Mending ...meanderings

We’ve just passed Imbolc; the way marker between the beginning of winter and the beginning of spring. The lambs are in the bellies of the yews, the catkins are flying and the snowdrops are nodding.

January is done - a month that often feels like a time of limbo. After all the rush and bustle of summer turning to autumn, the prep for winter and then coming together to celebrate solstice and Christmas, the gear shift of January can sometimes leave us feeling a bit empty, or lost, keeping our heads down against the rain and the dark, just surviving until the earth warms and life begins again.

It makes sense to me that we respond to the light, like all of life in one way or another. It also makes sense to me that it is a particularly hard element of living up here in the north of the globe, far from our more equatorial origins.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Yet there is beauty here. Here in the winter, even apart from the bright frosty mornings, there is colour and structure; there are the mosses and lichens, there are spent seed cases and round oak galls, great architectural branches and glassy lakes like otherworldly mirrors …but, as the light fades at 4pm, I am fully open to embracing hibernation tactics!

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

The value of this down time IS rest. It is the time for unpressured reflection, to understand where we have got to and prepare for our next steps; time to rosin the bow. Time to doodle, dream, read. Time to mend.

This year I have had some real treasures to mend.

At Christmas time I was handed one of our early Cambrian Gilets for repair. Having been accidently bundled up with a pile of clothing after autumn flooding, it had an unfortunate encounter with the washing machine and the soft wool thermal layer had succumbed to the rigorous tumbling. However, having become such a treasured garment, the owner was determined to try and rejuvenate it. After meticulously unpicking the layers, I was handed the surviving outer and commissioned to attach a whole new inner. The result was almost like new, but somehow more… 

For me, it felt extremely validating to have the opportunity to repair a garment that I always hoped would hold meaning for the person that owned it. Not only was this garment of practical value, but it was treasured enough to invest in the repair. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

The cost of replacing the lining was £125, around 40% of the cost of a whole new gilet, but a new gilet would have forever been tinged with sadness, representing somewhat the loss of the original, the guilt of the mistake. The repaired one now carries with it the memories of the flood, the sense of disaster and loss at discovering the ‘ruined’ gilet, the hope of finding a solution, the experience of overcoming the disaster, caring, investing and the joy of discovering that it was not a disaster after all! The gilet lives! The pleasure of putting that garment on and connecting with the story it holds will be even greater than before.

Maybe these investments in our clothing are the very act that increases their value to us. It strikes me that this is much like any other relationship. The more we put into our friendships and our communities the more they enrich our lives. 

Most of our lives are saturated with meaningless commodities - we are burdened with ‘stuff’ that we are desperate to offload to charity shops. We have grown up believing acquisition to be a marker of success, but the sense of achievement we feel in the novelty of purchase is fleeting, and then we are burdened with the “having”. 

Most of us find it so difficult to prioritise the mending of clothes simply because they hold such little financial value and we are unable to escape that as a measure of worth. 

But, consider this; the way that we interact with our clothing goes far beyond just practical value. The right clothing helps us to feel confident in different situations - often for both practical and social reasons, it affects our emotional state. It communicates something about us to others because it visually illustrates our choices, values and culture. We have an emotional relationship with our clothes, and yet resist investing in that relationship. 

View fullsize

Also in my mending pile was one of our original Merino Lambswool Flannel Shirts. Worn almost continuously for three years, it had understandably begun to wear thin at the elbows. Being someone who can't bear to throw away the offcuts of beautiful cloth, I luckily have a small stash of patching material that exactly matches. An hour and a half later, the shirt is good to go for another 3 years of continuous wear…

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Mending these pieces has convinced me to make our matching fabric offcuts available on our website. Along with our little cards of darning yarns, I hope they will enable you, our customers, to invest in your relationships with your treasured clothes. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Perhaps if the things we have in our lives each hold greater meaning to us, we need very few of them to feel a far greater wealth.

Migrants, industrialisation and black gold...

