Textiles and Bicycles

In June of this year a major Australian wool supplier (Elder Limited) will start sales of specifically non-mulesed wool for foreign markets.  You may already know that Australia is scheduled to phase out mulesing by 2010, but this is a preliminary step to start identifying whether wool is coming from a mulesed sheep or a non-mulesed sheep (as part of the Australian Wool Industry’s 2007 agreement with PETA).

I’m not sure how this will translate into labeling for consumer goods, but hopefully the identification will trickle down in a clear way.  Or else those that wish to know will have to research where labels source their materials…which is an unlikely practice en masse.

For those that don’t know what mulesing is, the wikipedia article on it is decent.  It’s hard to find objective sources of information…and the subject sparks a lot of heat between consumers and producers.

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.

No! Just kidding!

But I did just get this in my inbox:

Subject: A beautiful place to spend Earth day
From: Crate and Barrel

I’m going to go ahead and disagree.  I’m not sure I’m going to be reducing greenhouse gas emissions by buying a new couch at Crate and Barrel…even if it is made of sustainable wood…And just out of experience, you have to be careful with those sustainable wood farms.  I studied abroad in the Amazon several years ago and saw quite a few tree plantations on what used to be awe-inspiring rainforest.  We even did a little biodiversity study and found that the varieties and sheer numbers of bird species in secondary (new) forest were quite a bit less than primary (original) forest.

Now while I believe in eco-friendly wares, I don’t think I am “doing my part” (which I think about .2% of the population actually does and I’m not sure I know any of them) unless I’m drastically reducing my consumption (which I could use some serious work on).  I try and do more than what I think I can…I don’t own a car, I don’t use AC, I minimize general energy usage, and on and on…yet I did one of those carbon calculator things and it would still take 3 earths to support my lifestyle for everyone!! I struggle with this at work everyday: convincing people that you can’t just buy a hybrid and say the transportation sector has done its part.  You can’t just put in new windows and say the building sector has done its part. And you can’t be a consumer and think buying the same amount of crap with an eco-friendly label on it is even kind of enough.  It’s better than nothing, for sure.  But we’re beyond that.  We need more. Drastically more.  Or I guess we need less.  Drastically less.

I still think when we buy, we should all buy “green” when it’s available–just in serious moderation.

Happy Earth Day!

Yarn!

I apologize for the obvious insult in there…but I’m a city, anti-sprawl, sustainable transportation advocate. I believe in personal responsibility and choice that should reflect more than wanting an enormous, cheap house on what could otherwise be productive agricultural land…which for non-Washingtonians, is what is largely happening in Loudoun County.

Thankfully, some of the farms of Loudoun County persist and provide local fibre, meat and produce alternatives for the DC area. I found this fantastic website for the The Loudoun Valley Sheep Producers Association, which:

exists to promote and support the Northern Virginia area’s farm flocks, providing education on all sheep issues including health, management and marketing; promoting lamb and wool; encouraging and mentoring youth and promoting fellowship and comaraderie among the members.

You can look for farms that specifically sell yarn here, which lists the farms in the Loudoun Valley and attaches nice little picture symbols for different products they offer, from fibre to meat. There aren’t many websites listed–most have email contacts, which requires a lot more effort and inquiry than most, including myself, are often willing to do. So I did find a few that provide useful websites:

Solitude (They’re having an open house on Saturday April 12th at Redgate Farm in Round Hill, VA)

Wooly Booly Cormos (More for spinners)

Willow Hawk Farm (This one may be my personal favorite. They offer handspun yarns, but also all sorts of services adhering to a love for 18th century living and techniques–like fibre arts instruction)

It seems local may be more possible for me than I thought…looks like I can’t be so lazy anymore.

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?

Handmade not by me. But by some Repetto shoe-makers in Paris.

This isn’t an advertisement for Repetto, but I respect craftsmanship, especially when done by the human hand rather than a machine–an art that seems to be becoming obsolete. There are a few episodes of the Twilight Zone (a show I watch every other day or so on YouTube) that stuck in my mind because of this very issue. One in particular is the”The Brain Center at Mr. Whipple’s,” where a factory manager becomes obsessed with replacing his workers with machines. Think of the cost savings–no paid vacations, no sick leave, no family emergencies. He believes that whatever a human can make with her/his hands can readily be replaced and even be made better by the use of a machine. Until the manager himself is replaced and he is confronted with both the obsolescence of the individual and the value of one–the value he sees in himself over another and especially over a machine. A machine couldn’t think, it couldn’t feel and it couldn’t give the thing it was making the character produced by human variation and error.

