Weaver's Guild and Fiber Shed

(Admin Note: This discussion originally took place in This Thread. Given that is was off topic but very informative, I have moved it to its own thread.)

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Here is a link to Fiber Shed in California. https://www.fibershed.com/

They seem to be making an effort to bring all the parts necessary to produce clothing into a region and to grow, produce and manufacture clothing in as environmentally sound a way as possible. Naturally the prices are very high, but I think this is a proto guild/family oriented distributed system.

With prices like these, the idea of very limited wardrobe and respect of good clothing would likely return. Knitting by everyone to produce socks could also make a come back.

Justin Patrick Moore's picture

Hi Kay. This reminded me that one of the members of my ARES & other ham radio club is also a member of the Cincinnati Weavers Guild. https://www.weaversguildcincinnati.org/ My wife & I went to one of their open houses / sales last fall, and indeed the prices were high, but everything was hand made, often even with fibers they spun themselves. Paying for quality is something I remember my grandparents who lived through depression always telling me. My dad got the lesson, and I like to follow it. Anyway, there are some guilds left it seems...

Speaking of clothes and the way people dress: it's a sad sight out there. I like the way James Howard Kunstler has written on the subject of dressing, especially his scathing comments about American males.

There is a Weaver's guild here in Salt Lake too and they put on a wonderful fiber show every two years and very often things are for sale. However, it is mostly a hobby activity, or a form of fiber "art". What I think is so interesting about the Fiber Shed organization, is that they are bringing all the necessary parts together on a regional basis to produce clothing, wool, cotton, and linen. I know there are two parts here in Utah; we grow sheep and we used to grow cotton and silk, believe it or not and there is a least one wool fiber processor that turns that raw wool into yarn or wool batting for felting. Sadly, there isn't a third part, the production weavers. I know they used to be as my pioneer forefathers were weavers and ran a weaving mill where they settled, but it is long gone now. More is the pity.

The idea that fiber could form a shed, like a watershed is a really interesting way to look at it from the perspective of reviving a regional economy. I suspect that could be turned to other necessary technologies, like metal working or paper making.

ClareBroommaker's picture

" What I think is so interesting about the Fiber Shed organization, is that they are bringing all the necessary parts together on a regional basis to produce clothing, wool, cotton, and linen."

In the last few years, after discovering that wool no longer causes me rashes, I have been buying wool blankets secondhand. The tags on these old blankets often tell the maker and the location. It became clear to me that the US used to have wool mills in every part of the country. I presume that means that sheep ranching was a much more common endeavor all over the country as well.

Before I bought these blankets, I bought new via the internet a woven wool mattress pad. I had to wait for it to be made, as the machine weaver did not just turn them out every day. The seller was also able to tell me where the wool was coming from (though I've since forgotten).

If some of our monocropping farms would return to producing fibers, both animal and vegetable, we would provide for ourselves and of course have employment that actually does something important.

David Trammel's picture

They have a website with a directory, https://www.fibershed.com/affiliate-directory/ Looks like the nearest one to me is Kansas City.

Off that group's Facebook page I saw a link to http://woolful.com/resources/ , which seems to have a ton of podcasts and resources. The podcasts lead off to a magazine called "Making" which looks to be about weaving.