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Where do your plastic clothes end up?
There are other costs, as well. This disposable, mass production of fast fashion is amplifying one of the biggest environmental problems you’ve probably never heard of. Billions of micro fibers—small bits of plastic easily consumed by aquatic life—are being emitted into the environment from the clothes we wear.
The true cost of what we wear
This documentary is a must-see. It took me a few months to get around to watch it, because the trailer made it look like a compilation of stock footage simply edited to prove a point, but I was wrong.
Flowering Flax
Most definitely, the most beautiful time in flax growing: the flowering. The plants already have their maximum height, and they get the typical purple flowers in the morning, that then fall throughout the day.
The growing Flax
A week after sowing and it seems none of the catastrophes I feared occurred. The birds didn’t flood in to eat the seeds, we didn’t bury them too deep for them to sprout, and we didn’t kill them from lack of water.
How many seeds do we need and why?
I think the question I tried hardest to find a clear answer to from the people I consulted and the material I read was the exact amount of seeds I would need for a given area.
Flax growing advice from Eng. Flávio Martins
There are books that are more extense on the flax subject, but I consider these written in the 1940’s by Eng. Flávio Martins something special because they had a clear mission: to ensure that the farmers that were growing flax for EFANOR had all the necessary information to produce good quality crops.
Here they are!
Four days after the sowing, the little galego flax sprouts started peeking out.
Flax - Sowing
The research I've done so far has made me realize how complex this little plant is and how the quality of the flax we'll get depends almost exclusively on what is done at the time of sowing, and well, also on a series of meteorological factors that we can't control.
Flax - preparing the soil
Our flax was sowed a little bit later than it should have, by the 23rd of April. The plan was to do it two weeks earlier, at the end of March/beggining of April, but problems related with the equipment necessary to prepare the soil made us postpone it several times, and also change the location, and this date was the best we could do.
The cloth from those seeds
I've known Maria das Dores for about two years. I couldn't forget the time I met her because I almost went bankrupt for buying yards and yards of the fabric she manufactures completely on her own, right from those seeds. I've been saving that fabric ever since and have only used a small square for a very special occasion.
Shearing is coming!
We're almost in May and shearing season has been open for a while now, but in Serralves, the first time the Bordaleiras-Entre-Douro-e-Minho sheep will be sheared in the farm will be in the next saturday, the 9th of May, starting at 11h in the morning.
The silkworm eggs
My first idea, to find someone who could offer us the silkworm eggs, was to contact the Centro de Artesanato de Freixo de Espada à Cinta. That's where, back in 2011, I got to see the whole cycle, from egg to yarn. But I hadn't been there since that time, and I came to know only now, that the Center was shut down in mid 2012.
Recent acquisitions
The books I look for are always more technical and practical than historical or ethnographic, which makes them harder to find. But recently I've come across a few that have to do with topics I'm researching.
Galego Flax: the seed
I had been offered Galego Flax seed in a previous occasion, although in a small quantity, so I never thought that getting enough seed for the area we had planned to grow would be so difficult. But until now, I had never tried to buy or get seed of this variety.
Flax. But which flax?
All cultivated flax belongs to the Linum usitatissimum L. species, of which there are hundreds of different varieties. Some of these varieties are commercial and it is these that are currently used for the commercial production of flax for various purposes, as they are more productive.
2015 - Saber Fazer in Serralves
After Saber Fazer's last presence in Serralves, for the Autumn Festival activities we organized, I was invited to make a proposal for a program related to this subject, to be carried out throughout 2015, in their grounds.
Work in progress with Guida
Last time I went to Lisbon, I took the opportunity to visit Guida Fonseca and work with her on what I hope to be Saber Fazer's next little book. With Guida involved it's not a surprise that it will have something to do with the beautiful craft of weaving.
How many tools can you use to make a groove
If you're an experienced enough spinner, you can spin fiber with anything, even a rock. That's why my pickiness with spindles, weight, shape and material can be completely subjective.
It was a festival
And this is how it was in Serralves, at the Festa de Outono, last sunday. I think that it was the first time that any of us, both in the textile and basket weaving activities, had to deal with so many people at once.