A Collection of Fibershed Producer Stories
Originally published January 6, 2023 on the Fibershed Blog
by step, it’s coming together,” says Marie Hoff, gazing out over the pasture where her flock of Ouessant sheep graze alongside pecking hens. A plucky rooster keeps a beady eye trained on her as she begins to walk the perimeter of her property — a 2.5 acre homestead in inland Mendocino County — pointing out all the Climate Beneficial™ practices [fibershed.org/programs/climate-beneficial-agriculture/ carbon-farming] she and her husband have been steadily putting into place.
From the introduction of chickens this past summer to revitalizing an old water tank, Marie is determined that each decision be carefully considered and aimed towards supporting healthy land management. This mindset epitomizes both her personal values and the way she runs her business, Full Circle Wool [fullcirclewool.com] — a wool goods and grazing company.
“Look at this!” she grins, bending down to delicately touch a sprouting brassica plant. It’s the first hopeful sign that the extensive cover crop she planted is taking root. “The soil was incredibly compacted when we bought the property five years ago,” Marie explains, “struggling with stunted grass and invasive annual varieties. But we are trying to help it heal from over-enthusiastic mowing, and it’s exciting to see how quickly the land is responding.”
Two grants have been instrumental in helping Marie make significant strides in improving her land. Selected for a Carbon Farm Seed Fund grant through Fibershed, she used the funds to jumpstart the revival of her land with a rainwater catchment system. With this setup, Marie will be able to use the rainwater for growing cover crops and perennial plants, which create better nutrient cycling for the land with their deep roots. In addition, a Healthy Soils Program grant through CDFA (California Department of Food and Agriculture) enabled Marie to apply compost to begin the process of fortifying and restoring her soil.
Throughout the process of applying for the grants and studying land management, she learned about the vital role of diverse microbes in the soil, which prompted her to add chickens (their manure helps counteract parasite overload on the land that could come from just having sheep). She’s also started planning for hedgerows and a silvopasture. “Having a lightly wooded grassland with fruit and nut trees will be good for additional nutrient cycling and water flow, and offer shade and treats for the animals,” she adds eagerly.
A curious sheep trots over to investigate what Marie has found on the ground. She is a dark and quick animal, part of the rare heritage Ouessant breed that lays claim to being the smallest sheep in the world. In addition to being known for their size, Ouessant sheep are also valued for their deep jet-black wool, and for being healthy, hardy and non-picky browsers. These qualities make them wonderful compact grazers — a quality that first caught Marie’s attention long before she purchased her property, spurring her to buy her first seven sheep in 2013.
“They were offered to me to purchase, but I didn’t have my land at the time. However, I did find a temporary place to put them and decided just to forge ahead!” she laughs. “It was a bit of a wild move and a long shot! Of course, I learned as I went, though I don’t recommend doing it that way.”
With a passion for sheep steadily building over time, Marie immediately saw the business potential — contract grazing, to be exact — and seized the opportunity to partner with Leslie Adkins (a friend, fiber artist and farmer) to obtain those first sheep. Together they invested in and brought out a small flock from the East Coast, and a friend offered to let Marie’s sheep live on their land (while Leslie’s went to live at her then eco-farm in Santa Rosa, and have since moved to Illinois). In late 2013, Capella Grazing Project, named after the shepherd’s star, was in business.
Offering weed control, land clearing, fire prevention and fertilization services to areas like vineyards and other private properties, the business began to establish itself. Through breeding efforts, the flock began to grow and is now the largest flock of Ouessant cross sheep in the West. But this was only the beginning for Marie.
Growing up, she’d never envisioned herself as a shepherd. With a degree in Dance and Performance Studies, Marie assumed she’d spend her days leaping and turning in a studio or onstage, rather than tromping through pastureland with wooly companions. But the recession hit soon after she graduated in 2005, and work in the arts became difficult to come by.
“It was sobering. I looked at my degree and thought ‘What am I going to do with this?’” she recalls. To make ends meet, she took on a series of odd jobs — catering, local community performance work, and vending at the farmers’ market.
“I was living a young person’s bohemian lifestyle in the Bay Area, which was fun, but it could only go on for so long,” she says. “Years passed and it was 2012, and I was still asking myself ‘What am I doing?’ Something needed to change.”
The first shift came in reframing the question she’d been asking herself, which turned her life in an entirely new direction. “It was my lightbulb moment. I began reflecting on ‘What would I do if I could do anything?’ And the answer was fast and clear. I wanted to work outside on a farm.”
Working at the farmers’ market had brought her tremendous enjoyment, and through her contacts she found opportunities to visit farms and homesteads. “I began to learn so much and was exposed to different types of agriculture. But being around sheep and herding them particularly drew me in. There was something special about moving and exploring the land with them. It was my rabbit hole opening,” she smiles, her blue eyes shining, “and I’ve been going down it ever since.”
It would only be a matter of time before Marie went from visiting farms to desiring a place of her own. But first would come Capella Grazing Project, which gave her an appreciation for, as well as a stark understanding of, how connected the health of her animals was to the land they grazed.
“To protect my flock I put certain parameters in place, such as not allowing any synthetic pesticides or copper sprays to be used where they are grazing. Other contract grazing operations do this as well. And for biosecurity, no other livestock can have been on the land for two years prior, which I don’t think is as common. This reduces the risk of contagious disease contact, and keeps the sheep safe and clean and healthy. In return, the animals put vital nutrients back into the land, contributing to a thriving ecosystem.”
Working for a few years as Fibershed’s Producer Program Coordinator also introduced Marie to many local farmers and ranchers, who both shared her passion for sheep and
a desire to incorporate climate beneficial practices on their land. But through conversations and burgeoning friendships, she began to notice a disconcerting problem: there was no supply chain or demand for the vast amount of coarse wool that was being produced in Northern California, forcing the farmers to either dispose of it or sell it at a loss or break-even price. With a sense of urgency, a new question surfaced for Marie — What can be done with all this wool?
“I had to build a supply chain sometimes where there wasn’t one,” she says, walking back towards her farmhouse and home studio. “I knew that environment dictates what kind of sheep can thrive in a place, which determines the kind of wool available. Cold and wet climates support sheep with coarser wool, while more popular breeds like merino thrive in low-moisture desert climates. No one was seeing the value of our coarse local wool, and that had to change.”
To experiment with what could be done with the fiber, Marie purchased the wool clip (a farm’s entire seasonal supply of wool) from Loren Poncia of Stemple Creek Ranch and Jim Jensen of Jensen Ranch. After a bit of trial and error, she realized it made wonderful wool batting and connected Loren and Jim with Coyuchi, an organic home textiles company based in nearby Point Reyes. They began to use the wool in a line of duvet covers and mattress toppers, and the company has since become a vocal proponent of sourcing from farms who aim to mitigate climate change.
Through Loren, Marie was put in touch with Jill Hackett of Ferndale Farms in Humboldt County. She purchased Ferndale’s coarse white wool, and from her determined and creative mind she developed the fiber into a line of popular home goods. Full Circle Wool opened in 2016 as a complementary business to Capella Grazing Project, selling batting, felt, and what would become the company’s best-selling product: all-purpose wool sponges. It has since expanded to include other home goods such as pot holders and trivets (aka hot pads), a limited fashion line, and an exclusive collaboration with Darci Rose offering a selection of woven pillows and throw blankets.
Bonnie Reardon, a local seamstress and knitter, is employed for the company’s sewing and knitting needs, and all the cutting is done in San Francisco. The products are simple, honest and durable — both pleasing to use and good for the environment. Which is no surprise, as Marie wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It was a conscious decision from the beginning that Full Circle Wool would create a two-fold return,” she says, reaching the house and settling down on the porch. “First, it would support local farmers and their land by buying their wool at a rate that was profitable to them. Then, it would give back a percentage of sales towards implementing new climate beneficial practices. We’d be supporting the land management of today while simultaneously investing in tomorrow.”
And she’s shown that something as humble as a sponge can embody this large vision. Demand for them continues to grow as customers happily tout the many ways they can be used — to wash dishes, scrub a face, or clean surfaces. They’re compostable, long-lasting and naturally inhibit mold, bacteria and odor. But most importantly, they’re a starting point for many people to lean into a more sustainable lifestyle. A poignant example of how the smallest of things can illuminate the interconnectedness between people, animals and the environment. How something so basic can be a catalyst for change.
“This work, it’s relational,” she says. “An intimate connection between the land and animals, the farmers and the greater community.”
“When I lived in an urban setting, I felt so isolated, even though I was surrounded by people,” she begins slowly. “But this way of life — it brings comfort. Even though I don’t see very many people, I have deeper relationships with animals and plants. It’s a web of things.” She stretches out an arm towards her pasture, where the sheep are meandering, the chickens scratch happily, and vibrant green shoots peek out of the earth.
Because while Marie’s talent for choreography may not currently be seen up on a stage, it is undoubtedly here. Playing out in the sequence of steps she is taking to care for her flock, support her community, grow a business and heal the land. A dream and purpose, it can be said, coming full circle.
Full Circle Wool: fullcirclewool.com
“ This work, it’s relational,” she says.
“An intimate connection between the land and animals, the farmers and the greater community.”
Originally published February 27, 2023 on the Fibershed Blog Alexandria “Alix” Vasquez of Herderin [herderin.com] begins with the body, not the garment.
“What if garment consideration began with asking: Where would you like to be held? Where would you like to have some more support? Feel some weight around your shoulders, or something snug around your low back or abdomen? Could a garment play a role in healing you? Could it feel like wearing a parent’s clothes? What can clothing do for us, emotionally?”
