October 2023 Virginia and New York Events

My new book, Homegrown Flax and Cotton: DIY Guide to Growing, Processing, Spinning & Weaving Fiber to Cloth is off to a good start and I’ve enjoyed meeting people who are excited it is finally out. My last scheduled events for 2023 are very soon. I will be processing flax (breaking, scutching, and hackling) and signing books on Saturday, Oct 7 at Scotchtown, home of Patrick Henry, in Hanover County, VA from 10am-4pm. The next day, Sunday Oct. 8, I will be at the Fall Fiber Festival in Orange County, VA doing the same thing from 11am-4pm. This is a great time to see how flax straw is processed to line flax that you spin. Once flax is spun it is called linen.

Cindy at the Virginia State Fair 2023

Then on to New York. On October 21-22 I will be at the New York Sheep and Wool Festival, otherwise known as Rhinebeck. Merritt Bookstore has a large book signing area in Building B where I will be, along with many other authors. Their schedule will show the times I will be there on both days. It will be my first time at Rhinebeck and I am excited to be going. I will travel by train, which I can catch a few miles from my home, and meet up with friends from Indiana. That alone will make for a fun time, but I am looking forward to meeting folks who are interested in the possibilities of growing their own clothes and hope I can be of help.

If you can’t make it to these events and want a signed copy of my book, you can order it from me at www.HomeplaceEarth.com. If you live far from these events, check out fiber festivals in your area by doing an internet search. When you go, be sure to engage in conversation with the vendors and demonstrators and learn what they have to share. Inquire about fiber groups near you. Immerse yourself in all that is going on. You never know what you will take away from that experience. Look for me in 2024 at the Carolina Fiberfest in March and the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in May.

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Homegrown Flax and Cotton–the book is here!

My new book, Homegrown Flax and Cotton: DIY Guide to Growing, Processing, Spinning & Weaving Fiber to Cloth is here! If you want to learn how to clothe yourself from your garden, this is the book for you. Even if you never grow your own clothes, it is interesting to learn how one could do that.

Learn when to plant the seeds of flax and cotton and how to go about getting the resulting fiber into something to wear. (Once flax is spun it is called linen.) To go from seed to garment you need skills in gardening, spinning, weaving (or knitting and crocheting), and sewing. In the case of flax, you will need to break, scutch, and hackle. This book leads you through all that and suggests resources to help you along the way. It even includes detailed plans to make a tabletop flax brake. There are also plans to make a one-yard swift that can be adjusted for the skeins once they have shrunk from scouring. Homemade hackles are covered, also.

You can order autographed copies from me at www.HomeplaceEarth.com or come and see me at one of my book signings. I will be at the Ashland Farmers Market on Saturday, July 1, from 9am-noon. On Saturday, August 12, at 11am I will be at the Ashland Branch of the Pamunkey Regional Library giving a talk and signing books. In October you can find me demonstrating flax-to-linen and signing books at Scotchtown, home of Patrick Henry, on Saturday, the 7^th, and at the Fall Fiber Festival at Montpelier Station, VA the next day on October 8.

Monday, September 25 visit me at the Horticulture Pavilion at the State Fair of Virginia from 10am-2pm. I won’t have books for sale, but will be talking about my work and have equipment and my homegrown clothes on display.

All these events are listed on the Events page of my website. As more things are scheduled, I will update the page, so check back regularly. You may possibly find me at the book signing tent at the New York Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, NY in October.

When I first started on this adventure I often had trouble finding answers to my questions. Sometimes I just had to figure it out for myself. I wrote Homegrown Flax and Cotton to help you have an easier time of following this path—and to have more people in the know to play with. Hope you join the fun!

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Fall 2022 Events and New Book in 2023

I will be at a few events this fall and I hope some of you will come out and see me. First up is the Virginia State Fair. Find me in the Horticulture Pavilion on Monday, September 26 from 10am-2pm meeting folks and answering questions about gardening and growing cotton and flax and taking that fiber all the way to clothes.

