YF #11 “The meaning of green” interview continues

As promised, here’s the continuation of YF #11’s “The meaning of green” interview from page XX…enjoy! But first, to remind you who’s who:

• Marie Wallin is head designer at Rowan and has been closely involved in the launch of the Purelife organic and British breeds ranges. www.knitrowan.com
• Tara Swiger owns the Blonde Chicken Boutique, specialising in environmentally friendly hand-dyed and handspun yarns. blondechickenboutique.com
• Jonelle Raffino owns South West Trading Company, producers of SOYSILK® soya-based fibre. soysilk.com
• Joanne Seiff is the author of Fiber Gathering and Knit Green: 20 Projects for Sustainability. joanneseiff.com
• Beth Casey owns Lorna’s Laces, an ecologically-committed yarn company offering irresistible colourways. www.lornaslaces.net
• Kristy Wilcox owns EcoKnits online shop, offering the best in sustainable yarn backed up with a green company ethos. www.ecoknits.co.uk

What’s your favorite natural fibre to knit?

Marie: Most definitely wool.

Tara: Nothing beats the luxury of organic merino (I like Vermont O-Wool) .although I am partial to my own handspun.

Jonelle: SOYSILK remains my favorite earth-friendly fibre. It is super soft, silky, and feels great on my skin. I love that it is from an annually renewable resource and that it’s made without petrochemicals.

Joanne: Wool, hands down. I love to explore fibre and enjoy knitting a variety of things, but in the end, a plain vanilla wool yarn is a standby for me.

Kristy: If I had to pick just one, I’d go for a 4ply or DK spun 100 per cent British wool, either Wensleydale or Blue Faced Leicester. They’re soft, tactile, give lovely stitch definition and take colour beautifully. I’m going to make the Heathered Skies tank from Issue 8 of Yarn Forward, and I can’t wait to get started. For pure luxury, I’d have to choose Mirasol Sulka. It’s neither local nor organic, but the fair trade credentials ease my conscience somewhat. It’s just absolutely beautiful to knit with, thick and soft and quite delicious, and for something a little special, the mix of merino wool, alpaca and silk is divine. However, it does come from Peru, which is why I’ve chosen to donate to a UK based carbon offsetting venture to make up for the air miles involved in buying Mirasol and Artesano Alpaca yarns.

Who has been influential for you in making ‘green’ decisions in the fibre arts?

Marie: No one in particular, environmental awareness and the natural world has been of great interest to me from being a small child. When I started at Rowan nearly four years ago, I was very keen to see the introduction of an ethical brand under the Rowan name. As I am conscious of living in an environmentally and socially responsible way wherever possible, I thought it only natural that I encouraged the introduction of the Rowan Purelife range, and it is something that I am personally proud of.

Tara: I think it all started with one of the first Cast On podcasts by Brenda Dayne. She asked the question, “what would things look like if they were different?” She was talking about accepting advertising and delineated a set of guidelines for ‘green advertising’. At the time, I was dyeing custom colourways for a local yarn store and was about to open some wholesale accounts with yarn suppliers. That podcast made me research those yarns a little deeper than I might have otherwise. I tried to find out where this wool was coming from – why didn’t the website mention the sheep or farmers? The more commercial yarn companies I looked at, the more I realized that no one knew where their yarn was coming from! At that point, I started searching for eco-friendly yarns (like banana yarn or bamboo). This was in early 2006 and there wasn’t a lot of options! Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle solidified my commitment to local fibre. I came to realize that the most eco-friendly way to make yarn is to get the fibre directly from the farmer.

Jonelle: The enthusiastic fibre artists that have embraced the ideals and products of SWTC continue to inspire and guide me on my quest to bring more earth-friendly fibres to market. I am very proud that SWTC pioneered the earth-friendly trend in yarns.

Joanne: In the wider ‘conservation’ picture, my best friend’s family really taught me as an adolescent (over 20 years ago!) to think about sustainability and environmental issues. In terms of fibre arts, meeting individual shepherds and small yarn producers got me thinking about how to boost support for ‘green’ decision making. So many small farmers using organic and ecologically friendly methods are struggling and, after you find a cause you believe in, it’s an easy step towards deciding to support these people and their valuable efforts.

Beth: Finding a green yarn has been on my radar for a long time. There was no individual or watershed moment other than finally finding a vendor that had a product that met my criteria and lived up to the standards of a Lorna’s Laces yarn.

Kristy: I don’t really have people who have been influential – I’ve always tended to go off at a tangent to the direction I was expected to. A huge part of my green philosophy comes from my experiences working in British Agriculture, seeing the problems it faces from cheap imports, escalating fuel costs, bureaucratic red tape and so on, and being fairly horrified at the inputs necessary in some areas of agriculture, especially cereal farming. I found myself following the eco-friendly path as an offshoot of my self-sufficient mindset. There had to be more to life than an over-reliance on fossil fuels. How did we do it two hundred years ago?

Does your interest in eco-friendly fibres translate to other portions of your life?

Marie: I encourage all knitters and crafters to try to use organic or ethical yarns in their work. The yarns may be more expensive than conventionally produced yarns, but there is the satisfaction of knowing that the yarn you have knitted with has not damaged the environment and has been produced in a socially responsible way. If the yarn is naturally dyed like the Rowan Purelife organic cotton and wool, then there is the double satisfaction of wearing something that is completely natural. I do strongly believe that once people get used to how natural colours react and perform, more and more people will choose to use this type of yarn.