The very idea conveys a sense of relief and, given what humanity has experienced the past several years, feels especially refreshing, relevant, and welcome — as do Herderin garments. Designed, cut, and sewn in San Rafael, California are deliciously nubby, textured, wide-leg pants made for movement. Denim pants get their pleats from wrapping and vary by wearer. An “extra” set of sleeves at the
waist of a luscious, cream colored, mid-calf-length dress crosses the front of the abdomen.
“It’s ‘How does a wrap feel?’, not ‘How does it look?’” Alix clarifies. “I want to create a sense of embrace around the body, the emotional frame, not just the physical. How can I comfort areas of the body that feel and store emotions, like hips? The best thing I can do is wrap them in clothing, to support them.”
Alix’s body primacy and thoughtfulness resurrect the priorities that drove the creation of humanity’s first garments: what a particular body needed based on a person’s activities and lived experience, their local climate, land context, and available fibers. It is why we see wool caftans in North Africa, sheepskin coats in Eastern Europe, and why women in many cultures wrap their hips and abdomens tightly after giving birth.
And it perhaps explains why men are finding their way into Herderin’s long merino dress.
“I don’t know how many wear it out of the house,” Alix laughs. “It’s not necessarily about gender but what feels good. Men are slowly waking up to toxic masculinity and how it affects them. They haven’t had clothing options. Men’s bodies and wardrobes are so identified with the kind of work men do for others, like suits, and that is very limiting. Even having the space to wear a flowy pant…It’s not only for martial arts class. Or maybe someone doesn’t always want to wear pants. Men are thinking about sustainability too, so I think they are asking: Given all that, what’s available to me?”
It’s a tension between what’s normal vs. what feels good, which Alix examines in her designs. “Something shifted for me at a conference in Iceland,” she explains. “People had wool blankets and wore them as coats. In the U.S. we see someone do that and think ‘Oh, you must not be dressed,’ but in Iceland, it’s just always been. It’s beautiful, simple, elegant; utmost sophistication. It’s normal. But I know men who won’t wear what they feel most comfortable in because they would stand out. Can we say this is normal now, so they can be comfortable?”
Herderin’s philosophy and values are so far from those of modern fashion that the moniker does not feel like it applies to Alix’s work, and it has always felt that way to Alix, too.
“Fashion was so much not a fit that fashion is what kept me out of the field,” she says. “I didn’t think I fit in fashion, don’t think I fit, because of what it prioritizes. The system of fashion is not working, for the planet or for us. Fashion brands, whether big or small, spend a great deal of energy on design and production, and if this system worked — this standardization — people wouldn’t be so drawn to the alternatives as much as they have been in recent years.”
Garments not working became a personal issue for Alix early on.
“In seventh grade, I was 6’ tall,” she laughs. “It was always clear that clothes would not work for me, as-is. I asked my mom for a sewing machine because I was putting things together with safety pins, and she gave me one.”
More quietly, Alix adds, “My mom was a single parent, so I never got to spend a ton of time with her. I got to spend physical time with my mom by wearing her clothes: they had my mom’s scent, my mom’s energy. It reminded me of being protected. Sleeping in one of her huge shirts…it was the best shirt. Designing from a place of deep physical comfort has been deeply healing for my childhood.”
Alix always wanted to go to school and study design but was so unlike “the fashion kids going to FIDM” that she didn’t. She moved to New York, attended the New School, focused on social justice, and had friends in fashion who dressed to be seen.
“And I didn’t want to be seen,” she says. “What gives someone the right to comment on my body? In New York that was possible, to not be seen, to fade into the scene.”
After graduate school in Richmond, Virginia, Alix landed in Boston, “where I really did not fit in with traditional academia as a PhD student,” she says. Thanks to encouragement from a partner and twin flame, Alix’s interest in the intersection of clothing and emotional
experience came into focus. In retrospect, this period looks like a harbinger.
“My partner said, ’You always said you want to make clothes.’ We bid on this vintage Husqvarna sewing machine, won it, and it shipped to the house,” Alix recalls. “And I was not looking back. That was in 2013. The pleasure of not having to shop, and I can just make? I save so much time and life not looking around for things and instead put it into developing skills. Sewing is such a fundamental skill.”
Alix also started a nonprofit based on sociological research she conducted at MIT, on how seeing one’s self in others aided people during emotionally challenging times.
Today, Alix says she feels more like a chef.
“The fabric is the same as food. It’s about sourcing, supporting locals I’ve come to know, using the beautiful harvest, and letting the best ingredients speak for themselves. How much closer can I get? Sense of place is really important to my work.”
Alix continues, “When I lay out fabric on the cutting table, it’s a very important part of my process. It’s where I take the most time. I think about the person it’s for. It’s more like rolling out dough: I want to cut into it as little as possible. I don’t want to manipulate the fabric too much. It took a lot to get here. It’s like a being, as pure as it can be on its own. I want to be
“ The fabric is the same as food. It’s about sourcing, supporting locals I’ve come to know, using the beautiful harvest, and letting the best ingredients speak for themselves. How much closer can I get? Sense of place is really important to my work.”
responsible, give the fabric honor, use as little manipulation as possible to get to longevity, comfort, emotion.”
Alix recently started working with Climate Beneficial Wool [fibershed.org/programs/climate-beneficial-agriculture/ climate-beneficial-fiber] and wants to source fabric from as close as possible, she says, “not because of ‘Buy American!’ or something like that. I’m half Puerto Rican and half Iranian. But because it’s superior stuff. Why go farther? Going local is the only way we can know. I can see the sheep. I know the wool is here. And all you do is shear it! It’s allseasons wear, it grows every year, it’s gender fluid, it’s for everyone. I live in wool.”
As Alix’s standards have gotten higher, Herderin’s path has admittedly become more challenging in some ways.
“Margins are hard,” she explains. “I can’t do one-thousandyard minimums, for example. The question becomes, ‘How can I get that, from this farm, at a scale I can afford and work with?’”
But Alix is quick to focus on what matters, and the reward.
“I divorced myself from a productivity-centered mindset. It’s such a kind feeling when someone says ‘I love what you’re wearing’, because of the heart that went into it. The aesthetic is simply the outcome of all the work that came before, of this deeper emotional work: This comforts me. This body is for me. This clothing is for me.”
Herderin creations are available online at Herderin.com.
WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED KOA KALISH
Originally published March 21, 2022 on the Fibershed Blog
Cody and Thomas Nicholson Stratton, otherwise known as the Foggy Bottoms Boys [foggybottomsboys.com], are seventh-generation farmers in Ferndale, California. There, where the fog hangs low in the Eel River Valley, they run a multi-species farm, including a certified humane, organic dairy for milk, cheese, and beef, sheep for fiber and meat, and pastured poultry. Going viral from their TikTok videos with 90,000 followers and 10 million views, Cody and Thomas are raising awareness about local fiber while simultaneously increasing representation and visibility for the LGBT community in the agricultural world.
At the family farm, all four living generations are present at some point during the day. “There are my grandparents, who live halfway across the field and help with various aspects of feeding and washing eggs,” Cody explains. “They should be retired, but are still here every day. Then, my parents live a mile down the road and are involved predominantly with the cattle livestock business. They are more cow people, but when we need help with the sheep, they’re here as well. Then there is Thomas and I, and lastly, our son who is three. He helps too, and is great at putting stickers on egg cartons.”
Cody’s ancestors first emigrated from Denmark to Humboldt County in 1860, and started a dairy on Cock Robin Island, which sits in the middle of the Eel River. Growing up raising sheep, Cody received his first lamb when he was five, a holiday gift from his parents. Growing into a 4-H project, the initial lamb became a flock of registered Dorsets, and Cody began breeding them for natural colors. “I didn’t know much about fiber at the time, I just loved the colors,” he remembers.
Eventually, Cody left the farm to attend college, and sold off the flock. In 2014 he returned, bringing Thomas with him, who also had his own history and love for farming and agriculture. When they returned to Ferndale, Cody decided to keep a few Angora rabbits. “While raising Angoras, I wanted to do something with the fiber,” he says. He realized that blending Angora with sheep wool would be a good solution. “So I worked with Jill Hackett at Ferndale farms to get some fleeces, and we started milling our own yarn. I fell back in love with sheep.”
Cody’s inspiration and love for sheep sustained and in the year 2014, he and Thomas bought an entire flock, growing their sheep herd from nine to 50. It was a year later when they started making their own yarn. “We’ve been progressively growing our flock and integrating the sheep into the overall farm practice, using them to do grazing projects. And, soon we’re going to start incorporating them more into the dairy, for weed management.” Still, they focus
Handthe sheep mainly for fiber, and rotate them between three farms. They have about 120 now, with an ideal goal of 1,000!
“I grew up pretty unexcited about fiber, as most people are,” says Cody. “There was nothing very exciting about clothes, you know? And then, as we were raising sheep, we really started discovering the benefits of local fiber and the serious issues with fast fashion. We were always very conscious of what we ate, but not of what we put on our body. And so as we became more knowledgeable about fiber, that really drew our interest into generating quality fiber that people could use.”
The Foggy Bottoms Boys’ goal has been to produce fiber that is raised locally, milled locally, is high quality, and is affordable and accessible to all. “It is really important to us
that our yarn is not super exclusive. Yes, that’s been hard to do. But that’s why we focus largely on natural colors, to not have the additional cost of dying the yarn.”
