By Lea Stewart / Source: Ecouterre

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In the spring of 2014, a dedicate lot of Londoners embarked on a mission to grow a garment. That meant starting from seeds, and using only hand labor techniques to turn a plant into fashion. One year later, they have made a gorgeous woven top entirely from urban farmed flax crop. This exemplary project brought together gardeners, weavers, fashion designers, neighbors, and even school children. When we first learned about the project, we had a lot of questions. You may also be thinking, “isn’t flax a weird plant to grow for textiles?” We dug in to find out more.

The project was born when Zoë Mill Burt from in Herne Hill and Kate Poland, of Cordwainers Community Garden in Hackney met through the London-based Slow Textiles Group.

Along with Poland’s co-founder Natalie Mady, these driven women aimed to prove that slow fashion is possible in an city by making a garment entirely from urban-farmed textile crops. They also wanted the project to be a way for community to connect to their environment and to each other.

“We were inspired by the idea of the threads that bind us together in the city,” Poland writes on her blog. “We wanted to show, through a piece of material, that individually we can come together to make something that we can’t do on our own.”

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Flax is a fast growing plant, and it’ll thrive even in fair conditions. From seed planting, flax is ready to harvest in 90 days. It also grows in soil that is not very nutrient rich and light deprived. For the small vacant lots in London that the group uses to farm, flax was a perfect match.

Poland says that flax was actually the first textile crop grown by man, more than 10,000 years ago. Flax farming for textiles was at its peak three centuries ago, but waned as textile production industrialized.

Much of the information of how the farmers from years past processes their flax has been lost, so part of the effort of this project was to piece together the history and revive the craft.

In Poland’s online diary, she mentions on several occasions the challenges that humans bring to urban farming.

Among them was the diminutive size of the plots, which were strewn throughout the neighborhood. Although the team tried their best to urge people with signs and netting, the crop was trampled and trash strewn on many occasions. They lost an entire crop to a careless dog walker whose pet romped and destroyed it. Weeds and weather also became challenges to the plants surviving. Luckily, flax is a hearty plant.

Read more @ Ecouterre