Look for posts about our Square Yard Project and by our Square Yard Project participants sharing their ideas about flax, sustainable textiles, slow clothes and growing together.
planting square yards together
Our “square yard project” is an inclusive seed trial, a community art and education project and a celebration of flax for linen in Pennsylvania.
We have over 60 volunteer participants in and near Pennsylvania, tending a plots of flax measuring 1 square yard (36” x 36”) at their own location this season. We’re so grateful for all their help with this important work and cannot wait to see all the square yards sprouting.
Everyone will contribute to a central database of valuable information about how flax grows in our region. Once the crop is harvested, we’ll make a community art project, creating a visual record of our work together to revitalize an agricultural textile industry.
We’re inspired by and excited to be collaborating with Journey in Designs as they grow square meters of flax for linen in Scotland.
Our “square yard project” is an inclusive seed trial, a community art and education project and a celebration of flax for linen in Pennsylvania.
We have over 60 volunteer participants in and near Pennsylvania, tending a plots of flax measuring 1 square yard (36” x 36”) at their own location this season. We’re so grateful for all their help with this important work and cannot wait to see all the square yards sprouting.
Everyone will contribute to a central database of valuable information about how flax grows in our region. Once the crop is harvested, we’ll make a community art project, creating a visual record of our work together to revitalize an agricultural textile industry.
We’re inspired by and excited to be collaborating with Journey in Designs as they grow square meters of flax for linen in Scotland.
Cultivating our Roots
by Roan Farnum
I came to be involved with the PA Flax Project because for the last several years I have been fascinated by textile crafts. Along the way I’ve picked up a wide array of handcrafting skills: spinning, weaving, natural dyeing, knitting, sewing, you name it. I can be a very dedicated learner when I’m passionate about something, and I have a stubborn belief that I can do anything I put my mind to, so I’ve chugged along exploring these varied and complex disciplines. However, I have a confession to make.
It’s really hard.
You might be saying: well yeah, obviously. But you see, I’m a bit of an optimist. I knew it’d be hard, but not like that hard, right? People have been doing these crafts for thousands of years, and people still do them today. It’s just that those people aren’t the people who are around me - I’ve been learning these things all by myself, and I was starting as a total beginner. Not a recipe for an easy success.
This journey has taught me many things, but the one I want to point out today is that it’s so important to pass down traditional knowledge through communities. Making textiles is hard work, but learning the skills to be able to make them is the real uphill battle, especially when you’re an adult with other responsibilities. If I had learned these skills as a child, I’d be much better equipped to make my own clothes today.
One of the big reasons I was interested in textile crafts in the first place was because I know how damaging the current system of fast fashion is, and I wanted to have the choice to be independent from it. If I’d had these skills sooner, I’d have that power today, and if we all had that power, we’d have prevented the system from becoming what it is now.
I keep thinking about a theory that Rebecca Burgess posed in Fibershed, the foundational work about textile sustainability in the modern age, which suggested that the reason that cotton became the dominant fiber produced in American colonial plantations and not flax was because the consumer base of European settlers in America were already familiar with flax. They worked it in their communities to provide for themselves, and “it is much more difficult to build exploitative ownership models with a material that everyone already has access to and already knows how to work (152).” Cotton was the foreign thing, the plant that people didn’t know how to grow or spin or dye. And so its production was taken over by third parties who then went on to use it to exploit lands and peoples.
I’m sure there’s some economic theory out there to explain that phenomenon, but I see this pattern in many of our modern day issues, and especially in fashion. People generally know by now that fast fashion is destructive to communities and their environments, but people need clothes and don’t know how to make their own, so they buy from these companies even if they know they are harmful. We let the system be the knowledge holder instead of us, and in doing so we gave up the ability to decide how the process should be done - and if it really warrants all this collateral damage.
Clothing used to be one of the many points of contact between people and nature. Through growing, collecting, and processing materials into garments, we learned about the natural world around us and how we depend on it for our everyday needs. When we let outside groups take care of this process for us, we severed that point of connection. We live our lives surrounded by fabric, but we’ve forgotten that fabric is made from plants and animals, made from the earth - if it even is anymore.