Cody and Thomas have gotten creative, offering social media live streams with Kool-Aid yarn dyeing demonstrations — an accessible way for people to learn about fiber, while being food safe and fun. “All people need is white wool and Kool Aid, and then they can do it with their children,” Cody says. “We’ve made TikTok videos about making rainbow yarn and having our son participate in it. It’s been fun for us to use our social media presence to share about fiber, to introduce people to it, and then to give people a pathway into working with it.”
Cody’s dream would be to see his sheep’s wool on the runway someday. “That’s why we’re breeding for high quality fleece. New York Fashion Week! I would love to see one of the designer’s looks have something from us. That would be my dream come true.”
The family’s ultimate goal is to have the farm be able to be passed on to the seventh generation. “It is clear that it cannot only be a dairy for much longer, as the dairy market is consolidating and shrinking. And we want to diversify because there’s more resiliency in a diverse system.”
In terms of resiliency, diversity, relations, and representations, Cody and Thomas are highly conscious farmers. “We were just trying to represent gay and LGBT members of agriculture and use it as sort of an educational platform, then we went viral and it became a brand.” Cody and Thomas now use their platforms also to help elevate Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s voices in the agricultural space. They often advocate that board seats are given to BIPOC individuals because there is a need for more representation.
“Ultimately, I think that representation in farming can be holistic,” reflects Cody. “Ethically raised animals is not just about the animal welfare aspect, it’s also the impact on your community. It’s food security. It’s high quality local fiber. It’s elevating local communities. It’s the entire environment.”
In relationship with the First Nations people, Cody and Thomas aim to be supportive in any way that they can, on the ground. “Our philosophy is to be good neighbors and be respectful. We’ve worked with the Wiyot tribe, who borders our land, on several projects over the years,” says Thomas. “We try to be supportive any way we can.”
“Ultimately, I think that representation in farming can be holistic,” reflects Cody. “Ethically raised animals is not just about the animal welfare aspect, it’s also the impact on your
community. It’s food security. It’s high quality local fiber. It’s elevating local communities. It’s the entire environment.”
With this kind of inclusion, intersectionality and awareness, it’s no wonder that their products are being sold in every store in the area outside of Safeway, and that they quickly sell out of their products online. Find their wool (blankets, yarns, dryer balls), meat boxes, home decor, and occasional livestock on their website foggybottomsboys.com, and be sure to check them out on Instagram @foggybottomsboys or TikTok.
WRITTEN BY STEPHANY WILKES AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY PAIGE GREEN
Originally published August 26, 2022 on the Fibershed Blog
“Grassis my crop,” Roy Smith says, smiling. “Grass is California’s one ‘default crop’: it grows without intervention and feeds all life forms. We need ways to convert that default crop into a feed source for everyone else.” A diverse group of grass-grazing animals — pigs, geese, and sheep — is key to Roy’s 7.5-acre land restoration operation in Cotati, California. “Every animal must contribute to the land,” he adds. “That is their primary role.”
Roy’s place is a long, narrow ribbon of golden grass, green forested clusters, swales, and century-old chicken-farm buildings that runs from a house and handful of pigs in the front pasture, to the sheep and railroad track boundary in back. It is already hot at 9 AM this summer day, in the low 80s. Empty commuter trains roll past a half-dozen Dorper sheep, clustered beneath eucalyptus.
Roy recently lost an additional 10-acre lease when it was sold for housing development, so he is “down to a skeleton crew of animals, but geese come back quickly.” Everyone is waiting for breakfast: the sheep, a handful of pigs, two dozen or so geese, and two guardian dogs, the excited eight-month-old puppy trying to get a 13-year-old Great Pyrenees to play with him.
The 1920s-era buildings and Midcentury-style Airstream reflect Roy’s intentions: He wants this land to function more like it did 100 years ago. Roy learned a lot of what he knows from his grandparents, small-holder knowledge that skipped his parents’ generation. He is not nostalgic so much as appreciative, pragmatic, prepared, and clear-eyed about our context of increasingly rapid climate and ecosystem change.
It isn’t often people speak the way Roy does about our current moment. “It’s a privilege to be alive right now,” he says, quietly. “We must have courage and ramp up our adaptation.”
Roy is working as fast as he can to do just that, beginning with morning chores. He pops the lids from 5-gallon buckets and dumps sauerkraut-smelling vegetables into sprouted barley from a local brewery. “This is basically hog kimchi,” he laughs. “The veggies are grocery store waste that I pack really tightly into buckets, so they don’t spoil. They ferment and store for months and become digestible for the hogs. With the barley, the poly-to-Omega-3 fatty acid conversion happens in sprouting. The sugar has come out in the sweet beer liquid, and you’re left with high protein, fat, and fiber.
“The health of the pigs improves dramatically,” Roy adds, as he wheelbarrows the kimchi-barley blend over the front pasture.
“It cleans out their intestines. The lard ends up high in Omega3s, too, closer to the nutrient profile of a wild animal.”
He steps over a low electric-fence wire and dumps the buckets into troughs, kneeling beside the spotted, friendly pigs to bestow scratches. All four are Berkshire-KunekuneDuroc crosses from heritage stock, which Roy settled on after trying a bunch of different breeds. “You need the right pig in the right place,” he says, “a pig that will eat like a sheep will, grazing and browsing, but is not too rough on pasture. I tried some Landrace and Blue Butt that were not as good on pasture, but these pigs are, and they hold on to their calories.” They also provide fire control.
The front pasture was grazed twice this year. While green in the spring, its “first eating” was by sheep who want and need fresh green grass. Then, Roy hayed it down to low grass, and the pigs followed the sheep. “Only the pigs get external feed, so the sheep graze first.”
This is practically unheard of at a time when most folks in the American West are spending a great deal on hay. Only four pigs get external feed at this dry point in the year and years into a mega drought? How?
The small number of animals is part of it, but Roy’s management is too. “Here, February through June is our
super narrow window of production,” he explains, forking his spring-mown hay into the sheep feeder. From late June through summer and fall, Roy’s animals distribute grass, water, manure, and integrate nutrients (like fallen goose feathers, all protein) across the property to maximize grass growth when the rains finally arrive.
Roy spends a month haying himself, by hand with a sickle bar mower and hand scythe. “There is no cash reward to it,” he says, leaning on his pitchfork. “That’s not the measure, really.” At this point in time, that would be approximately $3,000 of hay value vs. $6,000 of possible off-farm income. “That’s true for now,” he points out. “Hay could have a $10,000 value, and then the equation would be different.”
Since the post-World War II period, he points out, “Labor has been expensive, and energy has been cheap. But that is going to change.” Roy is not referring to solar energy, of course, but to petroleum-based forms that fuel equipment and fertilizers. “The most complex systems will be the first to fail. We are already seeing that. We’ve exhausted the highenergy systems. Money is an input. Everything here has to be functional with virtually no cash input. Truly sustainable means ‘it can be done by the poor.’”
Roy seeds during the dry season, too, periodically scattering a wildflower/pasture seed mix. The pigs, sheep, and geese have mulched the pastures to within an inch or two of the ground, prepping a nutrient bed for mycorrhizal growth during wet periods. Roy’s goal is “uniform mulching within mycorrhizal reach,” he says. “Even a half-inch of rain explodes the mycorrhizal action in the ground.” The sheep have stomped in seeds and fertilized the ground so germination can explode as soon as it rains, too.
“I’m lucky. We’re lucky,” he says. “We get to try to improve what comes next. It is within the loss and destruction around us that we can find connection and meaning again. The very harshness of our predicament snaps us from our daily trance, and reveals this world and experience as beautiful. To live in such times is to witness life at its most intense, but this also fills each of our lives with meaning, as our daily work will soon matter again.”
Two dozen American Buff geese, pale brown and white, trundle into the driveway beneath the high morning sun. “All of my fences can be breached,” Roy laughs, “even the outermost, but they all respect the property boundaries. I manage through husbandry, not force.”
Geese are very effective grazers. “They are much more appropriate for many small farms than sheep,” Roy adds. Geese eat grass and grain, roots and shoots (blackberry included), stems, and seeds. The American Buff is a dualpurpose breed: their lighter feathers mean they dress out cleanly for processing and provide a nice source of down. In terms of Fibershed experimentation, Roy is exploring the use of goose down more than sheep or alpaca fiber. “Fiber animals can push the ecosystem,” he says. “This place is more like Crete than Ireland.”
Roy’s stocking rates are not only governed by acreage and feed availability, but by social health. He wants each group of animals to function well together, and finds they tend to naturally operate in groups of dozens, sometimes separating into smaller units at different times of year. “About ten percent of any given group seems to be a natural leader or otherwise behaviorally divergent,” Roy says.
Roy’s place is dotted with nine cool forest clusters. Inside their welcome shade, the temperature drops, and lizards, bees, birds, and nests abound. In one cluster, Roy uses small,
shallow feeders as water troughs for the geese to slip into, supporting their need to slide in and out of water and cool off. The geese deposit manure in the water, creating a laborfree compost tea.
“Most compost tea is a high-energy input,” Roy says, emptying the water onto young trees. “You carry nutrients from a field and make them aqueous. With this, I can fertilize and water at the same time. Animals don’t come back to the same spot, and neither do these,” he adds, moving the now empty, shallow dish, which refills through an automatic trough valve.
