Immediately after writing about building a strong foundation for Odd Bird Studio, I turned to read the next article in the latest issue Taproot magazine. It just so happens I'm reading this issue, MEND, in order from front to back, and it just so happens I was up to the article Mendfulness by Katrina Rodabaugh. Suddenly, coincidentally, everything clicked into place.
Katrina writes about her self-imposed, year-long, fast-fashion fast. As she describes it, "As part of my journey to resist the fast-fashion industry and its unethical labor and ecological practices, I resolved to shop only for used clothing and learn the disappearing skills of mending, darning, and sewing garments, in order to make my own clothing." (What on earth is fast-fashion, you ask? Read here about it's opposite, slow fashion, at Alabama Chanin.)
The avenues of learning Katrina travelled during her project are the very stuff of the building blocks for a strong Odd Bird Studio foundation. For me, knowledge is confidence, and confidence is strength. And I consider learning about fiber production, to make better informed and purposeful decisions about my materials, the very bedrock of the Odd Bird Studio core value of earth-friendliness. My long term goal is to find and digest reliable, well documented information about the textile supply chain and share my findings through a resource page on OddBirdStudio.com. This is proving not as simple as it sounds. The industry purposefully obfuscates and oft repeated statistics have no sources tied to them, so there's no way of knowing if there's any truth to them.
But, thanks to Mendfulness, I have found a good starting place for my research. Katrina has the very thing I am trying to build, a growing list of resources about the textile industry. It's going to be a long, bumpy ride, but I hope you'll stick with me. If nothing else, I believe it will prove interesting and eye-opening in one way or another.
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