The first weekend in October is busy. I will be at Scotchtown, home of Patrick Henry, demonstrating flax-to-linen on Saturday, October 1, from 10am-4pm. The next day, Sunday, October 2, I will be at the Fall Fiber Festival at Montpelier Station, VA., also demonstrating flax-to-linen all afternoon. Look for me at the demos tent.

I have been working on a book about my fiber work for the past few years and am happy to announce that it is now with the publisher, Stackpole Books, working its way through that process. Homegrown Flax and Cotton: DIY Guide to Growing, Processing, Spinning & Weaving Fiber to Cloth is expected to be out in print on July 1, 2023. I enlisted the help of my daughter-in-law, Stephanie, to take photos. I will be wearing my homegrown clothes in all the photos you see of me in the book. In this photo I am wearing a linen dress I made from my flax in 2021. I was a bit short on fiber, but when my good friend Jan passed in August 2020, the flax she had grown came to me. It was enough to finish the project. I dyed the warp with Japanese indigo that I had grown and left the weft natural. I made the shirt from cotton that daughter Betsy had grown as part of our Cotton Project. There is a whole chapter on the Cotton Project in the book. The green and brown cotton had crossed and in the process of growing out subsets of seeds to get back to the original green and brown, we found some white. You’ll have to read all about it in the book.

The message in the book is not only to grow your own clothes, but to think of where the clothes you wear come from and how the earth and the people responsible for their production are compensated in the process. Each action we take affects everything else. We have to not only think about those people on the planet now but look to taking care of things for future generations. To that end, I thought it would be fun to have another generation of Conners in the book, so I included our twin grandsons. However, if they were in the book, they would need homegrown clothes. You will see them wearing overalls I made. Since my shirt and their overalls are new this year, I was quite busy deseeding cotton, spinning, and weaving from January through the spring. Here is a teaser photo of the boys that Stephanie, their mom, took when we were doing our photo shoot. You’ll see that photo and a complete one of me and the boys in the book.

It has been quite a journey getting this book done. Besides all the how-to of going from seed to garment, there will be plans for a tabletop flax brake and for a small swift. You can thank my wonderful husband, Walt, for making that happen. I want folks to have no barriers to getting started. This can be done in your garden. I had a lot of catching up in my garden to do this summer, since I had to let some things go. I am caught up now and it is nice to not be quite so busy, although somehow, new projects seem to pop into my mind from time to time. There is always something to do.

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2022 Events

I have just posted the events in 2022 that I have committed to. You can see the list here or view it on the events page of my website at www.HomeplaceEarth.com. Except for the talk about transitioning from a home gardener to a market gardener at the Virginia Association for Biological Farming conference (VABF), all the talks are about fiber. I love to give the transition talk, by the way. I want new farmers to start out strong. I was a market gardener myself for 10 years and spent 11 years teaching sustainable agriculture in order to put more farmers out there and have seen people jump into selling their produce before they have thoroughly thought through what they need to do to be successful.

I am looking forward to talking about my work with cotton and flax/linen. As you know, the pandemic has changed the way we communicate and there is no going back completely to the way things were. Fiber guilds that have kept active have quickly adapted, allowing folks to attend meetings and classes that would have been prohibitive before. The Central Virginia Fiberarts Guild is an example of that and has attracted new members from further afield. I’ll be speaking on Zoom at their February meeting. When in-person meetings resume I’m sure there will be a virtual component to the guild’s offerings. Nevertheless, I will be doing some in-person events at other places, as you can see. Hope to see you there!

January 12  Richmond Weavers. Cindy is giving the talk The Sustainability of the Fibers We Use.  This is a regular meeting of the Richmond Weavers. Richmond VA. www.richmondweavers.org.

January 23-24  Virginia Biological Farming Conference. Cindy is giving the presentations Transitioning from a Homestead Gardener to a Market Gardener on January 23 and From Seed to Garment on January 24. The Hotel Roanoke Conference Center, Roanoke, VA.www.vabf.org.

