Justine Aldersey Williams is a botanical textile dyer and educator. Her practice is is totally in tune with the environment and nature. She is the Director of Home Grown Colour, Founder and coordinator of Northern England Fibershed and iniatiated the Home Grown, Home Spun regenerative textile project, the documentrary of which premiers this evening (12th May 2025) recording her journey to create the very first ever fully grown pair of jeans in the UK. It covers everything from seed to sewn garment. She is also helping develop the commercial uscale of British indigo from organic woad. This is a great journey I am sure you will enjoy her story, read on.
D: I learned about you and your work through Charlie and Helen at Mallon Linen because they are following you on insta and mentioned your Homegrown Homespun jeans project in one of their posts. That's when I started following the great journey you've been on, so I'm really looking forward to hearing more about it.
J: Have you been to their farm?
D: Yes, a couple of times on another project I’m doing around linen.
J: I'm reading a book called ‘Women's Work, the first 20,000 years. Women clothed humanity. And at times in history we had a lot of power because of that. But now for me, trying to spawn this new equitable regenerative textile system is challenging, because that work has never been valued in terms of a capitalist monetary system, it's always been done for free or traded or exchanged. So what happens when you've offshored all that skill to enslave people? Also, now that we've had this so-called, women's liberation movement how do you then find the value in it? I'm a creative woman and I'm still not paid properly for the work I'm doing, proportionately, financially, it’s tricky. We need new ways of thinking around this.
D: We certainly do. With all the interviews, I usually take you back to the beginning and we take a walk through your life and career to tell the story of you. It's more of a chat than an interview. I'm really interested in the journey that all my women have taken. So with that in mind I start with the same question for everybody, which is ‘where did you grow up?’
J: In multiple places. I was born very close to where I'm living now, but I didn't grow up here. I spent my early years in St. Ives in Cornwall. Which was formative and leaving that place has created this sort of longing. We go back every year and St Ives is this perfect place for me. Then we moved to North Wales, for primary school and secondary school. Then I went to Uni just outside London, then I came back to Liverpool. I've moved about a bit, I'm a bit of a mutt. I like that, I like that I've lived in different places.
D: I think movement helps widen your perspective.
J: I've been in beautiful places, predominantly West Coast, The West, the old Celtic lands if you like, like St Ives very on the edge. The beautiful rolling hills of the Vale of Clwyd in North Wales, where my school was, and I now live on The Wirral which is on a little peninsula between Liverpool and North Wales. From here we can see Hilbre Island and North Wales. I didn't really get on with city life. I like the elements, the fresh air.
D: Obviously the landscape and growing up in nature has had a strong influence on your life. Do you remember other creative influences from your childhood?
J: I think St Ives is a pretty big creative influence, even now, because it is an artist colony. Mum and dad had a guest house, it was the 70s, and we had a lot of quite wild people staying with us. I think that was an imprint that has lasted. Mum and dad were working class Scousers who made it to the posh Wirral, aiming at being upwardly mobile, putting their kids through private school and going bankrupt in the process. But they put my brother and I in these beautiful schools. Mine was founded by the Worshipful Company of Drapers. At the time it felt normal, ‘Oh, The Drapers, they're coming to Speech Day. But now looking back, I see our art department was phenomenal. The whole top floor of the school was devoted to it. We had a whole room of weaving looms. We had a sewing room, a photography room a life drawing room, everything, a screen-printing room. That was normal for me and a massive influence, also my teachers were quite maverick too. We had speech and drama lessons, meditation lessons and I was taught yoga really early on. It gave me this incredible creative foundation. What’s really nice is that I now run the alumni for the school, and there's a woman in it who has worked for The Drapers, and when she heard about the project said, ‘we'd really like to support you’ and they have, which is really nice.
D: You are very spiritual, and you mentioned again just now, that even from school there was a spiritual connection with yoga. Can you explain that for us a little bit more?
