Southeast Ohio Fibershed

By Lisa Heinz, Founder and Executive Director

One of the foundational tasks for a Fibershed affiliate requires us to pull together a network of farmers, growers, makers, artists, weavers, etc. This mapped network will give us as a community easy to access resources if we need wool to make fabric or if we need someone to make that fabric for us. This network has the potential to become a vast collection of resources for southeast Ohio fiber artists and growers, making the connections necessary to move forward sustainably.

As we know from the alarming photos of textile waste dumped in Ghana and Kenya, this is a uniquely American problem. Fast fashion has not shown it can sufficiently deal with the problem of throw-away clothing. However, one way to combat it is not to buy it, but to make or repair your clothes yourself. These skills and materials needed to make and repair clothing have become scarce because of fast fashion.

We haven’t had to find fabric or sew or repair or knit our clothing in at least a generation. We now realize how important these skills are to our very survival. This shift in mindset has moved many of our society’s young toward learning new skill sets that are not taught in school anymore. Does anyone remember Home-Ec? Those classes disappeared at least a decade or so ago.

In a sense, there’s a thirst for learning these critical skills among people from all walks of life, and teachers are rising to the task. In Athens and quite a few communities throughout southeast Ohio, Makerspaces, such as the Community Makerspace by Rural Action, have sprung up to meet the needs of our creative community. Through classes where people can learn how to sew a garment, knit a sweater, or turn a piece of wood into something useful, our communities build networks of people interested in contributing to the slow fashion and DIY movement, making us more self-reliant, reclaiming our Appalachian textile heritage.