How a Natural Dyer Localized Denim—from Linen Growing to Garment Production
Producing denim today is often a multinational process, with raw material cultivation and manufacturing handled by different entities. From start to finish, there are numerous chemicals involved to give blue jeans their indigo color and finish them.
“There are currently 70 million synthetically dyed jeans sold every year in the U.K.,” said Justine Aldersey-Williams, the founder of the Northern England affiliate of the nonprofit Fibreshed. “I don’t think enough people are aware that this toxic blue is derived from fossil fuels.”
Justine recently undertook a project to localize denim production, creating linen jeans using natural indigo in the U.K. Here, she goes into detail about the process behind her #WomanGrowsJeans initiative and how the fashion industry must change.
Carved in Blue: Tell us who you are and what you do?
Justine: I’m a textile artist, teacher and activist specializing in botanical dyeing. I see natural color as a gateway craft offering people a beautiful creative practice that highlights the need for alternatives to petrochemical dyes. I started my company The Wild Dyery in 2015 where I teach both online and from my studio in N.W. England. I also founded the Northern England Fibreshed in 2020 and immediately began a collaboration aiming to bring “Homegrown Homespun” indigo linen jeans to market via social enterprise, Community Clothing.
Carved in Blue: Can you tell us about the Fibreshed movement you’re involved with?
Justine: It was founded by a natural dyer, Rebecca Burgess, in California and has grown into an international organization comprising over 60 regional collectives of textile professionals aspiring to use “local fibers, local dyes and local labor.” We’re working towards agroecologically grown textiles that give back more to the earth than they take, gradually eliminating the social and environmental exploitation caused by fast fashion, mass production and lengthy global supply chains.
Generations prior to the Industrial Revolution grew and made their own clothing for around 30,000 years, with only the last six or so generations becoming dependent on mechanized manufacturing, offshored (often enslaved) labor and more recently fossil fuel derived fibers and dyes. So, it’s important to note how entwined climate breakdown is with the abuse of people and natural resources.
The principle of a Fibershed is similar to a watershed in that it defines a geographical area from which people can source the textiles they need. It reflects the way 99 percent of our ancestors lived yet integrates earth-revering principles with appropriate scale technology to ensure production stays within planetary resource boundaries.
Carved in Blue: How long have you been interested in natural indigo?
Justine: I’ve been growing and using indigo for about 12 years since completing my MA, where I specialized in natural dyeing. I now teach at many universities nationally and internationally. Since volunteering for Fibershed, I’m often asked to speak about the positive potential of regenerative textiles and have been featured on various TV and radio programs including Countryfile’s “Field to Fashion” episode where I demonstrated how to extract and dye with our native source of indigo, woad.
Indigo is the color of deep oceans and infinite skies yet is a color rarely seen occurring naturally in the botanical environment. The process of extracting blue pigment from green leaves never fails to delight me. Indigo doesn’t become a blue dye until an oxygen molecule attaches to its golden/green precursor, and watching this instant transformation upon lifting a textile out of a vat has a magical quality. It’s been associated with divinity in multiple world cultures due to the awe it inspires and is often referred to as “the color of God” so for me, indigo is a sacred practice that connects me to my true nature, which is nature.
Carved in Blue: When did you start this current #homegrownhomespun 100 percent UK Linen project? What inspired this project?
Justine: Despite working with renewable materials already, my increasing awareness of the climate crisis compelled me to establish a Fibreshed in Northern England. My hope was to entice a clothing manufacturer friend to help raise awareness of the need to transition to renewable, regional materials within the textile industry. Patrick Grant and I had started our businesses at a similar time and shared common values around sustainability. After sending him the Fibershed book along with many compelling studies and articles, he agreed to a collaboration and I subsequently invited arts commissioning organization SuperSlow Way, who run the British Textile Biennial, to join our endeavor.
The Homegrown Homespun project planted its first flax and woad crops in April 2021 with the intention of making a prototype pair of jeans by the following October then bringing a line of indigo linen jeans to market via Patrick’s social enterprise Community Clothing by October 2023.
We deliberately set ourselves an impossible challenge, already knowing that there were no commercial linen or natural dye facilities in the country. Our rationale being that humanity urgently needed to divest from fossil fuels, and fiber and dye plants represent potentially lucrative crop diversifications for farmers once mid-scale processing facilities had been incentivized. A win-win!
As if all that wasn’t enough, the inclusion of SuperSlow Way meant we could locate our project on disused urban field in the heartland of the British textile industry with the hope of including the nearby South Asian communities who had suffered economic deprivation due to their textile jobs being offshored. We were combining a number of factors—economic, environmental and social—in a community project meeting two hours a week and with exhibition deadlines!
Not surprisingly, there were limitations to fully exploring the intersectional issues and deeper implications of regenerative agriculture, which prompted me to produce the Growing Slow Textiles online course, offered for free to volunteers and enabling them to journey from seed to indigo linen cloth at their leisure over nine monthly Zooms with a niche team of specialists in flax growing, processing, spinning, dyeing and weaving. It’s been one of the most rewarding aspects of this project watching the delight when someone shows a small piece of woven cloth they’ve tended through the many stages of textile production.