J: I was a chorister, and attended church every Sunday throughout secondary school, reluctantly, fighting it and hating the patriarchy and all of that, yet at the same time having euphoric experiences from singing with a full orchestra. I can't get into the whole religious side of it, but the point is to be moved by spirit, and I think when you're becoming an instrument, a wind instrument, and you're using your voice in that really intense way in harmony with other people, I had really beautiful experiences with it. I would practise four times a week, it was serious. We sang in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and as I got older, I was singing solos and also had operatic training, but that wasn't for me because I was into fashion, I wanted to be cool, and it really wasn't my way of singing. But tuning your vocal instrument that way, the resonance it creates, it has this vibrational effect that is powerful. And that for me is a religious experience. Maybe that's the combination of having quite broad minded teachers who, although there was dogma in what we were being taught, were really open minded and inclusive too. I guess that also opened up an interest in the land I was growing up in, where there were pre-Christian vibrations, with paganism and the Celtic. When I was 21, I worked at summer camp in America, and read Women Who Run with the Wolves, which started a quest to find Native American peoples where I was working, and then everywhere else I travelled, I was looking for them. It was really bizarre in the 90s, that when you saw a Native American reservation it would always lead to a casino. It was an unusual situation in that their culture that wasn't recognised as it is now. The day after my 22nd birthday I was travelling through Arizona and stopped at a gas station and the guy said, ‘oh, have you come for the butterfly ceremony?’ and it turned out that we were going to the reservation that was having this incredible ceremony; which I've just got goosebumps even now thinking about it, because it was the whole community coming together for, which I think is a coming of age ceremony, but the tiny tots were dressed up in full regalia and the thumping stamping of the feet and the drumming and the chanting. We were welcomed. We were given food. No photography, obviously, which is in stark contrast to now. But it was the most beautiful experience. I think my interest in Native American spirituality led me back into British nature based belief systems, which then led into animist beliefs which is what I encompass it as. I am trying to work through Druidry, I've got their yearly course I'm meant to be dipping into, but I've got into all kinds of things through yoga practise. There are not a lot of alternative practices I haven't tried.
D: Throughout your education and career, you've always had a connection to textiles. Why textiles, and for a while fashion, how did you end up taking that direction?
J: To start with; I didn't know that my great aunty was a tailoress in Liverpool, but the sewing has travelled down through that lineage. Mum is a seamstress, she's not a professional seamstress, but she’s always made our curtains and made loads of our clothes when we were kids, we’d look like the Von Trapps. Even now, my kids will go to my mum if they need something mending. She's an incredible mender. So that was part of my everyday. Mum was always cutting out stuff on the kitchen table. I think it's in my DNA, but one of my earliest memories is that I would always get lost when we went shopping because, I used to suck my thumb and would get comfort from rubbing a little piece of cloth on my wrist, and ironically, bearing in mind what I do now, it was nylon petticoats from Marks and Spencer. So aged 3, Mum would be in Marks and Spencer, they’d lose me but knew to go find the petticoats and I’d be sitting there at the back of the rail. I've always had this sort of connection with the tactile, and in a sense meditation, I would go into a meditative state and have always enjoyed, taking comfort from that tactile element. When I did my MA, I was assessed by an educational psychologist because I wanted a Mac, and they identified that I have hyper sensory sensitivity which means that all my senses are probably a little bit more switched on than perhaps the general population. So it makes sense that textiles, the tactile and sensual element is comforting to me and is why I don't like the city and don't like a lot of noise, or a lot people around me. It’s all part of the creative thing, apparently this is a form of ADHD, this creative aspect of the personality, which is nonsense. Who is this person who is not neurodiverse? Who is that person? I want to meet them. This compulsion to standardise. We're all unique and different and that definitely feeds into the issues with the planet too. We've had this kind of obsession with standardisation and mass production and uniformity and longevity and all those things interconnect.
D: Where did you go to university?
J: I wanted to go to Saint Martins, and I went to a kind of feeder college for Saint Martins first. There were a few these colleges that don't exist anymore. Mine was called Berkshire College of Art and Design. They had really close links to the London Fashion scene which meant I got to work with Vivienne Westwood in Paris and Helen Story, and Red or Dead in London, for work experience. Then I applied to go to Saint Martins.
When I look back this was a really pivotal moment for me, I was lined up to go to Saint Martins and on the day of the interview; I had the car, and two of my friends also had interviews at Middlesex and Saint Martins. I had my interview time, my other friend had hers and the third friend, no mobile phones, was nowhere to be found. Then we heard that her interview had been knocked back by an hour and a half, which meant I was going to miss mine. So I had this ethical decision, do I leave and she's not going know where the hell I am? Or do I wait and miss my interview? I waited for my friend. When I eventually got to my interview at St Martins, Wendy Dagworthy didn't want to know. She didn't even want to look. She said ‘no, your late.’ Which is cool, because that was the wrong place for me.
I came back to Liverpool and did advanced entry, which was the last two years on a degree. Then I took a gap year and worked in a designer shop eventually starting a PGCE teaching qualification, during which I got pregnant, which turned everything on its head. I studied teaching at a secondary school, I didn’t want to be a secondary school teacher, but back then it was the only route to teaching. That was not fun, I worked in socially deprived schools in Birkenhead and Wallasey. There is not a lot of creative work in that situation.