Our NEW Italian Shirt

The first woollen shirts I made for our collection were designed in reference to the simple, traditional flannel shirts worn by the working class in Britain and especially in Wales. Our long tradition of flannel weaving has now dwindled now almost to nothing. In fact, when I began the process of commissioning our next run of cloth, after the closure of our last dedicated flannel mill, Melin Teifi, I hit so many barriers that I had to step back and consider my options. I felt sad about this loss and wondered why Wales has lost so much of its weaving industry. The answer to this question is long and complicated and I still don’t fully understand, but it’s because of communication technology, capitalism, developments in transportation, global economy, it’s the industrial revolution and its coal. 

I have always wanted to produce clothing that connects me and my customers to the land that holds us. A modern indigenous collection if you will. But I realised that the story of who we are and the land that we live in is shaped by the stories all around us, influenced by politics, inventions, immigration - we may be an island, but we do not exist in isolation. So, with our new shirt, I decided to tell one of those stories; it is made from a very beautiful, fine and luxurious Italian wool, but in the same simple cut as our original flannel work shirts. It echoes a convergence of culture that occurred at the turn of the last century and is still visible today throughout the towns and cities of South Wales…

Cast your imagination back 250 years, to the end of the C18th. One third of the land in Wales was still unenclosed ‘common land’. Most people subsisted with a basic smallholding and simple cottage. Those who did not have their own land to work were usually engaged as farm servants or labourers, residing in the main farmhouse until married, when they would move into their own cottage, but continue to labor on the farm. Aside from land management and animal husbandry, people were occupied as thatchers, charcoal burners, clog makers, spinners, weavers and peat cutters to name a few. Then, between 1801 and 1851, the population of Wales doubled, as it did throughout Britain and Ireland. The pressure on land increased and the landless poor were forced to either make illegal enclosures on high, poor land, or seek employment in small industry. Landowners with quarries or mines often allowed the erection of cottages on their land as it enabled them to also acquire labourers for their enterprises. Other small groups of cottages would appear around sites of weaving, fishing or trade.

In the late 1830’s famine, due to terrible weather, followed by tax breaks for imported food and increased road taxes for Welsh farmers made it increasingly difficult to eke out a living. 

An illustration of the Rebecca Riots in West and Mid Wales from 1839-43

Elsewhere in Britain at this time, the mechanisation of textile production and transportation was gathering speed. In the 1760’s, two spinning machines had been invented, heralding a new era for textiles, and as more mechanical inventions followed for the combing and weaving of fibre, textile production no longer relied on skilled cottagers working with spinning wheels and hand looms to create woollen cloth for export. 

Factories were established, massively increasing productivity and therefor also a demand for transportation, meaning more iron and a hunger for coal.

At the time the Spinning Jenny was invented in 1760, Merthyr Tydfil was a village of about 40 cottages. By 1801, only 40 years later, Merthyr had a population of nearly 8,000 people, all employed in the production of iron.

An illustration of the early slums of Merthyr Tydfil, courtesy of the BBC

Infrastructure could in no way keep up with the growth of industry and workforce. The settlements in the valleys of South Wales became slums, with families living in single room huts only 2m x 1.5m built directly on the iron slag heaps. There were open sewers and infant mortality was extremely high. 

Tip girls, working at Abergorki Colliery, Treorchy, C1880

In the decade between 1880 and 1890, over 100,000 people left their homes in rural Wales to join the frontier urban society of the industrial valleys. 

It is hard to imagine swapping a life in the countryside for the squalor of a mining town, but at that time, the reality was a choice between a hard won wage or starvation.

At its height, in 1913, there were 620 coal mines in Wales, employing 232,000 men, producing 57 million tonnes of coal in that year alone. Industry of this scale would never have been possible with the Welsh population alone. The immigrant workforce in the C19th to Wales consisted mostly of destitute English people, many Irish and towards the end of the century a large count of Italians.

A century of political unrest had ground out a desperate poverty in Italy. By the unification of the country in 1861, the country was still predominately rural with a large peasant class, trapped in the mezzadria (sharecropping) system with little or no opportunity to improve their lives. This resulted in a mass diaspora, with 16,000,000 Italians emigrating the country between 1880 and 1914.