Roy has planted clusters rather than hedgerows because “Clusters introduce diversity into the arid grass plain and become little ecosystems themselves. It is all about the edges,” he says, with enthusiasm. “I want more edges, forest and meadow, meadow and pond, all for that biological-edge effect. The edges are where you find the most biological activity, insects, birds. All life begets life which begets more life.”
In Roy’s clusters, poplar, willow, leguminous trees, volunteer oak saplings, and mulberries work together in a primarysecondary canopy relationship. The poplar and willow will live for about twenty to thirty years and serve as “nursery trees,” nursing oaks that will live for hundreds of years. The short-lived primary trees bring in the birds, which bring in the acorns, so the forest naturally progresses.
“And it is really coming to life,” he says. “The birds are spreading now. Taller trees are bringing in owls and hawks, and they will help with the gophers. And the gophers know it,” he laughs.
“They’ll take young trees out like beavers do. The trees bring in a natural hierarchy, and animals have tremendously complex thought processes going on. We may find gophers a nuisance, but their contribution and intelligence should not be ignored.”
All of this creativity and labor serves Roy’s ultimate goal of “comprehensive food production,” which he defines as “the maximum availability of nutrients for all life.” It is not just land Roy seeks to restore, but our proper position in an ecosystem. “Humans spent most of the last three million years as a skimming agent,” he says. “The law of nature is that skimming animals can’t use their position at the top to take it all, because they would destroy it all. I am returning to a system in which the human side skims a portion vs. the opposite, which is what we’ve been doing recently — growing as many humans and animals as possible.” Roy’s goal is to bring ecosystem health and production levels up to a high enough baseline to enable humans to skim again, both through the growing of crops, and with the help of sheep, pigs, geese and other animals.
He admits he gets worn out and tired, doing all the labor he can on his own. In the next 10 years, he hopes to have other folks on site doing vegetable production, and thirty percent tree cover from the forest clusters — more trees, animals, and people.
“I’m lucky. We’re lucky,” he says. “We get to try to improve what comes next. It is within the loss and destruction around us that we can find connection and meaning again. The very harshness of our predicament snaps us from our daily trance, and reveals this world and experience as beautiful. To live in such times is to witness life at its most intense, but this also fills each of our lives with meaning, as our daily work will soon matter again.”
Originally published February 9, 2023 on the Fibershed Blog
“Somesay the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing… It is the love of something, having so much love for something — whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity — that all that can be done with the overflow is to create.” —
Clarissa Pinkola EstesElaine Hamblin — designer, pattern maker and sewer — lives at the threshold between land and garment. Her domain stretches from idea to functional item, connecting locally-grown fabrics with wearers in need of clothing. She often begins by solving for her own personal needs, and then sharing that solution as part of a collection of clothing available to the public. Her designs are based not on what is superficial and trending in the fashion industry, nor what will sell the quickest, but on what materials are available from local producers and deadstock natural fabrics, and how it can meet people’s real needs, balanced with her design aesthetics.
Elaine started sewing as a child, making dresses for her dolls. Her mother sent her to Singer Sewing Camp (“boot camp for sewing,” she calls it), which, though it taught her a lot at the time, delayed a deeper dive into clothing until after college. During college at CCA (California College of the Arts Elaine studied fine arts in many forms: sculpture, weaving, hand painting and printing on fabric, and natural dyes, among other things, which brought her back towards clothing. Later, as an assistant for Japanese-American designers, she developed an interest in Japanese clothing design that remains present in her work today, decades later. She began designing costumes, and often worked on costumes for Bay Area dance companies, especially aerial dance, whose dancers move through the air perpetually, often at high altitudes, displaying fabric at every angle.
“In trying to be creative, what I start with may seem ordinary and familiar, and then transform into something else, something unfamiliar,” she explains; it’s art-to-wear. But it’s not just about art. There are the systems that produce the art materials. There is the current mire of people and planet, and the exploitation of both that clothing must also address. For Elaine, “design can be something that initiates a conversation” about the impact of fashion and its current system of waste and exploitation. She seeks another way, often treading against the strong currents of fast fashion in the opposite direction. Her interests lie in offering truly sustainable garments, raising awareness about how materials are grown, and the meaningful livelihoods of garment workers.
“I say that ‘Why is it so expensive’ is not the question; the question is ‘why is that so cheap?’ Why are we paying less and destroying people’s lands and cultures? We’re in a culture where we love a bargain. That makes it hard to evolve into a culture that uses just enough and values people’s labor, not just a company’s bottom line,” she states firmly. Having seen firsthand what is sacrificed for a company’s bottom line, Elaine remains resolved to do things her own way.
After spending nearly 20 years working in the corporate world for companies like Esprit, Gap, Levis, and Gymboree — which took her to other countries that manufacture clothing and develop sustainability measures — she began her own venture, Kosa Arts [kosaarts.com].
Started in 2014, Kosa Arts blends Elaine’s interests in clothing and interior design, producing apparel in small-batch quantities with great attention to sourcing, construction, and of course, design. For Elaine, sewing the full garment instead of relying on piecemeal mass production honors the craftsmanship that goes into constructing clothing, which necessarily values the garment worker doing the constructing. To create clothing that relates to the ecology of the place she lives, is to value the health of the environment and the health of the garment worker and the wearer themself.
“Sometimes you don’t know the difference until you work with the difference,” she notes, speaking of Sally Fox’s [vreseis.com/viriditas] breathtaking heirloom and organic cotton fabrics. These fabrics “have life in them, the feel and the smell of them, the vibrancy of color,” and are classically-
bred and naturally-grown. Comparatively, other gmo-cotton or synthetic fabrics feel lifeless. The process of making is important, of working with fabrics that are alive and healthy. Elaine’s clothes are not about the ‘just get it done’ mentality of manufacturing; they are a creative, and often revelatory, process: a process whose qualitative difference becomes evident when wearing them.
With a desire to relate more deeply to her natural landscape, Elaine’s love of design transforms materials from her local fibershed into useful, functional garments that take care
of the wearer, the worker, and the planet. Her insights into process and the systems that clothe us shine a light toward a future of design that values life over the bottom-line.
To learn more about KOSA Arts visit kosaarts.com and follow @kosa_arts on Instagram.
You can also visit Elaine at Werkshack [werkshack.com], a collective workspace and gallery (481 25th Street, Oakland, CA, 94612).
“In trying to be creative, what I start with may seem ordinary and familiar, and then transform into something else, something unfamiliar.”
Originally published March 13, 2023 on the Fibershed Blog
Beth Miles is an established linchpin of the Fibershed community, bringing producers’ goods to viable markets for years. But she is, above all, a master craftsperson and artist. Beth’s industrial design, art, and apparel design and construction skills meet as she works leather, fabrics, and hardscapes; paints, designs and sews. She is the brains and hands behind her Grange Home [thegrangehome.com/ climate-beneficial-wool] line, which is a culmination of and departure from her prior life in apparel design. Beth applies the best of what she’s learned and leaves the rest behind.
Quality materials are the foundation of Beth’s craft, and she shows them with joy at the Fog City Flea Trading Post inside the San Francisco Ferry Building Marketplace. January morning sun streams over San Francisco Bay and onto fluffy sheep hides, hand-stitched statement bags, a woven leather chair, and vintage army cots that have been reimagined for their next chapter.
“My designs are less ‘I want it to look like this’ and more ‘What do we already have as a place from which to begin?’” she says. “And what already exists — vintage cots, or sling
chairs, table bases — that can be an inspired point of departure? I am constantly thinking of how I can reimagine, combine, or enhance the pieces I find with amazing regenerative materials, and give them their next life. I truly see an opportunity in everything.”
Beth points to a leather chair on an upcycled teak frame. She restored the frame and hand cut twenty undyed, vegetabletanned leather straps to hold the main leather sling to it. She attached each strap to the sling with brass hardware and secured a hand-sewn Climate Beneficial wool pillow to the top, to support the head.
“I apprenticed at S H Frank & Company to learn all of this, how to work with leather,” she explains. “I taught myself how to work with hides. You learn a little about leather from working with those, but vegetable tanned leather is completely different, and all leather is not the same.”
Vegetable tanning is the established, most environmentally friendly option for tanning leather, and is biodegradable due to the natural substances used in its creation. The process often makes for stronger leathers that, treated with simple natural oils, last at least one lifetime. More common chemical tanning processes, by contrast, are seriously toxic, relying on heavy metals like arsenic (which poisons food and water supplies, and is a carcinogen associated with many types of cancer) and chromium, which bioaccumulates in animals and people, pollutes water and soil, and interferes with plant metabolism, reducing crop growth and yield.
Materials matter, and Beth cannot bear to waste top-quality ones from local farmers and landscapes she knows and loves. She lifts a hand-stitched shearling clutch, a couture statement bag, from a shelf, which she made from sheepskin and fabric remnants.
“I use every scrap and find a place for it, like in these bags. I designed a piece that honored the material, and the cost is based on the time and effort the piece required. It’s a oneof-a-kind, hand-sewn, couture-level statement bag and I will hold onto it until its new owner discovers it. I no longer wish to do the ‘produce, sell, markdown; produce more, sell, markdown; rinse, repeat model. We produce to order and hold a small quantity of inventory so that we are never left with goods that have no home and end up in landfill.”
“I was always a dreamy maker,” she adds. “I am the youngest of eight kids. My father was first-generation American and my mother was a woman of Irish-American descent who made and created endlessly. We didn’t have stuff. There was very little TV. My mother taught us to sew at her knee, using commercial patterns. We knit, we cooked, we did everything with her. And that’s what I wanted to do. Create. Make. My favorite question to my sister was ‘Wanna make stuff?’”