D: There’s even less these days.
J: That’s because the topics are being removed. There is less and less creativity altogether, which is my mission, and it's always been my mission. I've always been an educator, but since the Homegrown Homespun project it’s really it brought home to me that we have to put these skills back into the curriculum.
D: At what point did you become a yoga teacher?
J: I didn't work very long in secondary schools. I stayed home with the kids, I hadn’t been thinking I wanted to have children at the time, it was a happy accident. But once that happened, something kicked in, a certain set of rules within my matrilineal DNA that things had to be done a certain way, and for me, I wasn't going to have some minimum wage teenager raise my children, so I prioritised motherhood and did things that fitted in and around the kids. I was really sleep deprived and started Transcendental Meditation to deal with that which led to more yoga and training to be a yoga teacher. When the kids went to school, for me, it felt like it was too young for them to be there. So I started teaching yoga in their schools to give them some strategies to handle this crazy educational system they had been thrown into, with all its stressful expectations. I taught children's yoga all over the region, I trained teachers and head teachers, working within the hours I could, but had about 15 classes over three days, everywhere in the Northwest, and did that for 10 years. I also taught in the community centre down the road for about a decade. It was all very much about service, there's a concept in yoga called Seva which is being of service. I wanted my kids to have some kind of emotional intelligence going into their curriculum, in the early 2000s, there really wasn't any. It’s more prevalent now which is great. I went deep into that practise and listened to Sanskrit mantras exclusively for 15 years. Then something switched and I had this creative calling.
D: Which brought you back to textiles and the land. You now describe yourself as a creative activist. Can you tell us why? Also, can you tell us about your natural dyeing, processes? And your journey into regenerative textiles.
J: During my MA, I investigated ‘Does meditation enhance creativity?’ I was doing quite intense meditation and would wake at five in the morning with loads of intuitive downloads, creative ideas, problem solving things I had been mulling over and waking with the answer. For me that is the gift of meditation. I think it also puts you back on your true path. I believe there is a morphic field, or a unified field of consciousness, wherever this is, for the common good, for the greatest good of all, you're going to be directed to that, if you're tapping into that in meditation, you're going to be led in that direction. So, I was having this creative calling, then bizarrely, Patrick Grant, who I had known when I lived in Liverpool, but hadn’t been in touch with, popped up on my TV screen doing fashion. My art boxes were in the loft and he popped up doing fashion and I thought, he doesn’t do fashion, I do fashion. What am I doing, not using my creativity at all? Although I had been getting this urge, seeing him catalysed something in me, I guess I was a bit indignant at myself for wasting all the creative work I'd done. It wasn't a waste, as I believe yoga is creative, but I went back and did an MA to re-catalyse me and update my skills. I had been a screen printer and originally created printed textiles for fashion which was very toxic. At the time I had asthma and was concerned even then where all these crap plasticised inks were going as we washed them down the drain. That was part of the reason I moved away and moved into yoga. But when I came back, everything had gone digital, which is better, so I updated all those skills. Also because I'm a Yogi I didn't want to be a computer all day, and natural dyeing was a perfect balance to that. Something I could do that was hands on and hands dirty. Having those technical skills were really useful as I set up The Wild Dyery. I started by making and selling products but realised quite quickly I was not going make money like that, and it’s quite difficult to sustain, because of the hours and hours you put into every item, every creative person will tell you the same thing. The Artist Network, did a survey and it showed that most creative people are earning way below the minimum wage, around £2.60 an hour, because of how long everything takes. Also with the environmental situation I wasn’t comfortable hustling and trying to sell more products on a planet that's already choking in them. But if I can teach people to extend the life of their textiles using natural dyes rather than fossil fuel dyes or at least tell people, ‘did you know the colours in your clothing come from the oil industry,’ which most people don't know. If I can get this fact across during this beautiful creative process, where we're printing with flowers, and making all these lovely things then that would be really useful.
For me the environmental aspect has always gone hand in hand with the creativity in terms of natural dying. At the time it wasn't easy to learn natural textile dyeing, so I started a Facebook group and a community and a lot of the older generation dyers joined it. Then I created an online course because there wasn't one. I created the course I wanted to have, and it’s still running. It's teaches these skills and preserves this heritage craft. As time went on Fibershed came into my sphere of influence because it was founded by a natural textile dyer called Rebecca Burgess. At the same time my daughter was learning about Extinction Rebellion and when she said to me ‘I don't think it's responsible to bring children into this world. I'm not sure I should have children’, it was like a stab in my heart. My thought was ‘my god, you're not obliged to have children, but that should be your decision, not because of some fat cat ecocidal corporation CEO.’ I was I incensed, and again that was another catalyst for me. I thought I've really got to raise my game, I'll start a Fibreshed, I'll volunteer and really be a part of this. It took quite a long time because they were super busy and when it came through it was March 2020, just as COVID struck and such a lot of things happened from then on in.
