The slow fashion movement has interested me for years. The philosophy behind it, understanding the origins and process behind your clothing and choosing those pieces least harmful to people, animals, and the planet, falls right into my own mission. It was this philosophy that, as a novice knitter, led me to learn how to spin fleece into yarn and eventually wind up with my own fiber-producing herd of llamas and alpacas.

These days knitting and crochet have become very popular and there are countless independent brands producing yarns from ethically sourced fleece and fiber. Thanks to sites like Etsy you can buy raw wool or carded/combed fleece directly from farms and other small companies. (Including my own!) The growth of DIY fiber arts and crafts has been another reflection of the slow fashion movement. What is slower and more worthwhile than spinning your own yarn and knitting a lovely sweater to your own specifications?

But, my journey through slow fashion has hit a major snag. And that is my current obsession with sewing. The way that we, as a global industry, produce fabric is the absolute opposite of earth friendly. For example, if you go to the average fabric store in any American city, you find lots of lovely fabric, and usually a sticker or note that says “made in America” or “made in China” but absolutely no information about the source of the fiber and where it was processed.

For example, you may find a nice cotton that says it was made in America. Great. But you don’t get the whole story. That cotton may have been grown in Texas, sent to China for processing, India for spinning, sent to Spain for dyeing, then sent back to the US for sale. That is most certainly not a small carbon footprint! If the fabric is to be used in the commercial garment trade it would have even more of a journey as it would probably end up someplace like Indonesia for cutting and sewing. For more about that, you can read this BBC article that was published 2 days ago.

If you were able to obtain the supply chain involved in the creation of your fabric, there are still big pieces missing. How was the fiber farmed? Was there heavy pesticide use, were the sheep treated well, were the workers paid a fair wage and treated decently? This kind of transparency is not only lacking, it is most likely completely impractical in our current global system of cloth production.

I’ve been researching this topic for months now and I’m no closer to finding a good solution. I could do what I did way back when I couldn’t find the yarn that I wanted. I learned to make it myself. I am a weaver, though I haven’t touched my loom in several years. And I do have plenty of fleece from the llamas and alpacas (and local sheep!) that would make lovely fabric. Doing it all myself would most definitely be slow! I’ll be exploring more options in the coming months and will record my ideas, experiments, and analysis here.

Most of them, anyway.