We’ve let go of so many of our points of connection to nature – with our food, our housing, our yearly rhythms of seasonal work – and I believe that every time we do, we see ugly side-effects. We let our land be abused, we let people be exploited, we excuse waste and excess – all because we don’t see the connection these decisions have to our daily lives. Clothing may seem like a small, incidental thing, but we are surrounded by textiles every day, and when we can’t look at them and see the natural things that made them, we subconsciously view ourselves as that much more removed from nature. This is an illusion – we can never really be separated from nature – but it’s an illusion that influences the choices we make every day to either protect or destroy the world around us.
So yes, this learning is hard, but I know how vitally important it is. Maybe your thing isn’t spinning, or knitting, or gardening, but I’d ask you to simply remember that, just like your food, your clothes come from the earth. That remembering alone is a big step towards healing our current system of destruction, and this is the core of what we’re trying to build with the PA Flax Project: a system that brings us back to remembering the earth, back to remembering the plants that provide for us.
Our lives are rooted in the earth – they always have been and always will be. Just like plants, our roots are important, and so let us cultivate them.
Growing one of the first plants cultivated by my ancestors here in Pennsylvania
by Marcia Weiss
I’m participating in the Square Yard Project with the PA Flax Project. This opportunity first came to me through the Philadelphia Guild of Handweavers, my local guild. As a textile designer, weaver and life-long fiber enthusiast, this presented an amazing chance to get involved at the very start of the process—growing the fiber. I’ve done much weaving, dyeing and some yarn spinning, but planting flax was new to me. Linen, from the flax plant, is my fiber of choice. It’s long been my joyful “go to” material. I love the luster, the strength, the relative stiffness of the hand and the natural color. One of the reasons I love it, is because linen was one of the first plants cultivated by my ancestors here in Pennsylvania.
As a weaver, I’m a planner by nature. Many decisions are made prior to sitting at the loom. I approached the Square Yard Project in the same methodical manner. I configured the area of a raised garden bed to 36” x 36”, planted the seeds and happily waited. The raised bed is near the western edge of our property, adjacent to open fields. It was very exciting when the plants emerged. They grew and flowered beautifully. Then, sadly, a crazy windstorm occurred, snapping perhaps one tenth of the plants approximately 10” from the top. I believe that Nature was laughing at my careful planning. Although this was disappointing, the overall crop still looks pretty good. Now, I’m watching for the right time to harvest the fiber; any day now!
There is still much to learn and truly this is just scratching the surface of the process of growing, harvesting and processing flax, but it’s one incredibly exciting journey. Our PA Flax Project leaders are generously and supportively walking us through every step. I am excited to see where this leads.
Philadelphia Guild of Handweavers, Awbury Arboretum, June 2022
Our square yard of flax lies at the rear of our dye garden.
The plants we have growing there, indigo, purple basil, coreopsis, marigold, etc, are all for making natural dyes. On this June day they look proud and strong, enthroned in their solid and spacious raised beds set in two perfect rows.
The flax behind them, sown directly into the ground, looks so humble by comparison, so sweet and self-effacing. Visitors to the Arboretum ask ‘what is this? Why grow it?’ And yes, sure, our little patch of flax may appear hardly significant to some, a strange curiosity even, but there are many ways of seeing.
To the spinners and weavers of our Guild this mysterious grassy newcomer expresses a full spectrum of craftmanship. It’s a window onto a creative horizon full of power and breadth. Growing your own linen, a commitment that less than a century ago was culturally defining, common and economically essential to people around the world, now has become something so foreign it seems utterly magical, like building castles in the sky.
The material is calling to us from those tiny blue flowers at the tops of their slender stalks. Our spindles and looms and needles are lined up and ready to engage that beautiful homegrown fiber. No matter how small or short or imperfect, it will be precious to us. Let’s harvest!