D: Did it enable you to immerse yourself more, because I believe you managed to extend Fibreshed out from where you are in the Northwest.
J: I think COVID probably made people a bit more, I could say adventurous or maybe reckless in their decisions about let's do something. The little self-employment grant, meant that although I had to stop teaching my studio workshops, I could sustain myself a little bit and that helped enable me volunteer for Fibershed. Fibershed is part of an international organisation, but it was very much burgeoning in the UK and at that time and there were only Emma and Deborah down South working on it. I decided to jump into collaboration very early on. I had been back in touch with Patrick (Grant) for a while and we had similar professional interests so that was how the project Homegrown Homespun started. My rationale was, if Fibershed is really looking at what the resources in your region are and working within those boundaries, those resources might be planetary or people and expertise, lets make that happen. But I hadn't fully comprehended what I was taking on, because Northern England is the industrial engine room of the UK, we have all the industry. But you can also think of it as the heartland of harm. The epicentre of capitalist colonialism. So I went out and met people who were interested and obviously, Patrick is a massive advocate for British manufacturing and is doing his best to work towards being as sustainable as possible. Plus he had a national profile, because of The Sewing Bee. So I asked him to co-found the Northern England Fibreshed with me. He said no but agreed to collaborate on a project.
D: Which leads us really nicely into the project. The Homegrown Homespun project you created with Patrick, where you grew the first pair of jeans in the UK in, was it 120 years?
J: It’s probably ever, because jeans weren’t a British product. Historically our workwear would have been linen and potentially woad. But jeans is a term that has become synonymous with Levi's and the specific rivets in the pockets and the specific design, so from that respect they're the first pair. The guy who eventually stitched them is a denim historian and said it was the first. When you look at it historically, jeans weren’t a thing in Britain ever. But the point, the reason it started was because I had gone out and met producers in my Fibreshed area and the women I met were predominantly working with wool. A lot of weavers require big quantities of cone dyed wool for their long warps and their only option was to use the industrial scale, commercial facilities who were all using synthetic fossil fuel derived dyes, which seems sacrilegious to me. To take this beautiful wool from the farm down the road and have it dyed with virgin fossil fuel colours, which are so harmful.
D: Taking a natural product that against your skin is OK for you and coating it in petrochemicals that will disrupt your endocrine system, is crazy.
J: At every single stage of production there is harm. I am not a wool specialist. I am a surface pattern designer and a natural dyer. But I realised that in my region there is a huge amount of pollution and harm being caused by this use of synthetic dyes and these women were restricted in fully participating in Fibreshed principals, because our strap line Local Fibre, Local Dye, Local Labour means we are working towards agroecologically grown and that doesn’t involve fossil fuels. My rationale was; I had helped a brand called Herdwear launch, they wanted to produce naturally dyed knitwear and were struggling to get a factory to use natural dyes. Because I was already involved with Patrick and the project, there was a certain level of awareness being raised. I went into the factory and convinced them, that this is a thing, give this a go, and they did, with the red and yellow dyes. I developed the recipes, and they scaled them. Indigo was a stumbling block as it is a more challenging pigment to work with. My rationale there was; if Patrick is going to collaborate with me, lets tackle this one. Let’s see if we can get natural indigo into a synthetic facility. Then that will mean the wool users and producers in my region will have a full spectrum of colours they can use and will be a great incremental benefit to them.
Patrick called me in August 2020 and saying, ‘what do you want to do with this Fibreshed?’ My reply was that I would like to get fibre and dye growing in the region again and to incentivise some mid-scale manufacturing facilities that can make them viable crops for farmers. Textile crops. To try and get that reintroduced into British agriculture. So, I suggested we grow indigo for dyes and flax for linen. In my own textile practise I like to do narrative hand embroidery and to mend and always want to be as sustainable as possible, by trying to trace the provenance of my embroidery thread, but I couldn't do it, and I couldn't buy any British linen or any kind of embroidery thread produced in this country that I could dye myself. So my thinking was, let's make a mending kit, a little denim mending kit. That could then work in with Patrick’s company, as he has a social enterprise called Community Clothing, selling jeans. Then, maybe, he could sell the mending kit and that would really tie into the Fibershed theme. He said ‘No. Let's grow jeans, making a mending kit’s not going to make a big enough impact. Let’s tackle the most iconic garment on the planet, that’s almost completely impossible to produce in this country right now."
