Canada: Grow your own clothes – East Vancouver group is fanatical about fabric

Rebecca Graham (right) processes the flax plants to make linen, while Sharon Kallis holds a linen blanket. Jennifer Gauthier / Vancouver Freelance

If you join this club and plant some flax seeds you could end up with a home-grown linen handkerchief

By Tessa Vikander
Metro
Mar 15 2018

Excerpt:

Even with the latest genetic modifications, jeans and T-shirts still don’t grow on trees as fully formed garments. And, for better or worse, cotton and linen is still grown in fields, and processed rigorously before it’s woven into fabric.

Despite these constraints, there’s an ambitious group of fabric fanatics in Vancouver who are growing their own clothes, and you too could join them in a course called the Linen Grower’s Club. That is, as long as you have access to a 4m x 4m plot of land to grow flax plants, and are okay with the fact that it might take a year before you have processed the plants and spun enough linen to weave a handkerchief.

If you’re extra patient, and super dedicated, then perhaps like Sharon Kallis, you’ll commit six years to the hobby and end up with three kilometres of spun line, enough to weave a vest.

Most of the course happens in a park at the south edge of Strathcona, where Kallis, an environmental artist, and her colleague, Rebecca Graham, are teaching a dozen people how to plant and grow flax, and process the plants into a spool of spun thread, all using ancient techniques and tools.

Read the complete article here.