Beth found her first job at a Los Angeles ad agency. She learned about storytelling, she says, particularly the importance of “having a singular message, consistency of voice, and also the challenge of consumers not wanting to take time to understand every single thing about every single product.”
She moved on to design, attending a graduate program at FIT (the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City) in the 1990s. Beth landed her first design job at Ralph Lauren, on Seventh Avenue at 550 Broadway, organizing large cones of cashmere from Italian mills.
“I had access to a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” she says. “Donna Karan was in the elevator next to Oscar de la Renta. Some manufacturing was still happening in Manhattan. I did lots of listening and learning, took it all in. Ralph Lauren had high expectations.”
Beth recalls the commercial sewing patterns she used at home with her mom and even the pattern standards taught at FIT. “There is, for instance, no collar facing in a Ralph Lauren garment. A facing is not fine enough. Instead there is a tiny binding, and tiny binding is delicate, and expensive. I learned industry versus home standards. Always pin down, never up. We spent our entire days in fittings and I just loved that, learning how to sculpt and make pieces really work. Refinement.”
After a decade in the New York fashion industry, Beth married a New Yorker and they moved to San Francisco, where they had a daughter.
“I realized I’d never see my family if I continued working like that. I also started to ask questions like, ‘Can I get closer to the source?’ and ‘Can I do childrenswear that is not coquettish?’ I had a daughter and I’d look at her and think, ‘She is perfect, beautiful. She needs nothing more than a simple cotton lawn dress.’ I wanted a high quality, builtfor-hand-me-downs line for girls that featured swiss dots, dark denim, baby-wale corduroy, and the luscious fabrics I
“I can’t change everything, but this is what I can change. This is my statement about sustainability. It’s luxury reimagined: If we have the privilege to choose, why wouldn’t we choose this? Why wouldn’t we choose health, wellbeing, community?”
recalled from my own childhood in Chicago. And the fact is, people spend more money on girls’ clothes than on boys’, and I knew that a domestic product would cost more. I found a factory in South San Francisco, bootstrapped it, scaled it. I called it Ses Petites Mains Tiny Chic Clothing, which means ‘their little hands,’ a double entendre for little kids and the hands that create couture stitches.”
By 2015, after ten years of success (and through two global financial collapses), Beth had run her course with Ses Petites Mains.
“Everything felt like a race to the bottom. There is too much cheap product. There is just too much stuff. Everyone was
challenged to be Amazon, with free shipping, same-day shipping. I was not going to join the race to the bottom but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.”
Then, Beth says, I met Sallie Calhoun, who hooked me with her inspiring soil talk. (Sallie is the founder and owner of the regenerative Paicines Ranch and the #NoRegrets initiative.) Sallie excitedly introduced me to Rebecca Burgess, the founder and Executive Director of Fibershed, and it was this sudden moment of, ‘Oh! This stuff is happening?!’ Finding Fibershed was a coup d’etat. I heard my own values in Rebecca’s story and more: I had no idea that fibers could enrich our planet in the way that they do, helping to draw down atmospheric carbon and creating soil health. And with the level of quality of the Fibershed producers’ materials, I felt like I was back at Ralph Lauren but better. I began to think, ‘If I was going to do products again, this is what I would want to do them in.’”
Beth began to see a path forward. She started to work directly with Fibershed producers, creating trunk shows and pop-ups, and the Grange Home line grew from there. Today, Beth designs and crafts products that are investment pieces.
“I lead with beautiful design and I will only work local. I start there. It is sustainability at its finest,” she says.
Beth is especially proud of her wood-framed Army cots, in use before World War II and through the Korean War, before aluminum frames were introduced.
“They’re so simple, so practical. They had to be sturdy and transportable — yet they are so sophisticated, chic, modern and smart, like a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair. The cots remind me of my dad. He was a World War II Marine stationed in Hawaii. We would go to the Army Navy surplus store when we were young — even though my dad was a pacifist, anti-gun, very principled — because they had things that were high quality and affordable, and the store supported our community. My father was hugely civic minded and I try to honor that, in his memory.”
Beth completely deconstructs each wood frame, then sands and cleans all of the metal fixtures and wood supports. Next, she reconstructs the frame with new brass hardware, and cuts and sews a new cover made of either Climate Beneficial wool, vegetable-tanned leather, or deadstock denim or wool, at times with a sheepskin appliqued on top. The craft lessons she has learned along the way are in evidence on Grange Home offerings: a tiny binding on the edge of a new wool cot cover, topped with a Gotland sheepskin; tight, even lines of hand stitching between woven fabric and bias edge.
“The first time I got a cot, I fixed it up and thought, ‘What if I create a patchwork denim textile from old Levi’s 501’s in place of the canvas?’ A friend saw it and immediately bought it. And I just kept going.”
Beth even took on furniture delivery during 2022, when fuel and shipping costs spiked.
“It was wild but it gave me a chance to see the spaces where my cots would live,” she says. “I love to meet my customers, see how they are using something I made. I am so honored that people with beautiful spaces see my pieces in them.”
Grange Home cots have found their way to Santa Monica offices that overlook the Pacific, to various homes as nap and weekend cots for visitors, and to provide comfort after endless Zoom calls. Vineyard customers move them outdoors for afternoon gatherings, “a way to add elegance outdoors, especially with Covid,” Beth says. One cot lives on the mezzanine of a young tech worker’s loft, and a woven leather cot recently sold to a Vietnam veteran in Hawaii.
“He wants to use it as indoor-outdoor piece,” she laughs, “and I keep saying ‘Just don’t leave it out overnight!’”
Beth is profoundly grateful for her relationship with Fog City Flea Trading Post, which gave Grange Home a start and, for the past year, her own retail space too. In January of this year, Beth opened a Grange Home outpost within Fog City’s newest endeavor, Market Market in Palm Springs.
“James Morelos — who started Fog City and Mojave Flea, The Southern Flea, Market Market, and more — is transforming retail,” Beth says. “Fog City initially held weekend-long popups, which I joined in November 2021. I had cots, small bits of what I have now. I used the experience as a test market and it received a great reception. People saw my work like I hoped they would, and it just started to go. William Brennan, Fog City’s General Manager (now Creative Director), was also a fantastic partner who helped me strategize about how I could move into their permanent space, which opened in February 2022.”
Like her children’s line, Grange Home is bootstrapped.
“It is all personally funded. It’s a cash-flow thing,” she explains. “It’s a different kind of product. Something like this is going to have a longer response time. A $1,700 cot needs time to percolate, and that is okay. I wanted a systems shift from mass industrial to craft and enduring, beautiful, timeless design. I can’t change everything, but this is what I can change. This is my statement about sustainability. It’s luxury reimagined: If we have the privilege to choose, why wouldn’t we choose this? Why wouldn’t we choose health, wellbeing, community?”
The Grange Home: thegrangehome.com
Land, By Hand
WRITTEN BY STEPHANY WILKES AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY PAIGE GREEN
Originally published May 1, 2023 on the Fibershed Blog
AtBlackberry Farm [bbfarmbolinas.wixsite.com/home] in Bolinas, two generations of women have stewarded the land for 50 years and counting. In 1972, 29-year-old Aggie Murch and her husband, Walter, left a houseboat for a farm across the road from Bolinas Lagoon, on the west side of Mount Tamalpais. Today, Sirima Sataman [sirimasataman. com] — printmaker, sculptor, fiber artist; shepherd, farmer, and horticulturalist; mother, wife, and Aggie’s daughter-in-law — is taking soil health deeper, implementing so many climate beneficial practices that it is hard to keep up with them.
“She is working with nature to help the land,” Aggie says. “What Sirima is doing — stewardship of the land — means most. You hold on and make it better than before.”
Blackberry Farm’s seven acres (five grazable) include a white farmhouse with green trim in the middle of the farm, close
to the road. The front drive ends at a weathered gray barn. Sheep pasture wraps around the U-shaped property to the left of the house and olive trees, an English-style garden, and greenhouse run behind it. An apple orchard, chicken hutches and pasture, and swale wrap along the right side of the house, toward a large dye garden and ram paddock.
It is a rare dry and sunny morning in a winter of atmospheric rivers and storms. Aggie shares history over tea and homemade scones, on the front porch of the house where she and Walter raised four children.
“It was a wonderfully derelict, very imposing old house,” Aggie says. “We fell in love with it. That front lawn was all daffodils, ten thousand or more. The children sold them by the roadside. Coming here…It was a way to raise children. Chores, not like ‘Make your bed’ but ‘Feed the horses, be home by 5:30 p.m.’ Raising children through the discipline of farming, horses, chickens. We had a constant understory of children. The land itself was a base.”
The 1970s marked a time of peak Bolinas mystique and cultural influence, buoyed by the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, myriad Beat-era poets [newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/what-the-bolinaspoets-built], and the community practice of removing highway signs to direct visitors away from Bolinas. Though they would not describe themselves as such, Aggie and
Walter Scott Murch are legendary, too. A nurse, Aggie was one of the West Marin midwives in Dr. Michael Whitt’s Point Reyes medical practice. As an equestrian, she co-founded the Marin County Pony Club in 1999 and became a founding member and program director for the community radio station KWMR. As Muriel Murch, she is a published author.
Walter Murch is a world renowned film editor and sound designer. His work on The Conversation, Julia, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient has earned Oscar and BAFTA awards and his book, In The Blink of an Eye, remains a cinema classic.