I think COVID had a part to play in this, it's a poly crisis going on and I think COVID really brought that home. I think perhaps we both entered into something that was wildly ambitious. There is value to being bold and brave. I think we both entered into it with; from my point of view, not with any particular expectations of success, but that it would be an interesting learning process that we could be very transparent about and document at every stage along the way that would really raise awareness of this issue. Because he works with the Kings Foundation at Dumfries House, he sent me up there to meet them and see if they would be able to collaborate, but it wasn't quite a fit for them at that time. But I had really brilliant conversations up there with Jax Farrell and because obviously King Charles has this long history of being a passionate advocate for organic farming they had a brilliant organic farm there. The facilities are incredible and speaking to the farm director, she told me they hadn’t found a way to connect Future Textiles with organic farming. I told her that Fibershed was the way to connect the two as Fibershed literally exists to connect farming to fashion, and you grow textiles. They also wanted to start a dye garden, so I was able to advise them a bit on which dye plants to plant in Scotland. But ultimately, they didn't have the land to do a full project. Then an e-mail came through from the British Textile Biennial who had formed in 2019. I asked Patrick (who is their patron) would he mind if I contacted them to see if they wanted to collaborate, which worked perfectly. So we created this project called Homegrown Homespun, with Super Slow Way, who organise the British Textile Biennial, and it became a community based project. There was a lot to tackle, there were the community volunteers, Patrick who brings the commercial manufacture and Fibershed coming together to create this triple bottom line project of sustainability, ecological, social and the economic which was really fascinating.
D: How did you find the land to start?
J: Myself and the project manager, Alex looked around a couple of sites in Blackburn. One had so recently been used for landfill, you could see the soil was dead. Then we found a place that was right on the Leeds, Liverpool Canal. It had been used for fly tipping and rough sleeping, but it was a beautiful little clearing in some trees, literally a stone's throw from the centre of Blackburn, and it felt like an Oasis. Like a place that you could come to for solace and we transformed it. I was told, ‘don't ever come here on your own, will you?’ I don't know Blackburn, so I wouldn't have even thought that there was any kind of risk. But we transformed it into this lovely haven where people now go to. The wildlife has increased and the canal siding has all been replaced.
D: It's great that it's beside what was built as part of the Industrial Revolution to transport goods.
J: Exactly, and the British Textile Biennial are great at integrating all these intersectional issues that run through that waterway. The history, the onshoring the offshoring. There is a large Pakistani community in Blackburn, and I think a lot of what Super Slow Way do is, to try and empower that community. The project had these goals to create slow textiles, but we also had these markers along the way of the Textile Biennial 2021 and 2023. Originally we were going to try and produce a prototype pair of jeans by October 2021 and Patrick was going to try and bring the full line of jeans to market by 2023. But we only planted our first seed in April 2021. From that we managed to create a beautiful prototype piece of cloth.
We went through every single process by hand, because there are no manufacturing facilities for linen or natural dye in the country. We knew that was the case before we started, but for me, going through the process by hand was the gold. There is this mentality that something is only valuable if you can make a profit from it. However, for me I felt the value was right there. Because what we're doing by hand engages people with natural materials directly, they are having a direct experience in the environment, that is worth more and you can't buy that. You can’t buy that message by touching a garment, you can only gain it physically. I also think there's an element of communion with the plants when you're in that environment, there is a wisdom being transferred by working slowly, so I found that stage really valuable. As things progressed and we were trying to upscale, Patrick happened to have a lot of issues in his business that were separate from the project that he had to prioritise, so he wasn't able to bring the jeans to market.
But I decided at a certain point in the process that I'll loop back and create a prototype pair because it might take 10 years, to get to manufacture, but by 2023, I wanted us to have some kind of totemic garment that represented all the hard work everyone put in with so much goodwill. It’s a talisman of this beautiful future that we all know is possible. As much as we are brainwashed by this economic system we are in and are blinded by it, I do think we all have instincts that are calling us, the remembrance of, hang on a minute, my granny didn't used to do that, it's not that long ago and for 30,000 years humanity did not consume like this, and they were not dependent like this. I feel there's a real immaturity to consumer dependency and that we've been deskilled from our agency. We've been disempowered through this funnelling of our education system. Making us passive consumers which perpetuates, capitalism. The skills that we were teaching in the field in Blackburn break that cycle because people have revelations, they have never thought about clothing this way before, and say ‘I'm never gonna buy in the same way ever again.’ ‘Now I understand that this is how all of my ancestors produced their clothing.’ We wouldn't be alive today but for people with skill.
