Textiles and Bicycles

I may not be down with made in China, but it seems made in Turkey is getting better everyday. A giant Turkish textile mill, Bossa, which supplies brands like H&M, Calvin Klein, Habitual and Nudie Jeans with organic cotton and denim is expanding its eco-friendly operations. It’s investing like crazy to make organics 10% of its total production and will start including fabrics from linen, hemp, soybean and wool.

I actually always notice that H&M’s organic clothing is generally (or possibly always) made in Turkey, as is some of their conventional clothing as well.

What’s interesting is it seems that Turkish mills acknowledge that they can’t keep up with India and China in terms of price, so they’re consciously trying to cater to higher aesthetic and moral values to give them a leg up — or at least a place to stand. I’ll take that. While I don’t think “green” is about shopping, I think it’s promising that “eco-friendly” is becoming a strong enough value on which even huge, global operations can begin to stand on in a real way. It’s even more promising that that these mills can carve out an environmentally and economically sustainable niche against the almighty price signal delivered so powerfully by the often irresponsible textile production practices in both India and China. It’s as though in the clamor to prove that just because it’s more expensive doesn’t mean it’s better, we forgot that if it’s really cheap it’s probably for a reason…

Aside from the labor concerns across the developing world, there are some interesting facts I found that really drive home how destructive conventional cotton production can be not only to the environment, but to human health. These can probably transcend cotton production into many realms of manufacturing.

In the United States, 25% of all pesticides used are applied to cotton.

Five of the top nine pesticides used on cotton are cancer-causing chemicals (cyanazine, dicofol, naled, propargite, and trifluralin).

In India, 91% of male cotton farm workers regularly exposed to pesticides eight hours or more per day experience some type of health disorder, including chromosomal aberrations, cell death and cell decay

Too bad all of these negative externalities, like pollution, environmental injustice upon the globe’s poor, and the true costs of transport are still just that: external, and not factored into the price. Somehow it’s the organic stuff that’s more expensive.  Damn economies of scale.

with Mona and Tim.

Mona got to knit. She only has 4 hexagons left before she is released from the prison of gift knitting.

Tim had to work. His prison of brief-writing is far worse, I feel.

So this was the instead-of-going-to-the-festival activity, and I have to say I was pretty pleased. I also have decided that the shared open space of the city is way underrated. I’ve been pining over houses in the area with private outdoor space and even went to look at some apartments in the neighborhood so we can move yet again (in the last 2 years I’ve moved 4 times — no joke…I was in school for most of that, but still…it’s no doubt some sort of disorder). In the meantime, I’ve been ignoring the fantastic resource that is Lincoln Park only 1 short block away. It’s got playgrounds, a makeshift dog run, beautiful mature trees to sit under and an open center square where people can sit (on these strange contraptions called benches, that in fact don’t always come with a pee-fresh scent) or fly kites. Today was the perfect day to fly kites and the perfect day for a wool festival, which together reminded me of the most memorable kite-flying experience I’ve ever had.

Uttarayan: the kite festival in Gujurat, India.

This a flickr group for photos of the festival.

Several years ago, after I graduated from college and worked like a dog to earn money, I traveled through India for 6 months with a couple of friends. It was one of those honest, completely for real life-changing experiences. As someone that had previously very uncomfortably resided somewhere between being Indian and American (and maybe still does), it kind of taught me I’d probably always be neither…or both — depending on who you talked to. Anyone with any interest in that subject of the Indian-American experience would be well-advised to read any of the works by Jhumpa Lahiri, the most famous of which is probably the Namesake. She has a new book out called Unaccustomed Earth (as in the new land on which the immigrant and his/her children steps is unaccustomed earth), which I have yet to read but hope to when it comes out in paperback.

One of the stops during the 6 months was to the home of one of my aunts in Baroda (now Vadodara), which is about 6 hours by train from Mumbai. We had already visited her before earlier in the trip, but one of my travel mates and I made a special trip out just for the kite festival. This was a last minute decision. As a result, we didn’t have train tickets. If I remember correctly, a Mumbai-Vadodara train was conveniently waiting on one of the tracks and the “line” (by which I mean clusterfuck of people) to get tickets was outrageous. So we got on in the hopes that we could just buy tickets on the train.

How do you say “shit for brains” in Hindi?

