Kitchen Garden Series upends the textiles industry by producing local linen
Aug. 13, 2020
When former costume designer Heidi Barr looks dorsum on her piece of work designing outfits for numerous Philadelphia trip the light fantastic productions, she doesn't just remember the careful hours she spent selecting fabric colors and patterns that enhanced a dancer'south operation or the manner sequins and tulle sparkled nether stage lights.
She mostly remembers the waste her job created.
Costume after costume was stripped from the performers and shoved into a cluttered, production visitor cupboard. Many were thrown away after a short run of trip the light fantastic toe performances. Barr'due south beautiful designs were appreciated for a week or then, and and so became waste.
"I had go disillusioned with creating a lot of actually great stuff that got seen once, or for a short run of a production, and so ultimately simply ended up in a closet and became waste," Barr says. "It'due south non difficult to take it personally as a designer because you pour your soul into the costumes and then information technology'south just in a cupboard forever."
Barr began looking for ways to utilise her skills every bit a textile creative person that didn't generate then much waste. She had already been transitioning toward eating more sustainable, locally grown foods and in 2012, while working as a shareholder at the urban farm Henry Got Crops, she started thinking nigh the connection between fabric and nutrient.
"My products are designed specifically for that intersection of food and fabrics," Barr says. "Everything I make is specifically designed for replacing single use and plastic disposables in the kitchen, in the garden, and in the dining room."
Whether it exist in the kitchen, in a garden or in a shop, single use plastics and other disposables abound. Barr realized that many of these items—plastic grocery bags, paper napkins, paper coffee filters—could be replaced with reusable items fabricated from clothes.
At the same fourth dimension, she noticed some modest budgetary needs at urban farms were going unmet. She envisioned creating a line of reusable kitchen textiles constructed from reclaimed cloth and selling them to support urban farms.
"My products are designed specifically for that intersection of nutrient and fabrics," Barr says. "Everything I make is specifically designed for replacing single use and plastic disposables in the kitchen, in the garden, and in the dining room."
Discovering More Sustainable Textile Crops
Her concern, The Kitchen Garden Series, is now assisting and her total-time chore and her products are used past some of Philly'south top chefs including Ari Miller, co-owner and chef at Musi BYOB, and by Judy Wicks, environmental activist, author and founder of the White Dog Buffet.
X percentage of the gain from her concern are donated to back up the urban farms Barr works with, Henry Got Crops in Roxborough and the Eastward Park Revitalization Alliance in Strawberry Mansion.
As her business organization grew, Barr still wasn't satisfied that she was doing plenty to fulfill her environmental mission, because she wasn't able to reclaim enough men's dress shirts and vintage flour sacks to meet her needs. She started sourcing linen to make her products, but when she looked for a domestic provider, she couldn't find i.
Instead, she started buying linen from a manufacturing plant in Lithuania, which came with its own environmental problems. Next to oil, the way and textile industries are 2 of the biggest polluters on earth. Over 10 million tons of textiles clog U.Southward. landfills and synthetic fabrics, like polyester, are fabricated from petroleum products, including oil and coal. These textiles likewise shed microplastics—contaminating oceans and poisoning sea life with each wash. The fact that many textiles are shipped thousands of miles to their final destinations merely adds to their already enormous carbon footprint.
Every bit Barr dug in, she learned a surprising fact: Linen and flax, the found it'southward produced from, used to exist grown and spun in Pennsylvania. In fact, Germantown—mere miles away from Barr's Wissahickon home—was one of the primary producers of flax in the 1690s and even had a flax blossom featured in its seal.
Currently, a crop of flax is grown each year as role of a historical re-enactment at the Landis Valley Hamlet and Farm Museum in Lancaster, but there are no longer growers using the crop to create spinnable fibers for linen.
"It was a traditional ingather hither," Barr says. "It's not ethnic but it grows well in this climate. It was a strong industry."
"I think when people hear, 'oh, you're going to grow flax and process it into linen,' information technology sounds crazy and hard, but it's not. None of information technology is," Barr says. "Everybody can grow a lot of flax in their backyard if they want to."
What's more, Barr learned that several organizations were already trying to encourage people to call up of locally grown textiles in the same way that they might think of locally grown produce.
The nonprofit Fibershed Project, which was started in 2010 in California, sprung up to back up local fiber and dye growers by encouraging people to buy clothes made of materials sourced from a region no more than 150 miles from their homes.