So we produced this beautiful piece of cloth. Then we were calling people for help because there are only a tiny handful of people who can do this work in the country. We had two spinners who could produce that first piece of cloth. I did the dyeing part of the process, and we had a weaver come up from Brighton. Between us, we were niche, but we still couldn't produce a pair of jeans, because every single stage of it was incredibly difficult. Which highlights how hugely skilled people were in the past and how much we need to reclaim and the reclaiming is going to be great, it’s a fantastic process and I guess I'm here to rebuild that.
D: But in an nonindustrial way. All the machines, that we're here and able to do this sort of thing were offshored, when the factories were bought, the machines were exported. During one of my visits to Mallon Linen they had just rebuilt a very old scutching machine.
J: That's where it's at for me. The industrial revolution was fantastic. Machinery and mechanisation is fantastic when it's tempered with moral and ethical values. Plus a sense of proportion, and a sense of the truth of what is actually sustaining your life on this planet when you contextualise it like that, the scale that Charlie and Helen work at, at Mallon Linen looks right to me. You haven't lost your hand to plant connection. It's not out of sight out of mind. The exploitation we're witnessing is because of lengthy opaque supply chains. You wouldn't treat people like that if they were on your doorstep and this is the principle of regionalism and localism. Fibershed are trying to find this sweet spot and it very much links into, like the work that Kate Raworth is doing with doughnut economics, where everyone has enough, but no one breaches the boundaries into too much, and no one reaches and falls through the gap because they've got too little. So, what Charlie and Helen are doing is great, it’s fascinating and I feel that maybe we have to think smaller scale than industry is currently.
D: Charlie and Helen are also learning from the older generation, those that are still around. Eugene McConville from McConville’s Mills is probably one of the last of the original scutchers left in Northern Ireland and he also used to grow linen and has been passing on his knowledge to them. Even though they are farmers they found that learning to grow the flax was a skill in itself.
J: We found that in the field too, especially when it came to the retting of the flax there was so much stress, because too little and you're not gonna be able to do anything with it. If you ret for too long you've lost your fibre. As a volunteer team, we were showing up two hours on Friday morning and that's not how farming works. The whole idea of making this a community project added another level of difficulty to what was already a really difficult challenge. Farming is an incredible skill. This is the thing, skill has been so demeaned. People really don't have any concept of what is involved because we've devalued all of these things that we rely on. It's the same with creative work, people have no concept that it takes 10,000 hours to learn a skill.
J: To make the jeans, I did a spin-off project, with funding from Arts Council England and their developing your creative practise grant, because I needed to learn to spin. To spin wool is difficult but to spin linen is extra difficult. That learning really takes years and years of practice. Because I knew I had an opportunity to get the story out it was valuable to say let's create the prototype by the 2023 biennial. It meant I had a year to practise, and I practised on vintage flax called Berta's Flax. Have you heard about this? Berta’s Flax is flax that was handed down from dowries in Austria. In the past keeping a chest of flax was common in many parts of Europe, at first as a dowry and sort of an insurance, and later as a sweet tradition. Because I was terrified to use the flax I’d grown, I compromised and produced the weft from Berta’s flax and used Charlie and Helens flax for the warp. My spinning teacher spun the warp and I hand spun the weft. I was going through every single seed to cloth skill but making some compromises because I wanted a pair of jeans to exist at the end of the process. In the end it took me nine weeks spinning 3 hours a day to spin the weft. I spun about four and a half kilometres of linen, as did Carole Bowman, who spun the warp. With my fashion and natural dye background, I can dye and I could do the pattern cutting and sewing feasibly well, but in the end I didn’t. Then I had the funding to begin to learn to weave. That's a classic case of even me, who is a creative practitioner, thinking, weaving, I can do that. But what I thought was weaving, was only the tip of the iceberg. Weaving takes place before weaving starts, it takes so much prep. Even threading the loom takes so much time and skill. I bought a little second-hand loom, I had decided to go to the Yorkshire Dales for 10 days and my two teachers were going to be close by so they could support me, so I would be a supported weaver. They were going to thread the loom, have it ready and I would do the final bit. However, a Weaver really needs to know the loom they are working with and my teachers didn't know the loom and it turned out that the loom wasn’t up to the job either. Six days in, we were demoralised, our backs were broken from threading and rethreading and both Carole Bowman and Ali Sharman tirelessly supported me. Honestly, I think we probably could have done it, but there's also an element of me that thought, look, the warp is getting damaged in this process, there is risk happening here. Amazingly though I had had some lessons with a weaver I'd met only two weeks before I went to Yorkshire who had said ‘I've got a brilliant loom and I weave linen all the time.’ It had come out of the blue, literally, because before that point we didn't know anybody who could do that.