Blackberry Farm played host to sustainable agriculture legends, too. Warren Weber started Star Route Farm next door to grow salad greens for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. And “Bill Niman lived in what is now the upstairs bathroom,” Aggie says, gesturing toward a window with her tea cup. (Niman’s all-natural pig, goat, and chicken operation later became Niman Ranch.)
Aggie tended green things, horses, and children, a linchpin of the Bolinas community. And then, she says, “came the fallow time. The horses died. The children grew up and left home. And I started an orchard.” She planted Wickson crabapple, Pippins, Winter Pearmain, Ashmead’s Kernel, and Bramleys for baking. “The orchard was something that I thought I could do, something that would survive me,” Aggie says.
Sirima’s background in landscape architecture, environmental studies, and art gave her the ability to really see Blackberry Farm. With forensic eyes, Sirima looked at the land — at Aggie’s fenced English-style garden, orchards, bees, and willows — and thought, “I see what this is supposed to be, what the intention is,” she says.
The orchard, for example, provided a foundation for silvopasture, in which trees, forage, and animals are managed equally in an interdependent, multispeciated and highly diverse system. Silvopasture creates not just soil but financial benefits: It gives a farm multiple products, one or more from each of the silvopasture components (like apples, cider, chickens, and eggs).
Sirima re-established beekeeping and orchard grazing, bringing sheep and chickens (and their manure and critter control) to the alleys between the apple trees. Thanks to a Carbon Farm Seed Fund grant from Fibershed [fibershed. org/join], she has planted more native plants as a pollinator hedgerow and improved the mix of forage and permanent cover crop.
“Instead of being annoyed that willow or hazelnut is clogging stuff up, we coppice!” Sirima says. She stops beside a narrow swale that runs the length of the orchard and will soon support a hedgerow. “I’ll grow willow on the other side of the driveway and coppice, and add water-loving plants to absorb more of this,” Sirima says.
Coppicing manages woodlands sustainably and increases biodiversity. When new shoots grow from a tree’s stump, they are thinned out to a limited number that grow to a larger size. The wood is harvested for use as woven fencing, or late-winter fodder for the sheep, and the cycle begins again. Coppicing opens up the tree canopy and the increased sunlight increases biodiversity, reaching grasses, wildflowers and shrubs that serve as food and shelter to bees, caterpillars, butterflies, and other insects that in turn serve as food to birds and mice, and so on.
“We’re in our second year of no-till,“ Sirima says, closing a gate behind her and stepping into the dye garden. “We have a dye garden and I hope to add indigo this year. We’ll also plant flax as a supplement, and it’s nice as forage. We have more native grasses and cover crop for pollinators: calendula, wild carrot, anise, pimpernel. In the chicken pasture, birdsfoot trefoil, vetch, and mustard greens bust up hard soil and provide nitrogen fixing. In spring, it’s radish up to my armpits in the chicken pasture and orchard. We let a percentage of the plants go to seed to renew the pasture for the next year.”
The radish provides cover to a covey of quail, Sirima explains.
“There are 40 or so quail born in the spring and even by the end of summer, most of them are still thriving because of
all that radish cover,” she says. “Radish roots breaking up the hard pan has made the soil softer, and the cover helps capture the moisture in the air. It’s remarkably humid in the middle of all that radish. It can get so dry here due to the prevailing wind, and we’re hotter than before, like all places. If I can keep the orchard green, I can help nature help itself and everything along.”
With all of this, how does she find time for art? Sirima has been a full-time artist since 2014. When asked, she shakes her head and smiles.
“There’s beauty in the creation of all these things on the farm,” she says. “Shaping the land, building a shed, weaving a willow fence or arch. It comes back around to why I need to make art. I’m interested in the environment and human ingenuity and partnership with the environment. At the heart of it is this balance in living in partnership with Nature.”
Sirima majored in environmental studies and art and mostly did environmental art, huge outdoor sculptures. She had to complete Sculpture, Fiber Arts, and Printmaking to satisfy the requirements of her Studio Arts major.
“That’s the first time I learned to weave on a loom and I barely remember the natural dye portion of those classes,” she says, smiling. “Over the years, I denied myself of art. I had my son. I worked in corporate America, for horticulture and technology companies. I did it for 20 years and then I popped. I was environmentally ill. I literally felt sick.”
Her last corporate employer organized Sirima out of her position and she turned down a new job offer. That’s when she decided to put her Art degree to use and try wholesale letterpress, teaching, and residencies for a year. After 18 months of experimentation, everything came together in 10 days.
“I sublet my loft in the Dog Patch and came out to West Marin, where I met another printmaker and opened Ink Paper Plate. It had a good run for five or six years.”
And, shortly before the pandemic, Aggie’s son, Walter, and Sirima met through a mutual circle of friends. They later married.
Sirima introduced sheep to Blackberry Farm and today has a small flock of registered Fine Fleece Shetland and Shetland x Gotland sheep. Their raw fleeces, roving and yarn are in high demand.
Sandra Guidi, a fellow Fibershed producer and nearby shepherd at Black Rock Ranch in Stinson Beach, “was one of my first sheep mentors,” Sirima says. “A whole slew of shepherdesses have lent their wisdom and experience to me
“You can feel the difference in the soil,” Aggie says. “I’m walking on sponge instead of tarmac.”
in person and from afar. I’m particularly grateful for the resources and community that Fibershed has provided.”
Sarah Keiser, Fibershed’s Intersectional Land Stewardship and Community Grazing Initiatives Coordinator, showed Sirima how to improve rotational grazing and extend her pastures with techniques like strip grazing with electric fencing; trialing pasture mixes to suppress noxious weeds; and getting sheep into the orchard alleys.
“It’s always about fencing,” Sirima laughs. “Hard fencing, electric fencing, more fencing, pens, and paddocks. I’ve spent three years on fencing and still need to work on the perimeter. We’re getting bobcats and coyotes. I guess it’ll be a lifetime of maintenance.”
Sirima continues, “I do a seasonal rotation and push their grazing to control weeds and manage the load on the land. We select a few ewes to breed with our ram and separate sheep after shearing. We put the bred girls in the richest pastures — high-protein fields with brassica mix, clover, olive and bay trees. Then they lamb in the paddock and nursery pasture, where the lambs are close and protected.”
“You can feel the difference in the soil,” Aggie says. “I’m walking on sponge instead of tarmac.”
And that, perhaps, is the most accurate, meaningful measure of all.
Blackberry Farm: bbfarmbolinas.wixsite.com/home
Sirima Sataman Art: sirimasataman.com
by Gynna
Originally published July 6, 2022 on the Fibershed Blog
“Youcan do anything, but you can’t do everything,” muses Gynna Clemes, arranging her bespoke cardigans and t-shirts on an outdoor rack while her toddler, Hank, weaves happily between the clothing. Then he takes off and scurries to a table piled high with socks and home goods.
“Mama made,” he says proudly, pointing to a stack of washcloths, before disappearing underneath the table to play. Clemes smiles. Motherhood itself has been both the catalyst and inspiration for the evolution of her business Gynna Made [gynnamade.com] — a zero-waste, madeto-order clothing and home goods line — while also a test for her entrepreneurial spirit. As someone with a strong, self-taught approach to life, there are endless interests, directions and possibilities that await. But there’s nothing like parenthood to make establishing priorities and pulling focus essential.
“There is a time and a season for everything,” she explains. “But that doesn’t mean you stop dreaming and planning. You realize that everything goes in spurts and that having a creative outlet is key. Just because something isn’t happening now doesn’t mean that it never will.”
It’s a philosophy that has served her well, allowing her to continue creating and growing her business while also balancing the needs of her family.
“I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a child,” she says.
“When I was ten years old, my brother and I would go to Sam’s Club and purchase big boxes of candy bars to sell around the neighborhood. We’d also mow lawns and pick weeds. But whereas my brother was more hesitant about asking for payment, I’d smile sweetly, extend my hand, and ask for what I’d earned.”
This confidence helped Clemes launch her first business, GRABstuff Creations, on Etsy shortly after college. “At the time I was hosting weekly knit nights and making project bags. Friends saw the bags and encouraged me to sell them, which I did successfully for five years.”
Along with meeting every week, the knitting group also attended events together. The 2010 Lambtown Festival was coming up and they decided to sign up for a few classes. One workshop in particular caught Clemes’ eye: a private class taught by Fibershed’s Robin Lynde from Meridian Jacobs [meridianjacobs.com], a sheep farm and weaving studio.
“When I get a bee in my bonnet, there’s no stopping me,” she grins widely. “I sure get a lot of them, and when I came across the weaving class I knew it was something special!”
The workshop intrigued her so much that Clemes couldn’t wait for it to start. She went out and purchased a loom before the first day of class to experiment with. When the day finally came, she enjoyed herself immensely. Lynde noticed, and mentioned she might like to try spinning.
“I have too much going on. I’m not going to learn how to spin,” responded Clemes with a sigh.
“Not yet,” countered Lynde encouragingly. “You aren’t going to learn how to spin yet.”
That one word — and the mindset shift that went along with it — would go on to impact both Clemes’ personal life and her next entrepreneurial leap. “The way I see it, nothing is discounted. Everything is embraced. But in its own time,” she emphasizes. And paired with her self-starter attitude, which approaches “rules as mere guidelines,” she has been able to use her time both wisely and creatively.
