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Snapshot

Snapshot: Fiberhouse Collective

Marshall, North Carolina

by Nica Rabinowitz

At the Fiberhouse Collective in Marshall, North Carolina, we envision a future of textiles that is place-based: a textile economy that supports small-scale farmers and producers while benefiting soil health and community resilience. Fiberhouse Collective encompasses twenty-two acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We host an artist residency in our eight-sided canvas cabin, which also »

Poetry

harriet tubman escapes to philadelphia

late fall 1849, eastern maryland

by Saida Agostini

“I run towards the woods like a young girl in love” I run towards the woods like a young girl in lovethe ground crisp with frost   my breathexultant and whiteI spent the night before   praying in an empty fieldstalks of cotton   reaching towards dark skyclouded with rain and thunder   I wakein early dawn   dress drenched   head clangingwith a familiar   ache and there »

Back Porch

Toward a New Women’s Radical Sewing Society

by Marcie Cohen Ferris

“My hand-pieced quilts and many pairs of gifted mittens and socks reinforced both my connection to generations of talented women before me and the post-1970s second-wave feminism I longed to represent in my daily life and actions.” I bought it in my early twenties—a bright red cotton T-shirt with the emblem “Women’s Radical Sewing Society.” I had »

Interview

“Blinging just like us”

Beading and Legacy in New Orleans

by Marwan Pleasant, Natalie Chanin, Olivia Ware Terenzio

“I’m the Flag Boy. I love the position. I embrace it a lot. It is just like a whole character. It’s a spirit that takes over you on Mardi Gras Day.” Marwan Pleasant was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he grew up masking as a Mardi Gras Indian in the Golden Eagles tribe. Pleasant »

Interview

Weaving New Stories

Berea Student Craft

by Emily Hilliard, Erin Miller, Emerson Croft

“If this was truly Student Craft and it was meant to reflect the students’ work and they were going to find joy in the process, they had to have some ownership over what was happening. So, we started with the Rainbow Baby Blanket.” Berea College, located in the foothills of Appalachian Kentucky, was founded in »

Essay

Lifecycles of the Loray

Adaptive Reuse and Historic Value

by Elijah Gaddis

“The Loray had been in operation for almost a century, changing its products and expanding or retrofitting its buildings to meet the evolving demands of the southern textile industry.” In 1993, Bill Passmore started taking photographs of his coworkers at the Firestone plant, formerly called the Loray, in Gastonia, North Carolina. He cataloged the spaces »

Essay

The New Sea Food

Fashion, Waste, and Microplastics

by Makalé Cullen

The future of fashion is inside us. We will—we are—wearing nanofibers internally, purchased not from a rack, but at the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s, the restaurant. Our identities, which we have adorned with plant and animal fibers for more than three hundred thousand years, will no longer only drape over us, they will become us—worn inside. Meet Fashion »

Interview

Fibersheds

Collecting and Connecting for a Sustainable Future

by Rebecca Burgess, Natalie Chanin

“When one region is down, we support them, when we’re down, we receive that support.” Fibershed is a non-profit that fosters regional networks, with a stated focus to build local textile economies, grow climate-beneficial agriculture, and support education and advocacy. Project Threadways started the Southeast Fibershed affiliate to connect growers, producers, and makers across the »

Photo Essay

Memory, (Re)Making, and the Futures of Indigo

by Maurice Bailey, Nik Heynen, Rinne Allen

We came together on Sapelo Island through a vision of how heritage agriculture could help try to save a culture; we came together because Cornelia Walker Bailey had this vision, and this vision required us to work together. We started this work from the conviction that geography, culture, and history are always dyed, stitched, and »

Art

What Is It Worth?

by Libby O'Bryan

“In general, local, artisanal, values-based makers are in constant struggle to validate their craft. Textiles, especially, are up against large global labor markets that have trained consumers to buy more disposable goods for less money.” After a career as a textile buyer and production manager in New York City’s Garment District and after seeing so »

Essay

History, Community, and Power

The Future of Textiles

by Natalie Chanin, Olivia Ware Terenzio

What is the future of textiles? Read news headlines, from business to environment to fashion, and you would be justified in pointing to the movement of nearly all textile production overseas, where supply chains are opaque and workers are often exploited; the prevalence of synthetic and toxic materials; and the massive and devastating volume of »

Art

On the Menu Tonight

by Daniel Wallace

In advance of the official Day of Love, we asked our pal, the Alabama-born author and illustrator Daniel Wallace, to draw some conclusions. With hearts on the brain, he climbed to the highest height, swam out to the middle of a lake, spoke with a few dogs, and tuned a banjo (twice!), all to share »