My latest bus project. I'm knitting a wash cloth with yarn made from nettle. It's a very interesting fiber to work with. Rough feeling at the moment, it's supposed to soften with washing. It takes attention as it's very easy to pick up the wrong loop while knitting.
It seems sustainable to me in all ways but one. It's not made from local nettle, but rather was made in Nepal. There is plenty of stinging nettle to be found around here, so I suppose it would just be a matter of learning how to process it. I have been planning on trying some as a dye.
It's pretty easy for me to find the intersection of sustainability and creativity in this project. This project is something useful, necessary, and made with a material that is sustainable. When it is no longer useful it could be tossed into the compost bin.
I've been thinking a lot about sustainable as a term. Generally I've been pretty comfortable with my definition of "sustainable," but lately I've seen more examples of confusion about the term. Especially around textiles and "fashion." Sometimes I wonder if we make this more complicated than it has to be.
I really liked the definition that was quoted at Slow Cloth by one of the members. She gave a definition that she found from "Our Common Future", a report by the World Commission on Environment and Development (a UN publication). The definition is: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Not easy to accomplish in our world today, but seems pretty clear to me. Maybe the next part of this is what do we need versus what do we want?
This is a plant commonly known as horse tail. It's another plant I've been planning on trying as a dye plant.
I like how it fits another definition of sustainability. The one given at Wikipedia. "Sustainability is the capacity to endure." Horsetail has been around for over one hundred million years.