A huge number of Italians sought a new life in America, but, closer to home, many were drawn to Britain by its booming economy. Initially the work was migrational, many coming to work for the summer months, often busking with street organs or selling ices to the adventurous Victorians and returning home for the winter with some money for their families. But the road was hard and long, and the opportunities in Britain were plentiful compared to the subsistence life of the rural Italian poor. By the end of the C19th over 1000 Italians had settled in Wales, many of them working at the busy ports along the south coast. 

Up in to the valleys conditions had begun to improve a little with the formation of workers unions, welfare halls and parliamentary representatives. People had a little more autonomy, were managing to build homes and build community. People worshiped on Sundays, men sang in the choir and there were working mens clubs and pubs for socialising and drinking. These were not, however, acceptable places for women. Although there was no ban on women in pubs, those who were known to be seen in such establishments suffered extremely undesirable reputations.

After the Mines Act was passed in 1842, women and boys under 10 years old were no longer allowed to work underground, but it took almost 2 decades for the ban to really come into affect due to a lack of inspectors and the much lower wages that pit owners could pay women and children. Eventually women were moved up to the pit edge, where they pushed and emptied the trams of coal, breaking, cleaning and packing. They became known as the tip girls and continued to horrify society by engaging in hard, dirty ‘mens’ work. They became a tourist attraction, considered hideous and immoral, with postcards of the ‘trouser wearing hermaphrodites’ being sold as curiosities. 

By 1886 Parliament announced it would create a new Mines Act to ban women from working at the collieries completely. Society believed that women should be engaged in the more appropriate sectors of household service or factory work, but those kinds of jobs were extremely scarce in Wales. A large gathering of miners was held at Temperance-hall, Tredegar. Although women were not allowed to speak, the case was put forward that without this employment many widows and unsupported women, who had worked the tips since childhood, would have no other choice but the workhouse, and that the outdoor work was far healthier and more moral than the cotton factory work that many were engaged with in the north. 

So the women kept their jobs, but their own voices were still not heard in society. They continued to be paid a fraction of a mans wage, and gender segregation was entrenched.

Around this time some of the Italians that had migrated to Wales started to make their way up in to the valleys from the coast and saw an opportunity to share their own culture amongst the clustered ranks of terraced cottages.

Since the C17th coffee had become increasingly popular in Italy. The Ottoman Empire used the port of Venice to supply Europe with coffee grown in its Ethiopian plantations, so it stands to reason that it was in Venice that the first coffee houses were established. Caffè Florian was opened in 1720, and is still going to this day. At a time of political reform and new ideas about class and social boundaries, it became a meeting place for artists and writers, political thinkers and, indeed, women. 

Cafe Florian, Venice

From the 1890’s onwards, Italian families began to open cafes in the new colliery towns. To begin with they sold simple meals, cigarettes, sweets and tea, sending out young Italian boys in the summer with hand carts full of ice-cream or fish and chips in the winter. 

Later they acquired the newly invented steam espresso machines, bought over from Italy, and sold coffee and chocolate; small luxuries in a life of extremely hard work, and a place to gather and share ideas regardless of age, gender or class. For the first time in this new urban society, women had access to a social space where they had a voice amongst men.

The Italians worked extremely hard to build and establish their cafes in Wales, often bringing over family members or young boys from their home villages to work in their businesses. By the outbreak of WW2 there would be over 300 Italian cafes in South Wales, forming a central part of life around the mining towns of the valleys that is still present today.

Our Italian shirt is made in our home studio in mid-Wales, in a simple, comfortable style that reflects the traditional flannel work shirt, but this time in a fine and elegant cloth; a little luxury from Italy.

The cloth we have chosen is designer salvage, meaning that it is the end of multiple bolts of cloth left over after a fashion house has finished production of a line of garments. The cloth has been intercepted before reaching landfill, and made its way to our studio, so that, in our small scale way, we can turn it into beautiful clothing. You can buy our Italian Shirt HERE

Surviving as an independent maker in the fringes of global industry.

Back in the spring of 2023 it was clear that my stock of inky-blue and gold merino cloth was running low.

So, looking ahead to the coming winter, I embarked on the process of designing and commissioning a new shirt fabric.