February 6  Central Virginia Fiberarts Guild.   Cindy will give the talk Flax-to-Linen: From Seed to Garment.This is a virtual meeting of the Central Virginia Fiberarts Guild. www.cvfg.org.  

March 11-12  Carolina FiberFest.  Cindy will give the talk From Seed to Garment: grow your own cotton and flax/linen clothes on March 11.North Carolina State Fairgrounds Expo Center. www.carolinafiberfest.org. 

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Homegrown Linen Vest

Homegrown Linen Vest

Work with my homegrown fiber, specifically cotton and flax/linen has kept me too busy to post lately, but I wanted to share my most recent project with you–a vest from my homegrown flax (Linum usitatissimum). I grew the flax, processed it, spun it into linen yarn, scoured it, and wove it into fabric for the vest. The processing involves rippling, retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling. I have used my homegrown linen as weft in my weaving before, but this is the first article of clothing where I used it as warp. Warp has to endure abrasion from passing through the heddles on the loom and, since linen is such a hairy fiber, I knew that I would have to address that if I used it for warp. Otherwise those “hairs” would hinder the weaving. I tamed the hairiness by dipping the fiber in a sizing solution that I made from gelatin. There are many versions of sizing you can make yourself. It washes out easily after the cloth comes off the loom. Although I ply cotton before I use it as warp, I used the linen as singles (no ply).The pattern I used is the same one I developed for my cotton vest and you can find the details here. This linen fabric was woven at 12” wide, as was the cotton vest. Since linen does not shrink as much as cotton, I was able to use ⅝” seams rather than the  ¼” that I used for the cotton vest. I wanted to add a bit of color to my vest, so I dyed some of the fiber with my homegrown Japanese indigo and used it for every other warp thread. The color is subtle and you don’t see it as stripes. The other warp threads and the weft is the natural linen color.

My linen yarn measured 38-45 wpi (wraps per inch). I wove it at 24 epi (warp ends per inch), putting two warps through each space in a 12 dent reed. I wove it on a heavy Nilus 4 harness floor loom. Linen warp needs to be held at a tight tension, which may be harder to achieve with a lighter table loom. It also needs a good shed to separate those hairy fibers. The greater distance from the heddles to the back beam on a floor loom, as compared to a table loom, also helps with that separation. I used 7.5 ounces of homegrown yarn for the warp. or 1,660 yards. The weft required less, since the warp includes loom waste. That was enough for the vest fabric plus the side panels on the lining.

intended lining side

I have begun to weave the lining fabric for my garments and wove this lining from my homegrown linen. Rather than spin more flax for the lining, I thought I would use up the leftovers from other projects, knowing that there would be a difference in color. Color differences may occur as a result of different harvests, retting conditions, processing times during scouring, etc. Since I would be the only one seeing the lining, it didn’t really matter. Right?

As you will see, it did matter. The leftover linen yarn that I had  was not enough for all the lining, but I had enough extra outside fabric to make up

linen buttons

the difference. I used the outside fabric to make the side panels and one pocket. I didn’t have enough of either fabric for both pockets, so there is one of each. The color difference on the shoulder is from different batches of flax/linen, not dyeing. As I was nearing completion I showed it to friends who said they liked the lining at least as much as the outside, so I made it reversible. For the first time ever I made dorset style buttons. I wrapped my linen around a ½” dowel 30 times to make the core for each button. The loops for closure are made using my linen for a kumihimo braid. The only thing in this vest that I didn’t grow is the cotton thread that I used to sew the fabric pieces together.

Weaving with homegrown yarn is much different than weaving with commercial yarn. I had gotten quite comfortable weaving with my homegrown cotton. Although I love the all-cotton clothes I’ve made, I also love the texture of the fabric I have made with a cotton warp and linen weft. In this photo you can see my cotton warp/linen weft shirt and dress. The color in the dress is supplied by the colored cotton I grew, not dyes. I enjoy challenging myself with these projects. You may not be into producing your own clothes, but I hope you find something you are passionate about. Then jump in and enjoy the adventures that present themselves.

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