Queen Ludd
Dear Hugo,
my brain is still fragmented in a million pieces, though somewhat recovered since last time I wrote.
For instance, I sewed a dress. A nice linen dress and I’m not even ashamed of the darts and seams. Linen is a little harder to work with than cotton, I found, but not as tricky as that plaid rayon blend I made my first dress out of (a poor choice). I enjoy learning the characteristics of each fabric as I go. I’m beginning to understand what it means when someone says a particular textile “sews beautifully.”
I’m also trying to finish an essay about the Draper X3 looms. These are the shuttle looms that wove selvege denim at White Oak Mill in Greensboro, where Uncle Mike and Meemaw and her father and her mother’s father worked. Now they’re at Vidalia Mills in Louisiana. I interviewed an exec there, this guy Bob, who told me about the day they revealed that Vidalia had rescued the looms and would be producing denim with them. He described people in the industry as “going ape.”
Which of course has got me thinking other historic occasions when people went ape over looms…
And then I somewhat accidentally ended up reading this week about a guy who owned part of a textile mill and specifically about his girlfriend who maybe worked in the mill or was maybe a prostitute (in addition to being a Chartist and supporter of the Irish Republican Brotherhood) and I have become convinced that she invented communism as much as anyone else did, and so if you ever hear me refer to myself as a Burnsist, that’s who I mean.
I thought picking up sewing again would be a nice hobby to clear my mind. And it is – focusing on a physical handcraft is a welcome respite from staring at my laptop screen in constant low-grade agony. But it’s also more related than I realized to this whole project of trying to understand my family, society, economic systems, the world, etc.
For instance: try to trace the supply chain of a single piece of fabric. This linen I bought for my dress came from a retailer in Vancouver. The fabric was woven in China. But that’s all the definite information I can get as a consumer. I don’t know where the flax was grown (possibly Europe) or processed into yarn for weaving (probably China, but it could have been Tunisia or Lithuania, two other major flax yarn exporters). Bob from Vidalia Mills told me garment production supply chains can exceed 20,000 miles, with the materials going back and forth between hemispheres for different production phases. Even these ethical, slow fashion retailers that pay their garment-makers a living wage won’t reveal what exact factories they work with for sourcing fabric, let alone what factories those factories use for raw materials.
I could sit here and type more. But I am going to go finish a hem.
Love,
M.
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
We will fling the winding sheet
O’er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour’d.