In terms of our Biennial deadlines, instead of the prototype jeans, we produced a prototype cloth in six months during 2021 (with just six weeks from harvest to exhibition!) and gradually realized that our project title had been over-ambitious. We weren’t going to be able to process our flax within the U.K. in time with the nearest linen processing facilities being in Northern France or Poland. It was this that provoked me to tackle growing a pair of jeans myself, and #WomanGrowsJeans began in September 2022.
Carved in Blue: What did you have to learn for this project?
Justine: The idea of #WomanGrowsJeans was that I’d fill any skills gaps in the seed to garment process. I am a fashion graduate, so knew how to pattern cut and sew. I was already a natural dyer and had spent the last few years growing fiber and dye. Spinning and weaving were my challenges. It wasn’t going to be possible to be an independent weaver in the timescale so I took enough workshops and practiced on my own loom so I could be a supported weaver when the time came.
I was able to learn to spin having tried it first during our HH community workshops in 2021. Having done about half an hour with wool, I resumed my training late 2022 and taking nine months to practice with the much more challenging flax fiber before daring to use my own crop!
Carved in Blue: How many people were involved in this project, and how long did each process take?
Justine: I had been growing flax and indigo at my allotment for a few years and storing my stock, never realizing that I’d end up turning them into my own pair of jeans! So during 2020-2022 the crops were grown in Hoylake. Once I’d committed to the challenge, I was advised to source a higher quality fiber than a newbie grower could produce for the warp, so contacted Charlie Mallon of Mallon Linen in Northern Ireland.
Around 100 days after planting, flax fiber is pulled and laid to dew ret or rot on the ground so that the morning moisture, heat from the sun and microbes in the soil can begin breaking down the lignin and pectin that binds the fiber to the woody stems. This can take anywhere from two to six weeks, and gauging the right moment to stop retting is a crucial skill. Too little retting and the fiber will be too gummy to process any further, too much retting and the fiber is lost! Once retted, flax must be broken, scutched and hackled using various wooden implements and nail combs of gradually decreasing size. The dried stems transform into ‘flaxen hair’ ready for spinning.
Indigo can have multiple harvests and is soaked to extract the pigment precursors before being aerated with a flocculant then filtered. For dyeing, I use the 123 recipe popularized by indigo dyer master Michel Garcia. Indigo pigment is not soluble in water so must be reduced in a vat using fructose and an alkali such as lime, which he sources from baked oyster shells. It’s a very low-impact way of dyeing not requiring any mordanting and once neutralized, can be disposed of down the drain without causing any harm.
Fibers are immersed in the vat once they’ve been scoured (hot washed) to remove any remaining substances that could prevent contact with the dye. They’re left for 30 minutes then removed so that oxygen in either air or water can react, locking the indigo dye within the fibers. Depth of color is slowly built by repeated dyeing and oxidation. The deep blue of my weft yarn took 10 hours to dye.
For spinning, I was advised to get a professional linen spinner to create my warp since this would be taking the most stress and is notoriously difficult to weave due to the fibers’ intrinsic hairiness. Carole Bowman produced around 5.5km of single ply yarn.
I spun for nine weeks, three hours a day to produce 4.5 km of weft and then indigo dyed it using my allotment grown plants.
I had decided to stay in the Yorkshire Dales equidistant between my two weaving teachers, who’d kindly offered to warp the loom then transport it to my accommodation. Unfortunately, the countermarch loom was more than a little temperamental after its journey, and after six days of “fettling” (fixing), the warp was becoming damaged. I decided to hand the job over to another weaver, Kirsty Leadbetter of The Liverpool Weaving Company, who I’d only met a few weeks before. It transpired she had a huge loom that would be more suitable and years of experience weaving linen—a rarity!
Once woven, the two cloths had to be washed and beetled to transform the stiff, open-weave, loom-state cloth into a soft fabric with drape and luster. I used the back of my fiber blending board (a wooden chopping board with handle) to beat the damp cloth, then used a rolling pin in both warp and weft directions to help the fibers settle together. A hot iron completed the finishing.
Denim historian Mohsin Sajid was the fifth and final pair of hands to co-create the jeans. I had planned for him to just pattern cut so I could put my sewing skills to good use, but time constraints, logistics and the machines involved meant I needed to step aside and let the master do his work.
Carved in Blue: Have there been any learnings from this project? What have you appreciated about the craft and slow method of making? What could the commercial denim industry borrow from this?
Justine: So much learning that I’m still processing! In fact, so much that I intend to write a book.
You really can’t talk about regenerative agriculture or fashion without discussing the thorny, intersecting issues of capitalist colonialism, encompassing racism, sexism and an ecocidal economic system that still impedes the production of ethical clothing.
Meanwhile, despite the alarms being raised my scientists, the supposedly most intelligent species on the planet continues to destroy its environmental life support system because growth-driven companies continue encouraging us to literally buy ourselves to death.
Additionally, even ethically driven companies have been impacted by Brexit and Covid, and this has resulted in a delay to the production of our upscaled Homegrown Community Clothing jeans. It’s a sign of the times that the only way currently to grow and produce Climate Beneficial™ clothing in the U.K. is to do it yourself, by hand!