When Lynde began Farm Club, a membership program where individuals help with farm chores, events and participate in hands-on learning opportunities at Meridian Jacobs, Clemes jumped at the chance to join. Through her burgeoning relationship with Lynde, she eventually found herself involved with Fibershed (becoming part of the Fibershed Marketplace [fibershedmarketplace.com] and the sixth member of the Fibershed Co-op), meeting local dyer Brooke Sinnes from Sincere Sheep [sinceresheep. com], and bringing home two sheep from Meridian Jacobs’ flock.
“I had admired Brooke’s beautiful yarns and fibers for so long that it was incredible to meet her and learn more about
her natural dyeing techniques,” she says enthusiastically, adding with a cheeky grin: “Though I’m not a dyer. Yet.”
She is, however, well on her way to becoming one. With Hank leading the way up a path that winds around a tiered garden, Gynna points out indigo seedlings in a makeshift greenhouse and a raised bed filled with madder, which will be ready for dyeing projects next summer. There’s also a loquat tree and a vegetable patch. And, of course, the perfect spot for a dyeing vat.
Hank has sprinted ahead and is excitedly yelling “Billy! Rachel!” With his bouncing auburn curls and wide smile, he turns around clutching handfuls of straw. He’s brought everyone to a picturesque barn and enclosure where Billy (a one-year-old Jacob ram) and Rachel (an eight-year-old half Blue-faced Leicester and half Jacob ewe) eagerly trot to the fence for their mid-morning snack.
“It’s a family business,” laughs Clemes, watching her son expertly feed the sheep. “When I’m out here gardening, he’s right next to me weeding and planting seeds. Or after watching our sheep get sheared, he was busy ‘shearing’ all of his stuffed animals for days. Then there are the times I’ll be spinning or weaving and he’s right beside me. Lately he keeps saying ‘Swish! Thump! Pump!’, so we are going to let him try spinning for his third birthday. It’s all enmeshed.” She pauses. “In many ways it has to be when you are both a mother and an entrepreneur.”
Though the current vision for keeping the sheep is to collect enough wool to spin and weave into a king-size blanket for their bed (using a design that Clemes made for her husband Roy’s wedding vest), she admits that could be just the beginning. Opportunities can arrive when one least expects it, like when her father-in-law was at Black Sheep Gathering and came across a refurbished circular sock knitting machine from 1919. With his vast knowledge of fiber arts
equipment as the founder of respected Clemes and Clemes Inc., he purchased it on the spot. The seller agreed to give Clemes a 30-minute lesson and that’s all it took to get her hooked and envisioning how she could use it to grow her business.
“It was 2016 and I had just started Gynna Made after working for a while in a regular job. I was still creating, but had needed a break from my Etsy shop. When I began Gynna Made, I was making and selling reusable dishcloths, coasters and home textiles. The addition of the circular sock knitting machine, however, enabled me to expand my business into making hand-cranked socks, headbands, beanies and holiday decorations. It was wonderful!”
But then came a series of life-changing events. There was the birth of her son, followed by the disruptive COVID-19 pandemic. The part-time work she had been doing was no longer possible, and there were no craft events to showcase Gynna Made products. Suddenly she found herself isolating at home with an infant, feeling a bit lost.
It is said that necessity is the mother of invention, but entering the state of motherhood itself can be a driving force for innovation. For Clemes, the two would converge and take her business in a new and exciting direction.
“Though I was a homebody at heart and felt happy being at home with my son, I needed a focus,” she admits. “I needed a break from making face masks and Hank needed
“My favorite orders are people starting their capsule wardrobes. It’s intentional slow fashion. We don’t need overstuffed closets. To take on the world, we need to feel comfortable — and clothing is such a fundamental part of how we show up,” she says. “And it can start with feeling good about what’s hanging in your closet.”
new clothes. He was constantly outgrowing everything, and I wanted to design with intention. Fast fashion is so detrimental to the environment, and most children’s clothing is made from polyester, which overheats their growing bodies. I knew I’d have a happier, healthier child in natural fibers.”
She remembered discovering organic and non-GMO cotton made by local fiber pioneer Sally Fox (founder of Vreseis Limited) at the Fibershed Symposium in 2019. It was her first outing post-baby, and seeing the beautiful, naturallycolored cotton struck a creative cord. She bought some to make a pair of shorts for Hank, and as she held up the finished product there was a familiar buzzing in her ear.
“Another bee in my bonnet!” she smiles, her face lighting up. “I went ahead and ordered rolls and rolls of Fox’s cotton, funding the business with a pre-order for my [now] signature cardigans. They would become the staple pieces of my new clothing line, and the Hank + Momma business took off from there, expanding into a women’s and children’s capsule wardrobe line.” She takes a satisfied breath. “I got my creativity back!”
The tiny shorts are still hanging up in her Northern California home sewing studio, which she fondly calls her “relaxing zone.” The shelves are neatly organized and lined with cones of yarn. There are design sketches displayed on the wall and sizing patterns hung on a rack. A line of Brother serger machines sits behind her antique circular sock knitting machine, ready to tackle the orders that come in.
Everything from the materials used to the manufacturing process is sustainable at Gynna Made. Each piece of clothing is made-to-order, essentially creating zero waste. Scraps are used for stuffing, mending or are composted. All designs go through a rigorous six-month wear-and-test period. And Hank, naturally, is the ideal tester (and adorable model) for the children’s line.
“The clothing you wear has to be comfortable, like a second skin. You should almost forget you are wearing it. And it has to be designed with the utmost consideration. I’m constantly thinking ‘What will you do with the clothing? How will it be used? Worn?’ For kids, it has to stand up to lots of wear — running, painting, climbing, accidents. Hank will always choose his ‘momma-made’ clothing when given the choice. But the women who buy my clothing are busy and active as well. Each piece has to serve multiple purposes and be made of high-quality fibers so that it lasts a long time.”
Unlike other clothing designers who outsource fiber procurement and production overseas, all Gynna Made products are proudly American-made. Each item is made from 100% Organic Cotton FOXFIBRE® COLORGANIC® fabric sourced from Vreseis Limited [vreseis.com]. It’s a blend of “Coyote” brown cotton grown in California blended
with organic acala white cotton grown in New Mexico. The cotton then makes its way to North Carolina where it is spun and knit into fabric, before returning to Clemes to be made into classic wardrobe staples like cardigans, jackets, t-shirts and more. New items are introduced after much thought and only if they fit seamlessly with what is already on offer. Clemes does not follow the wasteful ‘new line every season’ model popular in the fashion industry. Instead, she has her eye on helping customers build smaller, curated wardrobes.
“My favorite orders are people starting their capsule wardrobes. It’s intentional slow fashion. We don’t need overstuffed closets. To take on the world, we need to feel comfortable — and clothing is such a fundamental part of how we show up,” she says. “And it can start with feeling good about what’s hanging in your closet.”
It also goes hand-in-hand with the intention Clemes bring to the design and sewing process. “I believe that wearing a
homemade wardrobe is grounding. For me personally, it’s such a tactile experience. I know who grew the fabric. I can lean into every step and every stitch of creation. For some people, that sense of grounding is walking barefoot in the grass. I connect through using my hands, putting love and attention into each garment.” She happily holds up a tiny baby hat. “And thinking only good thoughts when making these sweet little things.”
With a two-week turnaround time for each order, she’s able to keep Gynna Made sustainable in all ways — for herself, her family and the business. It can be a juggle at times, but the peace, satisfaction and joy in her work is something that Clemes is eager to share with others.
“I want to inspire others to create!” she declares. To date, she’s already offered a few workshops on hand sewing and a T-Shirts 101 class. But her next goal is to expand into online tutorials with kits containing pre-prepared fabric that is cut to size.
“I’d like it to be a successful experience, since trying new things can be scary. I want to be a Guide for those who want to create,” she says. In a way, she is reimagining the knitting group she held years ago, except now it’s encouraging mothers and fathers to make clothing for their families.
There’s another class in the works, too. The idea is ‘Shopping Your Closet: Reusing and Repurposing.’ Clemes wants her customers and students to draw inspiration from what is already hanging there — thereby reducing waste, approaching fashion mindfully, and being creative and resourceful.
This conscientious approach to the lifecycle of clothing is also something she plans to address through a ReLove Program, allowing her customers to send back clothing that their children have outgrown to be restored for sale and offering them a discount code for their next purchase.
With a sparkle in her eye, she says, “It’s just the start.”
And if one has spent any amount of time with Clemes, they know this to be undeniably true. She has a contagious, uplifting energy. Whatever piques her curiosity, she throws herself into it wholeheartedly. There are so many ideas and designs she has yet to create on her fiber and clothing design journey.
“I’ve been thinking about adding quilts to the homewares side of Gynna Made, but there’s a lot going on right now,” she shares, the [spinning] wheels turning in her head. “It’s not the right time.”
Yet, that is.
To purchase Gynna Made’s zero-waste homewares and clothing, visit gynnamade.com. For a day-to-day look at the life and business of Gynna Made, follow her on Instagram at @GynnaMade and @HankAndMomma.
WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED
BY KOA KALISH
Originally published March 1, 2022 on the Fibershed Blog
Lemon has worked in viticulture his entire adult life, since 1981.After graduating college with a liberal arts degree, he lived in France for 4 years. In Burgundy, he fell in love with the wine world, working in the vineyards there. Eventually, he moved to Napa Valley to see what the wine world was like in California. After 7 years working in Napa, he met his wife Heidi and they started Littorai Wines [littorai.com] in 1992.