Tara: Most definitely! All summer we only buy fruits and veggies from the farmer’s markets! We’ve also sought out farmers to pick blueberries and apples and for goat’s milk, and started a garden last year.

Jonelle: Absolutely. Once you embrace the ideas, it becomes a personal challenge to do things a little better each day. I sold my big truck for a Prius, work at recycling and reusing, and my next goal is to learn more about composting.

Joanne: I find that once you start looking to buy local or organic goods, it doesn’t stop at the grocery store or yarn shop. I care how animals and farmland are treated, and I am thinking about how to practice what I preach and how my money goes towards supporting what I believe in. I buy locally grown meat, eggs, milk, cheese and produce. Making things from scratch, without additives (acrylic or corn syrup!) matters to me. I can a lot of my own jams and chutneys, bake our bread and have my own small garden.

Beth: You bet! I’ve been incorporating ‘green’ decisions since I was in college. I guess I look at it as being a lifestyle. I try to think about lots of different facets of my life, everything from being conscious about how my make-up is produced to buying a share in a local CSA for groceries. The primary reason I quit eating meat over 20 years ago was because of the damage meat production caused to the environment. The whole crew at Lorna’s Laces shares this ethic. Most of us take public transportation or ride a bike to work every day. We recycle as much as we can and have encouraged others in the building to do the same.

Kristy: Oh, hugely! Eco-friendliness is a favourite soapbox of mine. I’m a mad gardener, and like to grow as much of my own veg as I possibly can. I’ve got three big compost bins hiding behind the potting shed, and at the moment I’ve got five chickens, although I’m probably going to add another two come spring. I did have an allotment, but when my back problem resolved itself into a prolapsed disc, I was forced to give it up. I have a big garden at home though, so this year I’m going to have to garden clever instead of on a large scale!

I source all my meat locally and rarely buy it from supermarkets – my freezer is full of lamb from two miles down the road, beef from four miles away and the pork comes from a free-range pig farm on the other side of town, but it gets here in an old Land Rover powered by LPG. I’m careful with water and all my bulbs are the energy efficient ones. In the past couple of years we’ve had to buy a fridge and a washing machine, and I made sure they were both ‘A’ rated for efficiency. I make cloth bags to use when shopping (check out www.morsbags.com). If I can keep the dining table clear for long enough, I want to make a great big pile of Morsbags so I can include one in each order I dispatch. There’s nothing better than cotton bags full of WIPs hanging off all your door handles.

How do you support local fibre producers? Is ‘buy local’ an ethos you believe in, and why?

Jonelle: We can’t do it on a commercial level, but on a personal level, I have six llamas that produce fibre for my own stash. They’re even recycled llamas, does that count? My herd was rescued and one is a foster llama.

Joanne: I’m a big believer in buying local! I buy or trade for a lot of local wool for hand spinning, straight off the sheep on shearing day. I also support local sheep farmers by buying lamb for my dinner table. Farmers need to sell both meat and wool (and sometimes cheese) to support their families and their flock. When I buy local food along with fibre, I put money back into the local economy and reduce the hundreds or thousands of kilometers that foods from a chain grocery might travel as well. I also like to encourage local independent dyers and small yarn producers when I can. I try to use these yarns for my designs and for my personal knitting whenever possible.

Kristy: I’m a huge believer in shopping locally, and do a lot of my food shopping within walking distance of my house. It seems completely barmy that we should be importing stuff from halfway around the world when we’re perfectly capable of growing it here in the UK. Onions from New Zealand, anyone? I have to admit to a certain bias here, as I did agriculture at college, and I’m one of these consumers that the supermarkets roll their eyes at. I demand a Little Red Tractor or a Union Jack on everything I buy!

Any last words? What else would you like to tell Yarn Forward’s readers on this topic?

Tara: I’d just like to say that buying from small producers (whether farmers, dyers or spinners) is as green as you can get: you know right where the fibre is coming from and what’s been done to it, and you can get /exactly/ what you want (most of the spinners and dyers I know are happy to do custom orders) which reduces waste from yarn that no one would buy. Also, you’re helping someone live more sustainably as they rely on their own hard work and skill to support themselves instead of relying on big, polluting corporations. And check out greenknitter.com

Joanne: I travel a lot to yarn shops and find many shops do not consider organic, green or environmental issues at all. As a result, their carbon footprints are enormous! Many shops stock the same products from all over the world. There’s no local focus or even diversity. I’d love to see more shops that focus on locally produced fibres or yarns, locally dyed yarns and even patterns from local designers. It’s not hard to find a local hand spinner or farmer with beautiful products, but many shops never consider their local resources. Local creativity is an asset that really sets a community apart.

Kristy: Wooden needles plus natural fibres equals a simple joy. When you make something with your own two hands, there’s a certain indefinable something that is more than just the sum of its parts. And when you know that the raw materials you used have benefited someone else, and even the planet, you can feel extra good. I am also concerned about the overuse of the keywords ‘green’, ‘natural’, ‘eco’, and so on. Use them too much and in the wrong context and it debases their true value.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the interview. What do YOU think? How have you ‘greened’ your fibre supply?