Our original merino cloth was woven for us at the specialist flannel mill, Melin Teifi. Having produced exceptional cloth for over 50 years, expert weaver Raymond Jones has now, deservedly, retired from commission weaving.

So, I made alternative enquiries.

We are extremely lucky to still have one other commercial mill in Carmarthenshire that will produce short runs of woollen cloth to commission. It is here, at Curlew Weavers that my local Ryland and Black Welsh Mountain fleeces are transformed into the exceptional herringbone tweed that I use for our Cambrian Gilet.

However, due to various logistics including high demand, loom set-ups and yarn specifications, it was becoming clear that having our own shirt fabric woven there was not so straightforward.

I took a shot in the dark and made contact with Daniel Harris of London Cloth who is renovating the crumbling Elvet Woollen Mill, which is also less than an hour from the studio. He invited me down to see how they are getting on with the project and very generously helped me to brainstorm my predicament.

The project he has taken on is a mammoth one, and in short, they are a long way from offering a bespoke weaving service there. Although there was a chance Daniel might be able to squeeze a run of cloth in for me on a suitable loom it was clear that this would be a favour, and for such a short run, the yarn sourcing was problematic… it all, ultimately boils down to economy of scale…

The backbones of the Welsh textile industry are both its treasures and its torture. As far as I know, all of our mills except Melin Tregwynt, run on beautiful but geriatric looms, many of them now around 100 years old. While other parts of the UK - and the rest of the world - invested in new machinery and upped their production capacities, rural Wales, for a blurry, myriad of reasons, chugged along with what they had.

Daniel told me that, using one of these old looms, it can take a few days to weave the same amount of cloth that a modern loom can produce in about 3 hours. Oh.

Of course that also means that if I were to commission cloth woven on a modern, high-speed loom I would be looking at minimum order quantities in the thousands of meters (I was hoping to order 60).

 If I triple my order I might be able to approach a cost per meter that makes it possible to produce a shirt that doesn’t require a mortgage to buy. This would mean outsourcing garment production because I’d never be able to make that many shirts by myself, which in turn means a lot more pressure to sell shirts. Hmm. I spy ‘over-stock’ margins and marketing ploys… This is beginning to sound a lot like the fashion industry that I ran way from. That’s not to suggest that I am against growing my business, I just want business growth that is lead by demand, not by trying to push clothing on people who don’t need it just so that I can reach production quantity margins.

I don’t mind admitting that I have a sort of rosy nostalgia for our local wool industry. I want to be able to produce clothing that connects me to where I live. Sense of place and of belonging is deeply important to me in finding value in my work and part of that is using our small, local mills. They connect me to the past generations of people that have eked out a living in these valleys by farming and processing wool, and the wool in turn connects me to the land itself.

In fact, this is so important that I believe it is worth the cost to be able to fully process my local wool into garments that become so loved they are like old friends.

But what about the non-local wool? Our shirt merino was woven at a Welsh mill but was farmed in Argentina. At the time I wanted to balance our cultural heritage of Welsh flannel with a fibre that felt luxurious and soft enough to wear next to the skin. A merging of textile resources…

Humans have traded textiles for as long as we have walked the earth. We have exchanged techniques, merged ideas, traded dye plants, animal skins and clothes themselves, and all the while this exchange of textiles has been synonymous with the exchange of stories and influencing of cultures.  

I believe there are still stories to be told through the clothes we wear. If we take the time to tell them and to listen, to make those connections, what a great richness we could feel when dressing for our day.

Unfortunately, the scale of today’s global fashion industry is so mind boggling that it is extremely hard to glean any kind of story or connection to how your clothing is produced. It hasn’t arrived with a trader with tales to tell of French lace-makers or Indian block printers. It arrived on a pallet along with hundreds of other pallets on a ship from a chain of faceless factories.

We all hear the horror stories of the millions of tonnes of clothing waste that gets dumped in Ghana or Chile. In fact those of us that care about these issues of waste and exploitation become so aware of this poisoning that it is almost crippling.