Even in the 60s, we recognized the romanticism of craftsmanship, but we still continue to ruminate on it in words and ignore it in practice. Several months ago I accompanied a friend to the opening of the new Bloomingdales in Chevy Chase. I was in the height of my China boycott and couldn’t believe how all the expensive Diane von Furstenbergs and Marc Jacobs were made in China…in a factory just like the ones used for the cheap Walmart and Target clothing. Overseen by humans, but mostly run by machines. Apparently I’m paying for the design, but at this point a wrap dress is a wrap dress and the same goes for a canvas jacket with jumbo buttons. I appreciate the innovation to a certain extent, but what makes Chanel Chanel is the couture. The unique and exquisitely artful designs of Karl Lagerfeld may be in a different class the normal, more everyday pieces being designed and sold by the aforementioned designers, but the pieces in the seasonal shows–the couture, the stuff made mostly (or entirely) by hand are what’s stunning. It’s the shockingly complicated and intricate handiwork, the knowing feeling that this could have only been made by a select group of people not because they are the only ones with the owner’s manual to the magic automated sewing machine, but because they have the skill to masterfully manipulate textiles running through their veins. This is why I have an obsession with Hermes–a label that has remained true to its traditional family practices and still makes its $5000 bags with multi-year long wait lists using stitch techniques that can only be done by hand.

I will never buy a $5000 handbag, but in my world, handmade is damn impressive and worth every penny. That price tag may just be justified.
But a machine is a machine and a design alone can’t be worth $500, especially when I can buy a knitting design for $5.

I made this last night after acquiring all my necessary supplies at a bead store in Dupont Circle and after spotting this necklace in a catalogue of a major chain store that shall remain nameless because I’m kind of embarrassed for shopping somewhere so…generic. I blame having to go to an office in DC. People dress pretty conservatively here and it seems to grab people’s attention when anyone even kind of steps outside the suity box, which isn’t really a good thing when you’re at work.

So here it is. The color is a little off, it’s more of a lapis blue than the turquoise it looks like in the picture. I haven’t strung beads and made a necklace since I was 12. And I didn’t completely know what I was doing. So the clasps are kind of screwy and required an emergency Etsy buy of brass bead tips (which are these fantastic devices that hide your knots, keep them more secure, and generally make the process much easier). So it’s not actually completely finished and will have to be restrung when I get the bead tips, but it’s functional right now.

I like the idea of seeing something in a catalogue and figuring out how to make it instead of buying the thing, which in this case is almost definitely made in China. The China thing is even more important to me these days as the Chinese government trashes the Dalai Lama. It seems shocking that this would be an advisable political move for them considering the worldwide, deserved adoration for him, but apparently invoking the strong nationalist identity of the Chinese is working among the domestic populace and they do in fact seem to agree with the government. That a group of people can be condemned for peaceful protest in the face of persistent human rights abuses against them is something I simply cannot understand.

Unfortunately as a normal American without much political power my identity is little more than consumer, so the power of the purse will be my vehicle for expressing myself.

I have never really made a “nice” necklace so this kind of proves it’s more possible for most (if not all) of us to substitute our ready-made purchases with home- and handmade stuff (not to mention I saved more than $50). And I learned from a coworker the other day that fabrics sold in the US are almost always made in the US because of tariff laws, which do not apply to ready-made clothing. I haven’t checked this statement out, but it sounds like I’ll be sewing a lot more than I have been.

So I’ve been shopping a lot lately. Italy just got me going in a bad bad way. I bought all kinds of shoes there and now the momentum just has me in a frenzy.

This is a problem for me because something I’ve really wanted to start doing is not buy anything new for a while…
It’s going beyond the fantastic idea that Adbusters puts out there with its Buy Nothing Day, which is meant to replace Black Friday, or the day after Thanksgiving.
There are lots of bloggers leading the way with the concept of not buying anything new and there’s even a Facebook group about it: not buying anything new in 2008.

It seems to be something that’s gaining some traction with a lot of people. For instance, there’s a “Compact” that started in San Francisco (of course) with some “compactors” trying to create a movement–to reduce their unnecessarily wasteful consumption habits (common of pretty much all Americans) and maybe become something other than just a consumer, or customer, by not buying anything new. There are of course, some caveats to the rule, and I did think this was kind of hillarious:

One member recalls asking permission to purchase a new toilet brush, contending that it was a health issue. Overruled. How about a new house key? Allowed. New tubes of shampoo, toothpaste, sunscreen are okay, but skin bronzer would be frowned upon.