D: So everything was aligning for you.
J: I felt that sense of the planets aligning and because I follow my intuition, I thought I don't care about doing it all myself. Hand that baby over, she can definitely do that better. My point was that I wanted to understand all the skills and have been through my initiation with weaving. I’ve had a taster, that's fine. So I handed the weaving over to Kirsty Leadbetter, whose middle name is Jean, so I thought, OK, there's another sign. Then when I turned up at her studio and the name of the building was Lineker, which means field of linen I felt OK, this feels right. Also I wanted to include people who like myself have been working away for years, being undervalued, and not getting recognition. Kirsty was definitely someone who needed to be elevated. Turns out she does a lot of work for couture brands that insist on non-disclosure agreements. This was her chance to be involved in this historic project, which was really nice to do. There were so many people throughout the process like Simon and Ann from Flaxland, who also really helped throughout the project. When it came to the sewing, I knew there was someone I wanted to be involved with, Mohsin Sajid. He is a jean, producer but also a denim historian. I went to his place thinking; he can pattern cut and I will sew. When I got there that thought changed to, we've got one day here, these are his machines, they're vintage, I've never touched them, I would need a day to practise if I wanna let my ego to kick in and do it myself. You know what, no, again let the person do what they do.
D: Again, that’s part of the whole community you have throughout the whole project.
J: Part of the collective for sure. It was really nice that he got to be involved in that. And we have the first pair of jeans, it now exists. I keep coming back this statistic, 70 million pairs of jeans are sold in the UK each year, and only this one pair hasn't been imported. It was really nice to take them back to Charlie and Helen at Mallon Linen. You can see the process in the material, you can see where maybe some of the fibres weren’t quite retted as the rest. You can see where the fibres broke during the weaving process, and I love that story about them. That's the kind of clothing I want, with this beautiful story, with a healthy provenance. I don't want to wear the death of the planet. I don't want that on my skin. We don't have a choice right now, but I think that what I, and many others are doing, is creating choice now.
D: For your natural dyes do you have your own allotment where you grow the plants for the dyeing and do you grow woad for the blue. How is growing woad? Is it difficult? I know that growing indigo is extremely difficult.
J: It’s not the growing insomuch that is difficult it’s the extracting pigment and the dyeing. I did have an allotment which I gave up when the Homegrown Homespun project took off and I set up a market garden at home. I am now growing woad, and organic British Indigo with my Fibershed collaborator Mark Palmer, who’s a Soil Associate Inspector and we're growing at a large organic farm that supplies Riverford Organic in North Yorkshire. Trialling the upscale, of what we started in the project. I think there is an element that Super Slow Way wanted volunteers to upscale the Indigo production but this is a farmers job, its farm work. There are some restrictions to making that work within a community setting, it's really valuable and there are certainly things you can do, but for commercial upscale you need farming expertise daily. The farm we are now growing at is brilliant and the waste from that production powers the National Grid because they have an anaerobic digester on the farm which is already organic. Fibershed have this system called Climate Beneficial™ which is a verification system that’s not so well set up in the UK yet, because we're still deciding on what's going to constitute agro-ecological, and what our verification process is. What works in America is that, say a brand are working to this, that they can prove that they've been beneficial to soil health, and show social benefits as well, then they can use this beneficial verification and they give a percentage back to Fibershed who plough that into education programmes or they pay for maybe a windbreak on a farm. Creating this nice circular system which was what I hoped would happen from Patrick producing the jeans, that that could feedback into a nice positive loop that helps set up regenerative farming.
In terms of woad production, that's much more likely. Obviously, there are still barriers, because synthetic dye factories are about the bottom line and using indigo is inconvenient in comparison. I think that's its valueable because it throws the brakes on, it makes people value natural resources more, and it's not so easy to churn out and waste. As part of the project, we needed to find a synthetic dye factory with vision that could work with us. Patrick introduced me to a guy at in Blackburn whose factory was literally half a mile from where we were growing. He really helped to start that natural dye scale process by giving us space in his factory for free, and by being really interested. Amazingly, he had worked with; on his very first job in the factory, as an apprentice, a natural dye job with woad, and he never did another natural dye job after that, but he had his recipe book and said, ‘Oh yeah, I've done this before. We can do this.’ Again, this feels like a great synchronicity happening and when Patrick does this, which I have faith he will, there is someone willing to dye the garments naturally. And for us growing woad commercially, we now have this factory willing to work with it and that starts setting a precedent in the industry. It's slow moving, it’s like trying to turn the Titanic with these very commercially minded, industrial men. But having one person who recognises the need to future proof the bottom line of this is great and again another benefit of the project. I can't immediately say look at this massive change, it's incremental, but I do feel it's created a positive influence.
