’t uncommon. These skills are not as moribund as, say,
coopering, cobbling, thatching, or wheelwrighting. Modern
manufacturers like Ashford, Glimakra, Louët, Majacraft, Schacht,
Leclerc, and Harrisville make all the tools necessary for the fiber
artisan (the last, in an old textile mill in New Hampshire, the one
before in Quebec—both making handlooms). In Glover, not 15 miles
from where I live, is a fellow who makes new spinning wheels in his
home workshop, and can repair to working condition any old wheel
brought to him. In Saxtons River, Tom Golding makes spindles,
spinning wheels, and looms of stunning beauty and quality.
Interweave Press, in Loveland, Colorado, publishes a steady stream of
top-quality books on all of the textile arts. They publish
magazines, like Spin-Off, and Handwoven. There’s the Handweavers
Guild of America, with its magazine, Shuttle Spindle &
Dyepot. Web sites abound: www.weavershand.com,
www.braidershand.com, braintan.com, and numerous others. There
are “sheep and wool festivals” in Vermont in September, in Rhinebeck
(New York) in October, in New Hampshire in May, and one of the biggest,
in Maryland, also in May, among others. In Vermont, everybody,
whether in city, town, or country, can easily find someone with a sheep
flock and extra wool to get rid of. In short, for making our own
clothing the materials are available, the tools are available, the
information is available, and with a little bit of inquiry one can find
teachers eager to pass on the know-how.

The Zen of fleece washing

Any working with raw materials brings about transformations; that is one of the great
pleasing things about starting from beginnings. There is no
easier transformation to enjoy in the making of clothing than simply
washing a sheep fleece. Off it comes in the spring, under the skilled
blades of the shearer, and the naked animal runs off into the pasture.
Its covering then goes into a big tub (I use the utility sink in one of
our bathrooms, and in fact divide the fleece, doing small batches at a
time), full of very hot water and lots of liquid dish soap.
Gentle sloshing back and forth, and the water is astoundingly filthy.
Think about it: that sheep hasn’t washed its hair in at least a
year. The wool is full of dirt, sheep sweat, waxes, oils, sheep
dandruff, sheep urine, balls of sheep poop, and countless bits of
vegetation (including, at the worst, burdock burrs). After 10
minutes of soaking and gentle movement, the water is drained, and the
tub refilled, as before, for a second washing. While that is
going on, I go through the whole batch of once-washed wool, opening up
with my fingers any tight or snarly spots in the wool. Then the
second wash bath (much cleaner than the first; it may be re-used as the
first wash bath for a second bath), and then two rinse baths, to get
all the soap out, with water temperature kept consistent
throughout. In the end after letting the wool drain, I lay it out
on towels to dry. It is beautiful and ready for making into
something to keep a body cozy.

Once there were factories

So why are our dressers, wardrobes, and closets full of clothing
of mysterious provenance? In large part for the same reason our
pantries and refrigerators are full of 1,500-mile (often 15,000-mile)
food: cheap and easy. The fact is, Americans pretty much haven’t
gotten their clothing from anywhere but a factory – and these days a
distant factory – for at least a century and a half. The
Industrial Revolution, with inventions like the spinning jenny, the
spinning mule, the power loom, and the company town; the complex
harnessing of water in favorable British and New England sites and the
coal-fired steam engine – these took the making of clothing out of the
home and the small workshop and into the factory. The
inventiveness, persistence, vision, and enterprise of men like James
Hargeaves, Richard Arkwright, Eli Whitney, and Francis Cabot Lowell
brought inexpensive cotton goods to all. The story is rivetingly
told in books like Big Cotton: How a Humble Fiber Created Fortunes,
Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map, and A New Order of
Things: How the Textile Industry Transformed New England.

But the factories are mostly long gone. By the late 19th
century they were departing New England rapidly, in order to be closer
to the sources of raw material in the South, and the industry has
almost completely collapsed there now, too. Here and there are
survivors: for example, Green Mountain Spinnery, in Putney, producing a
wide variety of beautiful yarns, and Cabot Hosiery Mills, making “Darn
Tough” socks, in Northfield, Vermont. But go to Lowell,
Massachusetts: the Merrimack River, once powering with its water one
after another after another brick factory building with thousands of
workers toiling away, producing cotton and woolen fabric to clothe
millions around the world (by 1850, an astounding 65,000 miles of
cotton cloth was manufactured in Lowell alone) ended its work
half a century ago. You can walk into the American Textile
History Museum, and the Boott Cotton Mill at Lowell National Historic
Park; you can see the history and the machinery of the Industrial
Revolution laid out in front of you as educational exhibits.

It probably isn’t reasonable to imagine that we will all clothe
ourselves once again in homespun; there are too many of us. But I would
like to suggest that a revival of both local handwork and regional
industrial production will be not only practically necessary (as costs
of long-distance shipment rise steadily with the cost of petroleum),
but that it is, right now, spiritually necessary. I believe that
a society or culture that doesn’t make most of its own stuff is a
culture in decline, an attenuated, weak, impoverished culture.
There is little real satisfaction in consumption; there is great and
genuine satisfaction in production.

Work with the hands is soul-strengthening. Done in company
with others, it is a rich source of companionship. Some friends
and I, here in Craftsbury, host through the winter in our homes, one or
two Saturdays a month, “Crafternoons”—an open invitation to anyone to
bring projects to work on, food to eat, and conversation to
share. It is perhaps not really necessary to point out the
pleasure in this sort of thing. It is worth adding, however,
that, far from being drudgery, fine handwork can be a supreme
intellectual challenge. Really understanding what’s going on with
tablet weaving, for example, is as difficult as anything I’ve ever
undertaken. Burrowing into the depths of even this one subject
brings awe at the ingenuity, the cleverness, the technical excellence
of my pre-industrial predecessors: modern machines are not even capable
of doing what knowledgeable and clever human fingers can do; they do
nothing more than work very, very fast.

(Part 2 of Jeff Bickart’s “localwear” experience will appear in our summer 2008 issue.)

Jeff
Bickart lives with his family in Craftsbury, and teaches fiber arts,
botany, ornithology, and organic crop production 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.