In 2006 and 2007, the idea has gotten a lot of attention and apparently this group was on the Today show and other pretty powerful spotlights. While some actually accused the group of trying to ruin the economy (which may be a valid argument if no one ever bought new things ever again, but is pretty unlikely), the idea is obviously about reducing our consumption, which is so above and beyond levels of need that it’s just irresponsible, to put it lightly.

This is a concept I can readily agree with. There is no doubt in my mind that I have amassed enough crap to meet the necessities of me and probably a few more like-minded, materialistic young women.

Nevertheless, I can’t get passed the feeling that in order to make it through my experiment in faux-asceticism I would have to charge my yarn stash (with organics and the like) first…but I suppose there are creative ways to get a hold of old/recycled yarn. It’s all about being creative, like using freecycle.
I think a lot of my inability to stick to principles like these is my own laziness, which I’d like to start owning up to.

In the meantime, one thing I’ve decided to do more of is to rework my old clothes into stuff I’ll actually wear in this day and age. I found a bunch of stuff from the past this past weekend, some posing much simpler challenges than others.  One of the easier ones is a pair of wide leg jeans I bought in Brazil 7 or so years ago, back from my more hippie days. It turns out we’re now finding ourselves in the middle of one of the cyclical wide-leg comebacks, sort of like the locust cycle. Actually I think the legging cycle may be more akin to the locusts.

I hate leggings.

Anyway. I didn’t even have to do much to make them work again.  I guess as a hippie I wanted my pants 5 or 6 inches too long thus making them look less flattering and allowing them to drag enough to give me that natural dirty look…(I swear I don’t remember actually putting the contrived thought into it back then…)

So. I hemmed them.

I (obviously) did it by hand with bright red thread, which I though looked cute with the light denim. They’re nice jeans, so I’m glad they’re not going to waste anymore.

So now I have a “new” pair of jeans.

And the earth didn’t have to cry for them…or else it already did once 7 years ago.

Part of why I’m excited about my newfound knitting skills is that I can at least try and make many of the things I love that are available in stores I refuse to shop in because of political/social practices (like Anthropologie*) or that are made in China (like some stuff I reluctantly love at JCrew).

The Twinkle knits are an example of the former and the following is something I’m pretty sure I can make without a pattern from the latter:

I figure I should start simple with my experimentation given that I’m relatively new to knitting. But this seems to just be a long sweater…with some buttoned on waist strap things…

I used to go through stores with overpriced clothes and brag to myself about how I could sew those things myself…it’s nice to be able to do it with knitwear now too.

*note…just in case someone was wondering, the owner of Anthro/Urban Outfitters financially supports extremely right-wing causes…meaning that shopping there is indirectly supporting those things as well…which is sad because I did love that store…did.

Things have been very exciting lately. My new Phildar catalogues arrived today!! Meaning the orange cardigan in this Winter’s catalogue is my next project, but it will be the black cardigan I’ve really been needing lately.

About 5 more knitting-related deliveries are expected.

Someday Classic Elite will have more soft chunky and my order of French Grey will arrive in my recycling bin…(Reggie, my postman is amazing and leaves our packages in the recycling bin with a little note slipped under the door so we don’t have to go to the post office to get our packages)

I also just discovered Etsy. I’m late on this I think, but I have 3 packages on the way as a result of this newfound addiction, such as…

Some lovely stitch markers and lovely needle case.

I love this handmade/vintage revolution. It’s such a great idea to have this marketplace for unique things made by actual humans…ones not in a sweatshop or something equally dehumanizing. It also makes sticking to my no-buying-anything-made-in-China rule much easier–though I should say I’ve strayed a few times…Twinkle yarn is made in China…boo.
People always ask why I do this…
Is it the human rights violations?
Is it the lack of environmental standards?
Is it the fact that because of lax US standards we get the stuff from China that the EU rejects? You know…all that stuff with lead in it (like candy and lipstick)?
I always think this is a funny line of questioning. As though I’m supposed to pick one but be alright with the other truths.
They all pretty much suck. So I try to not support it.
I haven’t cut out buying US products made in developing countries altogether, but that may be a next step. The thing is the Chinese share of imports into the US is astonishingly high and overwhelmingly the largest (at least for consumer goods).

In other news, the Fad Classic vest is almost complete and looks fantastic so far…hopefully it fits.
The yarn used was not made in China. We can all rest easy now.