This week, we’ve got video from our live FEEDBACK FRIDAY featuring Rebecca Burgess of Fibershed.
Rebecca Burgess is the executive director of Fibershed, chair of the board for Carbon Cycle Institute, and the author of Harvesting Color as well as Fibershed-Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy.
Some things that Rebecca mentioned today:
-The main Fibershed website.
–3 maps showing Fibershed’s Regional Fiber Manufacturing Initiative. The first half of 2020 focused on mapping the ecosystem for the supply and processing of wool, linen, hemp, cotton, natural dyes, and hides.
-The Fibershed Affiliate Directory (whose Fibershed are YOU in or should you start one??)
–Fibershed Educational curricula for grades 1-8 (and I bet we adults could learn a lot too!)
More on Rebecca:
Rebecca is also a vocationally trained weaver and natural dyer and has over a decade of experience writing and implementing hands-on curricula that focus on the intersection of restoration ecology and fiber systems. She has built an extensive network of farmers and artisans in the Northern California Fibershed to pilot an innovative fiber systems model at the community scale. Her project has become internationally recognized with over 53 Fibershed communities now in existence.
She began the Fibershed journey in 2010 with a commitment “to develop and wear a prototype wardrobe whose dyes, fibers and labor were sourced from a region no larger than 150 miles from the project’s headquarters. Rebecca had no expected outcomes from the personal challenge other than to reduce her own ecological footprint and maybe inspire a few others.
She teamed up with a talented group of farmers and artisans to build the wardrobe by hand, as manufacturing equipment had all been lost from the landscape more than 20 years ago. The goal was to illuminate that regionally grown fibers, natural dyes, and local talent was still in great enough existence to provide this most basic human necessity—our clothes. Within months, the project became a movement, and the word Fibershed and the working concept behind it spread to regions across the globe.
FEEDBACK FRIDAY
If you are not familiar with FEEDBACK FRIDAY, every week, we speak with dyers, artists, scientists and scholars about our favorite topic, natural dyeing and color. Curated by Amy DuFault, Botanical Colors’ Sustainability and Social Media Director and presented by Botanical Colors’ Founder Kathy Hattori.