The textile waste mountain in Accra, Ghana - the last resting place of unwanted clothing from the UK market. Image credit: ITV

How on earth can one justify making more clothing a in a world that is already oversaturated?

Because we need a brighter vision.

There needs to be an alternative option; a small-scale alternative to mass production, a local alternative to globalisation, a natural fibre in place of synthetic; a connection.

By working small scale I can pay attention, both to my customers needs and to my materials –to where they are from and how they are made, to how I use them and what happens to the waste.

I don’t have the time to make tiny things from the offcuts of dressmaking because I am focused on doing the things that I am good at, but I still can’t bear to compost the pieces that I know could be turned into something. So, I give them away to friends who craft them into beautiful things like quilted baby blankets or children’s waistcoats.

Whilst brainstorming my shirt fabric predicament with Daniel at Elvet he mentioned a guy who traded ‘deadstock’ yarns and suggested rummaging through his stock as a cheaper source of high-end yarn.

Deadstock is becoming an increasingly popular term, and I have been reluctant to get on that particular train, as I don’t want to support an industry fuelled on overproduction (buying up fabric that was produced for a fashion company, who then decided it wasn’t the exact shade they wanted, doesn’t make you more ethical, it just makes it possible for the mill to continue to be subjected to the whims of big business).

Ends of cones at Melin Teifi, left over from my cloth order

However, the yarns this guy had were mostly a few cones of a colour or blend that was no longer being produced and weren’t of enough quantity for a full run of cloth (or for the producer to sell as it wasn’t a whole box etc). This means you’d have to design a cloth based on what yarns you could gather together instead of starting with a colour concept at the drawing board. OK, not an unappealing challenge…

This made me think of my own scraps and the local crafters inventing a future for them. That too is using ‘deadstock’ on a smaller scale.

Following this train of thought I phoned a man in Yorkshire, who’s family has been trading in reclaimed textiles and shoddy waste since 1905 to chat through my thoughts and reservations. Over many years they have developed good relationships with some of the most highly respected mills not just in the UK but also Italy. These mills produce incredibly fine fabrics for fashion houses all over the world. Once the design house has predicted their garment quantities they work out the fabric requirements and commission the mill to produce it. The cloth goes to the factory where it is layered up on a bed so the pieces can be cut many at a time before going on to sewing. This high scale process means that after production there are usually small ends of bolts left over, perhaps 2m to 10m pieces, that can’t be used as the factories just aren’t set up for it. They are just scraps.

I guess there is always a bigger fish in the sea, with bigger scraps.

Being a smaller fish with a different business model (one that requires a much smaller marketing budget, for example), I can make garments just a few at a time.

Using industry ‘scraps’ also means that I can get an extremely high end fabric at a level I can afford; the cloth has already been paid for by the fashion house, so the price of those scraps to me reflects the costs involved in paying someone to maintain relationships with the mills to save the ends of bolts from landfill and redistribute them to people who can use them.

I requested some samples of the pure wool fabrics that they had in the warehouse and was smitten.

As long as I can get it processed I will never stop using our local wool. For me this is a tether to the land that holds me. It is grounding and visceral, a physical connection to the hills and the people that make my home. But we do not exist in isolation.

From this grounding point I want to explore the stories that connect us to our past and future through people and landscapes. I believe that textiles can carry those stories and make our lives richer.

Our first shirt in an ex-designer, Italian fine wool deadstock cloth will be available this autumn 2024 and it will tell the story of Italian migrants who made their way to South Wales at a time of industrialisation and black gold…

Image: St Fagans & the ACLI-Enaip Italian Memories in Wales project - from the BBC Blog

Stay signed up to our mailing list or follow us on Instagram for notification.

Spalting; fungal warfare and beech table tops

After a very soggy summer, September arrived with blazing sunshine. With the ground finally dry enough we took the opportunity to move our winter wood supply up to our woodshed before the season shifts again…

As we threw and stacked, a musty fungal scent thickened the still air and we reached some crumblier, dustier logs at the bottom of the pile. It reminded me of when we chopped these logs back in the winter, from tree limbs that had been sat dead on the ground long enough to become host to a myriad of fungal life.