D: I love what you have been doing Justine it is very inspiring. Do you still do one to one teaching now or are all your courses online? Because you still have The Wild Dyery don't you?
J: I have a studio for that close to home and I will be doing some in person workshops. Because the project dominated my life so much, I feel like I've been sort of swept up, possessed and now dropped back on the shore and am processing all of that. I also have a film a 50min documentary that has its premier online with the full moon on May the 12th and I will also write a book. There are so many things that went right and wrong on the project that could be really useful for people to know about when doing this. Everyone has to learn this regenerative process. So, I feel like the mistakes and the issues are fascinating. When I did get some press creating the jeans at the end of 2023, it felt like it was picked up, like it’s a gimmick. And some of it was a bit sensationalist. Everyone filtered it through their own media outlet. But I feel like there's so much rich learning, in there that I can share. I have been asked to speak at lots of events, which is great. The jeans have a bit of a story to tell and it’s a fascinating story. It is a moment in history.
D: I'm so pleased you've had a documentary, made around the project. There are some great films and documentaries like Amy Powney’s Fashion Reimagined, Eleanor Church’s XTrillion, Waterbear, SLAY and of course The True Cost film, it would be amazing to have everyone showing in one place, that would be an amazing Film Festival.
J: Also Alan Brown, The Nettle Dress I feel he's now a part of this. Another thing that happened during the project was that I realised that it was unrealistic to expect volunteers to show up intermittently 2 hours a week and fully engage with regenerative principles, because it's so holistic and so massive it requires deep personal investigation. To address that I set up an online course called Growing Slow Textiles. Which takes people from seed to cloth and runs over nine monthly Zoom meetings. We have different teachers coming at various points. Jenny Balfour Paul does indigo history. I teach indigo extraction. We have Simon and Ann from Flaxland to teach flax growing and processing and Alan Brown from The Nettle Dress teaches drop spindle spinning. Then Ali Sharman, who helped me throughout my weaving learning, teaches very basic weaving. At the end of the year, there are a percentage of people who will make it through the process because it is an initiation, and the people who do, are so moved by understanding the reality of human labour, and the planetary resources that go into these throw away things that we wear. It really alters their psychology around clothing. So I have a book to write, ‘Woman Grows Jeans’ is my provisional title. I also have spin-off books from that about things I've learned that I want to say, that go more into the spiritual aspect of what clothing really is. Is it really about vanity and status and ego and competition or is it actually a beautiful gift from Mother Earth to warm and protect us and keep us alive. It's that level of coming back into divine inspiration of creativity that I'm interested in, that's what's being lost, and I believe that's what people crave. But this is all at proposal stage for now.
D: What drives you Justine and, how do you see the future.
J: I need to get back to the people in my Fibershed and re-galvanise that community because the project took me off in a tangent, I feel some people might have lost the reason of how, me making a pair of jeans, serves those people. But it was all to create this incentive for these synthetic dye factories in this region which churn out so much virgin fossil fuel every day who cause so much harm, to change. It was really to get to this point of saying, now you have a factory you can have your wool dyed in, which means you can now participate fully in being, regenerative and being part of the Fibershed movement. There's a lot of work being done around sustainability and the word regenerative is being bandied about a lot, but I really feel Fibershed are setting the benchmark with great integrity, without greenwash.
D: And there is so much greenwash.
J: There is, and I do question that, and maybe greenwash is part of the process. Maybe it's just an incremental step and we shouldn't be too puritanical. Fibershed isn't puritanical it includes everybody, whatever stage you are at.
D: If you're too puritanical you scare people away.
J: There's a difference between being puritanical and having no's boundaries and no principles, though. So it's finding that line, isn't it? We want Fibershed to mean something, and we need to get very clear about what it means. I've started a little WhatsApp group for all the Fibershed groups in the UK so we can communicate a bit more easily and discuss the value and really galvanise that ground up community.
Links:
Website: The Wild Dyery
Insta: The Wild Dyery
Documentary Insta: Woman Grows Jeans
Documentary PreScreening: Prescreening-invite
Documentary Website: Woman Grows Jeans
Northern England Fibreshed: Northern England Fibreshed