At first it was fine…it seemed too easy. We got seats in the chair car, where there are reserved seats, unlike the 2nd or 3rd class cars where people pack in so tight it defies laws of physics. The conductor even came around and kind of laughed off our little crime of trying to ride for free by actually letting us ride for free. We were just thinking about how much we loved India, when we stop at a station. And a flood of people get on the train. Including a psychotic man yelling at the top of his lungs, “GET OUT OF OUR SEATS!!!” over and over and over again. In retrospect I can understand the frustration of having tickets for a reserved coach and having some freeloading, entitled American kids take your seats. But he was frighteningly angry from the get go. We got up, only to realize that there were no seats anywhere on the train to be had and the entire train ride would be spent standing…standing packed tight in a hot train with hundreds of other people. So tight if you fainted no one would notice. Because there wouldn’t be space for you to fall or even lean differently. So tight I could have gone the entire ride suspended in the air just by the force of other bodies packed against me. The worst part was we didn’t even know the train’s schedule. Was this a “superfast” train that would get us there in 6 hours? Or a simply “fast” train that would take significantly longer.

Needless to say it was an interesting mix of being a nightmare and unbelievably hillarious. We got there in 6 hours by the grace of God (and for free I might add).

And quickly turned our attention to the kite festival, which I think is kind of a misnomer. It’s a kite war fought from the rooftops of the city. The kites are not elaborate designs, they are utilitarian weapons. The goal of each kite-wielding warrior is to “cut down” another kite, meaning you fly your kite in such a way that your kite will bring down another kite by either cutting the string of the kite or capturing the kite. My family must have bought hundreds upon hundreds of simple rhomboid kites in preparation. We had neighbors over to eat and drink and fly kites on the roof. It was amazing to see the sky full of kites and the rooftops across the city full of people in celebratory moods. Until the bandages and hand wraps came out and the blood started flowing. My cousin’s hands were bleeding!! Why? Because they coat the strings with powdered glass. Better to cut your kite with (my dear).

Amazing.

It was possible to get string that was not coated in glass, and that was what I flew my one kite with.

I am no kite-warrior.

I later told my aunt about our train experience and she was appalled. She laughed about it later, but I think her suspicions that raising kids in America turns them crazy were confirmed. All in all my friend and I both got into the competitive game of trying to capture people’s kites. I never quite got the technique down, but the event itself was such a beautiful display of citywide social interaction.

I learned some new things today that I’d like to share.  Since today is a day of lists here’s another short one:

#1.  If you live in DC, you’re in luck.  I just found some seriously local yarn sold at the Proper Topper in Georgetown (but not at the Dupont Circle location).  It’s made from a sheep farm in Loudoun County, Virginia, which thanks to good ole SUBurban sprawl is now considered just over the river.  As far as farming is concerned, it’s definitely among the most local to DC you could possibly get, unless you managed to squeeze a sheep in the small backyard of your rowhouse.  In any case, I forget the name of the stuff and I didn’t get to check out all of the colors, but I’ll be trying it out at some point and will share more then.  It’s exciting to find a yarn finally that’s truly locally sourced. Yay!

#2.  My dad told me a lovely story today about cooking rice.  Apparently back in the day, while growing up in Northern India, they would make rice by boiling it in water and then draining the starch-laden water, much the same as we do with pasta.  The way I’ve seen most folks make rice these days is to use the exact amount of water necessary leaving nothing to drain.  The way my father used to do it eliminates most of the starch in white rice, making it much healthier. Now the best part is that they then used the starchy water to starch their laundry! They would rinse their clean clothes in the starchy water and then hang them out to dry…presto, starched clothes.  Spray starch is rendered useless and the earth can smile.  or at least crack one for a sec.

How’s that for some recycling?

In 2003 I backpacked through India and Nepal for 6 months with 2 fantastic friends. I like to think of myself as a bit of a photographer, having studied black and white darkroom photography, gone to portfolio reviews and all that. But in reality I’m not much of one–or I’m a painfully slow one. Since it took me 5 years to have these slides printed. I’m actually going back to India for a cousin’s wedding in a couple of weeks, so these photos have really re-excited me. While they have nothing to do with knitting, I do think that having a knitting blog has brought back my photography obsession. I’m going to have to get into the self-portraiture thing for my FOs from now on. In that spirit, I thought I would share some photos I’m proud of:

Boys in Kanya Kumari–the southernmost tip of India where the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal meet.

A soldier at the India/Pakistan border, just north of Amritsar in the state of Punjab.

Chained elephants for a New Year’s celebration in Cochin.

A lone sadhu in Hampi (in Karnataka), which is a hippie-filled, but magical UNESCO site.

Autorickshaws–a major mode of transport in much of Asia and the topic of my master’s thesis. Ugh.