Flax project springs to life in Blackburn
Clothing entrepreneur, designer and television personality Patrick Grant is backing a community textile project in Blackburn that aims to prove that producing locally made apparel from locally grown textiles and natural dyestuff is still possible in the UK in 2021.
Homegrown Homespun is a regenerative fashion project that has grown out of an arts programme in northern England called Super Slow Way. In spring 2021, with the support of Patrick Grant, volunteers cleared a small area of disused land in Blackburn and began growing flax and woad on it.
Volunteers have gone every Friday since then to look after the plot and this will continue into the summer until the flax is ready for retting in August. North West England Fibreshed, a community of textile professionals aspiring to use regeneratively grown fibres and dyes, is running workshops in the area to teach local people about spinning, weaving and dyeing.
After that, Mr Grant, whose business interests include the Cookson & Clegg clothing company, which makes jeans at a factory in Blackburn, and a social enterprise called Community Clothing, will make a micro-collection of prototype jeans made from the locally grown linen fibres, dyed with the locally grown woad.
Speaking about it to BBC Radio on June 10, Mr Grant said: “The textile system we have now, as lots of us know, is pretty damaging to the environment. We want to turn the clock back to a system that existed a few hundred years ago when everything was produced locally and people in the community got involved.”
He described flax as “an amazing plant” because it grows naturally (in suitable geographies). He explained: “We planted our field of flax in April. It hasn’t been irrigated and we haven’t used any fertilisers and it’s just sprung to life.”
The project team’s intention is to showcase some prototype garments at an event called the British Textile Biennial in the autumn. “We want to prove the concept,” Mr Grant said, “and if the concept works we’ll roll it out in a much bigger way. We want to regenerate sustainable clothing and to create jobs. We want to encourage people to move away from having bad materials in their clothes to using good, climate-positive materials instead.”
Image (credit North West England Fibreshed) shows Patrick Grant with Homegrown Homespun team members sowing flax and woad in Blackburn.