The word Littorai derives from the Latin root littor and the Greek plural ai, and means “the coasts”. Ted and Heidi searched for the finest areas along the coasts to grow Chardonnay and Pinot Noir — two Burgundian varieties that Ted had worked intimately with in France. In 2000, they purchased their first vineyard land near Occidental. At that time, Ted had farmed conventionally for 20 years. Tired of the conventional way of farming, he sought to do something different. The question was, how?
“After 20 years of conventional farming, I no longer believed that western agronomic theory could truly explain why and how plants grow and reproduce,” Ted says. In order to farm alternatively, Ted saw two options: organic or biodynamic.
Ted chose biodynamic, because the paradigm was radically different from western agronomic theory. “Although there are many lovely organic farmers out there, it is possible to farm organically but still adhere to western agronomic theory,” Ted explains. Since he no longer believed in that theory, biodynamic farming would be truly a change, and a challenge.
In Ted’s words, biodynamic farming “holds the foundation of a world enlivened by spirit — that all material is manifestation of a spiritual reality. In biodynamic farming, we work with the energies and powers of the spiritual world as it manifests in the material world. We work with celestial rhythms and specific preparations to strengthen the plants and animals.”
He cites the following example from ecology, “Mature forests have reached the point of dynamic equilibrium — in other words, they are able to remain essentially unchanged for thousands of years. I ask, ‘What does the forest know that I don’t know?’” Ted wanted to find a model of farming that could achieve the balance and harmony of the forest.
This question opened the door to a much wider consideration of what farming is and what a healthy form of farming could
be. “One of the main tenets of biodynamic farming is that the farm should be a self-sustaining organism,” he says. “This is an ideal, but to get there you have to have animals. Animals play a fundamental role in rejuvenating the soil.” This led the team at Littorai to gradually add different elements of diversity — animals in the form of cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, and even a donkey. Companion plantings and composting were also added, as essential elements of that diversity.
Why sheep? At Littorai, there is more acreage of pasture on the property than there is vineyard. The sheep are able to graze around 28 acres, grazing year-round through a rotational grazing program. In late summer and early autumn the sheep are rotated through the forest, helping in fire prevention.
The role of the sheep is to maintain and improve the health of open pasture and the vineyards, as they contribute to species diversity and fertilize the vineyard. The sheep increase organic matter and humus in the soil, sequester carbon, and ultimately, make the wine better. “Our vineyard should be seen as an integrated complex farm,” Ted says. “It is a ‘wine farm’ not a ‘vineyard monoculture.’”
“Viticulture is a very curious form of agriculture, as it evolved towards monoculture before most other forms,” Ted explains. “In much of Europe, viticulture was originally placed in the poor soils where vegetables wouldn’t grow well. There was a great diversity advantage to putting vines in poor areas.”
These places were on hillsides outside of towns. “The vineyard-winery model of agriculture is virtually unique in taking agricultural produce to a very sophisticated end
product, all within one house. Alcoholic fermentation is a very complex chemical pathway. So not only are you transforming the original product, you’re bottling, ensuring stability and then selling into a marketplace that is quite complex,” Ted explains. “Vineyards and orchards are perennial crops. Hence, the way we think about soil fertility has to be dramatically different than for annual crops. The ruminants and their relationship to the permanent cover crop in the vineyard floor are critical, because of their longterm effects on those companion species,” he says.
After adding sheep to the vineyard, Ted notices new things all the time, including an increase of species diversity in the grasses. “Without animals grazing, what I’ve seen over the years is that certain grass, forb, or legume species tend to dominate. Thus, species diversity becomes limited, resulting in poor soil health. The presence of the grazers naturally increases that.”
“This can be expressed simply in the formula, the wisdom of the animals — that the animals give back to the soil exactly what that soil needs. There is an extraordinary alchemy between what they consume and what they defecate. And, it isn’t just their digestive ruminant tracks, it is also the way that they eat.”
Different ruminants eat in different ways. For example, sheep mouths are very different from cows’. Because they are nibblers, sheep are very precise with what they eat. Through decisions like these, a person or a farm can influence the diversity of the species in the cover crop mix. Even within a single vineyard, depending on the section that they are grazing, Ted and his team may have them grazing the grasses to different degrees. It takes a lot of learning, and a close relationship with the animals. “It goes without saying that a mower can do none of the above,” says Ted with a laugh.
Even between different species of sheep, there are radical differences in how and what they will eat. It took Ted and his team quite a while to hone in on what sheep would be bioregionally appropriate and best fit for the task. They settled on Shetland (of which they now have 40, increasing by the day with spring lambs). “Shetlands are hearty and independent. They need virtually no assistance with births.
In Ted’s words, biodynamic farming “holds the foundation of a world enlivened by spirit — that all material is manifestation of a spiritual reality. In biodynamic farming, we work with the energies and powers of the spiritual world as it manifests in the material world. We work with celestial rhythms and specific preparations to strengthen the plants and animals.”
They are not fussy eaters. They graze a bit like goats, eating briars and brambles.”
At Littorai, the relationship between the humans and the animals is very important.
“Wine people are not usually animal people,” Ted says. “We had to learn and adapt to a very different paradigm. Wine has its rhythm and so does the plant world. These can be partially altered by human choice, but with animals, it’s not like that.” For Ted and his team, this has certainly been a time consuming and very rewarding change.
“When you work with animals which are not pets, you learn a whole new respect for the natural world because of the very different relationship they have with it. You have to work with their natural rhythms, and it connects you to the natural world in a new way.” Ted can’t hire traditional wine people anymore because they have to be willing to work with
animals, and they must have a passion for the animals. “It’s been remarkably easy to find those people,” he says. “There’s a shift going on right now. That would not have been the case 25 years ago.”
Luckily, the world seems more ready than ever for a shift towards holistic agriculture, and Littorai is leading by example.
Ted Lemon is the founder and manager of Littorai, overseeing 10 full-time employees in production, including associate winemaker Sam Ecenia, cellar master Chris Casale, and vineyard manager Pedro Viramontes. The four men collaboratively manage the animals, 40+ sheep, 6 cows, one donkey, two guardian dogs, ducks, and chickens. Go visit their wine farm to meet the animals, and see more at littorai.com.
Originally published November 15, 2021 on the Fibershed Blog Jennie Henderson [hendersonstudiospointarena.com] is a prolific textile artist on the wild northern coast of California. Nestled in the small town of Point Arena, is Jennie’s home studio that she and her husband designed specifically for her weaving: with good light and room for all her many looms and tools.
“I make all of these things because I have to,” Jennie says, adamantly. “Gotta feel it, gotta do it.”
Once Jennie makes a piece, she says she has to sell it to make room for the next creations on their way. “I’ve always said that these things are just kind of inside of me and they want to get out. I guess that’s probably my biggest drive — these ideas come to me and I want to see if they will work. If they work, I say ‘okay fine, let’s go on and do something else!’” It seems that most of Jennie’s ideas work, as her creations are exquisite.
Jennie first learned to weave when she attended university in Denmark, the land of her grandmother. “There, weaving was everywhere,” Jennie says. She took one introductory
class, bought a loom and shipped it home. It’s been decades, and she hasn’t stopped weaving since.
When Jennie first started weaving, she sourced all her fiber from New Zealand, since it was impossible to source any good, local fiber from where she lived in northern California. Now, with the support and trending of Fibershed, Jennie is able to source wool exclusively from Mendocino and Sonoma Counties. She buys the raw fleeces and works with it every step of the way — washing, hand-spinning, and finally, weaving. “I used to send the fleeces to be processed at a mill, but I would rather do the work myself, often spinning them off the stable,” she explains. “The machine is too consistent for me.”
“Maybe I was born 100 years too late,” Jennie says, shrugging. “I just love the feeling of the wooden tools and the textures and smell of the wool.” Alpaca, however, is not used nor favored by Jennie. “That stuff is too slimy and slippery,” she says. For this weaver, it’s the hardiness of the sheep’s wool that has her heart, and hands.
“Handspun rugs are my thing,” Jennie says. Indeed, they are! Her rugs are beautiful, simple, elemental and elegant. “People say they are going to hang them on the wall, but I say they really need to be on the floor, under the feet!”
Her designs are completely intuitive, as she does not make any sketches or cartoons beforehand. Often implementing
diagonal lines in a tapestry style, she is completely present and simply “follows the lines.” Jennie says she instinctively knows when she needs to shift directions, or turn the angles of the lines. “I just go,” she says. “I won’t know until I feel it.”
Although her work is intuitive, she also implements geometrical elements. “The Fibonacci formula balances stripes nicely,” she explains. “And the Golden Ratio is a proportion that is excellent with rugs.” Jennie’s largest rugs are woven on her sixty-inch wide Glimakra loom from Sweden.
When not weaving rugs, Jennie weaves hand-spun wool throws with a simple tabby weave on one of her looms, or chenille scarves on a different loom. On yet another loom sits a half-woven silk scarf, and then there’s a section for her eco-dying experiments with local eucalyptus. Jennie takes her looms to workshops and also teaches weaving out of her home.
Eight years ago, Jennie had the privilege of doing a residency in the legendary weaving village of Teotitlan del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has won several awards including the American Tapestry Alliance award for Excellence and shown at the National Textile History Museum in Massachusetts. Jennie’s expertise and artistry is a treasure in our local Fibershed. You can find more about her at HendersonStudiosPointArena.com.
“I make all of these things because I have to,” Jennie says, adamantly. “Gotta feel it, gotta do it.”