"They Took to the Field and Spread the Flax Seed"
To create something like virtually Philadelphia, Barr needed country and knowledge of how to grow textile crops, such every bit flax. That's something Emma Cunniff, possessor of Kneehigh Farm in Pottstown, could provide.
Like Barr, Cunniff had spent years debating what she could practise to thwart the textile industry. While her farm primarily focuses on growing vegetables (she was "knee-deep in tomato season" during our interview), she grew a small amount of indigo, a establish typically used to dye popular habiliment items, similar bluish jeans, in 2019.
"If we were to grow, like food, smaller portions of sustainably grown cobweb then we wouldn't be polluting our waterways. We won't be contributing to climate change from and so many chemicals and fertilizers," Cunniff says.
A mutual friend and grower introduced Barr and Cunniff, who talked for two hours in their start call about farming, textiles and sustainability and emerged with the thought to plant an eighth of an acre of flax to see if the crop could again exist produced and spun into linen in Pennsylvania.
"Look down at your shirt," Cunniff says. "If you're wearing a natural fiber, you can see every single strand. Even if it'south automobile woven or knitted."
They bought seeds from Landis Valley Subcontract and in April, right around World Twenty-four hours, they took to the field and spread the flax seed. The crop blossomed in time for the summer solstice in June. Little blue, five-petaled flowers dotted the land. During this time, Barr and Cunniff hosted a socially distanced dinner in the fields to help fundraise for the costs of the projection and to enhance awareness near the importance of natural fibers.
"When you're wearing natural fibers y'all're fugitive putting toxic chemicals in your body … we have all these synthetic, crazy plastic fibers and a lot of people don't realize what their clothes are made of," Cunniff says. "Expect downwards at your shirt. If y'all're wearing a natural fiber, you can see every single strand. Fifty-fifty if it'south machine woven or knitted."
By the cease of July, Cunniff and Barr were again in the field harvesting their starting time flax crop, a process they found to be particularly labor intensive. The roughly three human foot tall plant has to exist pulled upwardly from the ground past its roots before being laid out in the field to dry. "The harvest is backbreaking. It's very difficult work," Barr says. "I certainly am in awe of the sheer labor information technology takes to literally pull yards of cloth from the earth."
Volunteers helped them for part of the process. One solar day, 15 people showed upwards to help them pull the plants from the ground.
Huge Growing Potential In an Urban Environment
This year, Barr and Cunniff have been focused on learning the crop and seeing if it'southward viable for growth in Pennsylvania and raising awareness of the use of natural fibers in clothing and textiles. Their efforts have been funded through donations on The Kitchen Garden Series site.
Barr has commissioned a woodworker to build traditional processing tools to turn the institute into spinnable cobweb. She plans to piece of work with handspinners and hopes to accept plenty textile for a tablecloth or wall hanging. She jokes that they've spent the summer making "$1,000 napkins."
"It's totally a learning experience. For us, it was merely learning how the crop grows," Barr says.
While they don't plan to profit off of growing flax this twelvemonth, the project has taught Cunniff and Barr that flax has potential to be a staple crop for urban agriculture.
They were able to grow their eighth of an acre without fertilizer or irrigation—a fact that could make the crop platonic for urban growers. At present Barr is working with folks at the East Park Revitalization Brotherhood to run across if flax could exist introduced as ane of their crops.
Flax is besides one of the all-time plants for remediating soil. It can pull heavy metals, including lead, from the soil. If planted around some of Philly's shuttered refineries, flax could aid pull chancy, cancer-causing chemicals from the soil, making both the soil and the ground around it healthier.
"It has a huge potential for existence grown in an urban environment where the soil has been contaminated, like effectually the refineries in Philly," Cunniff says.
Barr and Cunniff have besides been contacted by people offer state for them to continue to abound flax. While their long-term goals for the flax project are still a bit of a moving target, they promise to go along growing and to show people that it is possible to accept a strong, local textile supply chain.
"I recollect when people hear, 'oh, you're going to grow flax and process it into linen,' it sounds crazy and hard, merely it'south not. None of it is," Barr says. "Everybody tin can grow a lot of flax in their backyard if they want to."
Flax fields at Kneehigh Farm | Photo courtesy Zoe Schaeffer 
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/kitchen-garden-series-philadelphia/
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