Left for long enough, a whole variety of fungal hosts will completely devour fallen timber, each excelling in slightly different conditions within different timbers. In fact, their remarkable colonisation is what creates the staining that, in the timber world, is known as ‘spalting’.

The dark lines mark the path of fungi through the wood, delineating the front line of battle where different fungi meet each other in a clash for dominance over the next section of lignin (which, combined with cellulose, makes the cell walls of all woody plants). Before fungi evolved to break down the lignin, fallen trees and other plant matter piled in layers and layers on top of each other, becoming crushed by millennia of carbon matter, eventually, of course, forming the coal seams that fuelled industrialisation.

Back in May 2019, Danny procured a huge old Beech tree which had come down in winter storms a couple of miles down the road - and on the road. Enlisting the help of a local farmer with a loader he managed to rescue the butt before it was ringed up for firewood and milled it in the yard with our old TrekkaSaw. The tree produced and extraordinary amount of timber, which has been used for an entire kitchen, a built-in dresser, window seats, benches, shelving, bespoke speakers… All these were made from the straight lengths of the trunk, which could be processed into uniform planks suitable for joinery. What was left, was the crown…

Of all the timbers, Beech is probably the most commonly spalted. This is for two reasons; the grain is never straight - it twists and turns in folds and waves, which also makes it the choice for mallet heads as it doesn’t split, and a perfect challenge when chopping for firewood …for the same reason! The other characteristic is that, unlike many other hardwoods, it is very low in tannic acid, making it a much more hospitable place for a whole range of conquering fungi, who race up the twisty turny fibres.

Having been left for over a year out in the damp Welsh air we had no doubt that the crown would have developed some funky spalting. It was so wide that it had to be sliced up with the Alaskan Mill - a 6ft chainsaw mill with a guide rail to keep it level.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

The slabs were then stacked and left to dry for 4 years and are now finally ready to be made into some extraordinary furniture. This one is destined to be a table top, but we are also dreaming up a bed design, using one of these huge slabs as the headboard.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Finishing these mammoths to be flat enough for a level table top required a bit of invention as they are far too wide to go through any planner that exists in the UK (to our knowledge!) This one measures 130cm x 160cm and could be completed as a dining or coffee table, costing around £1500.

If you are interested in a table, or have your own idea and would like to talk to us about a commission, please do get in touch! Likewise, if you are keen to embark on your own project, we have some rough sawn slabs still available for £350 each.

What happens to all of the wool?

There are a lot of sheep in Wales. I often hear people wondering what on earth happens to all of the wool - and how they can buy it. These days it is mostly bought by large companies for making building insulation or goes to national sorting depots where it gets graded by quality and sold at global auction (by the tonne). The huge scale of the operation means that small mills have not been able to compete on price, and so we have inevitably lost almost all of the wool processing services in Wales. But of course, when you gain in economy, you usually loose in provenance.

Here in Carmarthenshire, in fact, within an hours drive of Carpenter and Cloth base camp, we are incredibly lucky to still have a commercial woollen mill. Our mill is not only operating at a manageable scale for independent makers, but can sort and scour (clean) fleeces, card (comb) then and spin the yarn as well as weave the cloth. To offer all of these services in one place is no small feat and requires a huge wealth of knowledge, skills and equipment.

So, when shearing time was nigh, I approached two of my farming neighbours to see if I could buy their wool straight off the farm. I was able to pick and roll my fleeces right from under the shearers feet, and got enough Black Welsh Mountain and Ryeland wool to commission 67m of beautiful herringbone cloth!

From delivering my 30 fleeces to the mill it took 9 months to receive back my 2 rolls of cloth, but it is absolutely perfect for our Cambrian Gilet! It is dense and hard wearing, but with good movement and on top of all of that, it is the cloth produced by the land in which we live.

As clothing and textiles have become such massive scale industries, most of us have lost any idea of how our clothing might connect us with a sense of place or belonging in a geographical and environmental sense… but I think that is a blog post for another day!

In terms of national wool production, my little operation is a drop in hills, but I hope it demonstrates what can be done if we just stick to what we believe in. Buy less, buy better ….and all that.