This week all of the pieces of my project started getting moving. I’m actually pretty shocked at how quickly everything started to get moving and am happy with how much progress I was able to make in only a week’s time.
At the beginning of the week, I was able to prep my 5’x10′ bed and get the flax seeds into the ground. I originally used the flame weeder to try to eradicate the weeds, but I quickly realized that it was an unnecessary use of propane. In my case, I could easily pull up all the weeds on such a small plot of land, and I have a hunch that large scale flax growing could benefit easily from simply tarp-ing the fields before sowing. Since flax can be grown like you would a cover crop, it really doesn’t require that much weed management other than in the first few days of germination – it will eventually crowd all the weeds out. I also found that I was right to not plan for irrigation in this climate. It has rained quite a lot more than the 1″ per week that flax needs for germination, so no extra water usage was necessary. The seeds are going to take roughly 10 days to germinate, so I am keeping a close eye on the bed during that time period to make sure everything goes smoothly.
I also made a great deal of progress on my upcycling project. I successfully used the textile I have available to me to alter the silk vest in a way that I believe makes it much more aesthetically appealing and flattering. I don’t have a sewing machine with me here in Washington state, but even with hand-sewing, I’m finding that it really doesn’t take too much work to change a garment pretty radically. An interesting aspect of upcycling I’ve come to realize in the past week is that there are different levels of intricacy that you can achieve, just like with any other form of art. I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked with embroidering the back, which, if I were doing this as a business endeavor, would jack up the price of the garment. But, the more simple alterations I’ve made haven’t required too much labor or any extra money at all. This gave me an idea of how I plan to analyze my upcycled pieces. When I am finished with all the pieces that I am able to accomplish over the quarter, instead of estimating a price for the entire garment, I am going to estimate the price for each of the alterations done and what the impact of resources used adds up to.
The final activity for this week was my internship at Olympic Yarn and Fiber. I’ve already detailed the activities that I was able to take part in here. But, aside from having lots of fun learning how to use expensive textile equipment, I realized that I actually don’t have any clue about the resources that go into using the different pieces of equipment that create products at such a fast rate. It struck me that for literally each step of the process, there is a separate, huge machine to complete the task. I don’t actually know very much about energy usage and how that impacts sustainability in production processes, so my goal for next week (and probably the following weeks) is to get a more solid understanding of each of the pieces of equipment that I encounter.