My initiation into a regenerative craft practice whispered to me from an era before ecocide when people had more time and skill and it’s skill with natural materials that engender respect for the environment and which build the self-esteem and confidence that makes mindless consumption a defunct thrill.
Fibershed have a design challenge called “Borrowed from the Soil” that requires participants to design with 100 percent regionally grown natural fabrics and dyes—materials that at the end of the product’s life can be returned to the soil as nourishing compost.
Designers and manufacturers have become completely detached from the reality of where their materials come from and return to and must be reinitiated into the skills I’ve immersed myself in this year if they’re to produce clothing responsibly. I’d like to offer corporate immersions into growing your own textiles that begin and end with digging your hands in the earth!
There are currently 70 million synthetically dyed jeans sold every year in the U.K. I don’t think enough people are aware that this toxic blue is derived from fossil fuels. However, the issue isn’t just about material choice, it’s also about consumption.
There’s currently an argument stating that natural dyes could never replace synthetics because they would take too much land to cultivate. I would challenge this assumption when framed within the necessity for people to stop buying clothing they never wear. We currently use only a third of our purchases, with 50 percent of clothing bought going to landfill within a year. So the denim industry needs to urgently divest from both fossil fuel materials and transportation and consider how they’ll transition from growth to earth logic. Produce jeans for life using regeneratively grown materials that support local farmers, please!
I can proudly declare an interest here as my work has identified a need for more British-grown indigo. I’ve started a new business called Homegrown Color with my colleague and Soil Association inspector Mark Palmer and we’ve been growing a trial crop of woad with an organic farm in Yorkshire.
Upscaling is not an easy process, and our indigo will be in shorter supply and undoubtedly more expensive than its synthetic counterpart, but this is the point. We need scarcity and difficulty to help us revalue and respect the earth’s resources. Ease and convenience equal waste colonialism.
When grown regeneratively, indigo dye has the potential to sequester carbon from our over-heated atmosphere, putting it back where it’s needed in our depleted soils. It can increase biodiversity and engender reverence for nature when used responsibly.
I’m aware of the interest in lab-grown indigo, which is certainly an improvement on petrochemical-derived dye. I’m just not sure how it slows down consumption or improves our ecology for all those who rely upon it.
Carved in Blue: Have you got plans to exhibit this jean?
Justine: Yes, they’ll be revealed publicly during an interview on Saturday Oct. 28 at the British Textile Biennial. Then next year, I hope to take them on tour around as many exhibitions, events and universities as possible.
Carved in Blue: Historically, what do we know about the earliest indigo woven project? How does your jean fit into this narrative?
Justine: When Vasco de Gama opened the trade route around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, Europeans gained access to Asian indigo, which was four times stronger than their native woad source and so began the exploitation of enslaved labor to satisfy fashion. Historically, exclusive color has been a signifier of elite status. This quest for superiority and dominance fueled the textile slave trade, so my use of British-grown woad—and what ended up being incredibly pale woad due to weaving issues—marks a return to our humble source of indigo and our senses. Flax also has thousands of years’ worth of heritage on these shores and is our alternative to imported cotton, also being far easier to process than hemp.
Carved in Blue: Any future sowing, weaving plans?
Justine: Yes! These jeans are a prototype made to my measurements which aren’t for sale, but if I can find an appropriate supporter, I’ll repeat and refine this process next year, so someone else can own a unique piece of history.
We live in a society with more billionaires than ever before, with one in particular earning $1.5 million per hour. It’s insane, yet ironically what I’m about to suggest will sound mad. But then, as Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
There are I’m sure wonderful billionaires, but we need to change our notions of wealth and barometers of success. If your wealth is accompanied by greed and hoarding, you’re nothing but a hungry ghost with an insatiable psychosis masquerading as success. Real wealth is generosity, it’s having enough wealth of character and confidence in yourself to give. How many billionaires have moral wealth?
These jeans are a process rather than a mere product because they document the evolution of human skill during a pivotal era when we expand our consciousness beyond the binaries of old/new and begin integrating the traditional wisdom of self-sufficiency with revolutionary technologies. We need to find the sweet spot of manufacturing that revalues human labor and planetary resources. These jeans define that process and invite a new trend for fashion philanthropy where provenance is prized over aesthetics.
I’ll make the most expensive pair of jeans for the person truly rich enough to treat me as their equal. The price is 600 hours paid at the buyer’s hourly rate. I’ll earn only what’s fair along with anyone else involved and the rest of the revenue will fund an agroecological textile farm in Northwest England that becomes a center of excellence for regenerative textiles.
I realize this is a provocative and perhaps unlikely proposition but however ridiculous it might seem, it’s not more ridiculous than building underground bunkers or throwing billions into space exploration while the earth burns. My ridiculous proposition is designed to draw attention to the ridiculous economic disparity that dissociates the super-rich from climate reality and is an invitation for just one of them to come back down to earth and give back enough to create a beautiful future for generations to come. They then gain the peace and contentment of real wealth woven into a simple pair of jeans! Billionaires, feel free to DM me!