This week’s most notable accomplishment was my focusing in on filling the gaps of my knowledge about the flax that I am growing on the farm. To do so, I did some research into the botany of flax and created a plant profile for the crop. While doing so, I am really pleased to have potentially troubleshooted the germination issues that I had. For further reading on that, you can find a post about it here.
Something that caught my attention while reading about flax is that it is best not to grow the crop successively due to soil born diseases that can occur when the same nutrients are consistently drained for the soil. This isn’t a particularly surprising concept to me given that most mono-cropping practices tend to yield the same result without heavy fertilization. However, because flax is a textile crop rather than a food crop it does make it a bit of a challenge to work out productivity of growing the one crop for the purpose of textiles while utilizing the land correctly. I definitely had considered this to be a possibility before planting my own flax, which is why I intend to compare the soil test that the POF class took of the management unit it is planted in with a soil test I do of the bed once the flax has been harvested. In the next week I am also going to be researching small flax farmers and millers to see how they combat that difficulty. Overall, I am finding there to be very few small-scale flax farms. So, it will be interesting to see what information I can get from those few who do run that particular operation.
Aside from that, I am still plucking away at the dress I am upcycling and am finding the lace-up top to be a tiny bit time consuming. This is mainly due to the fact that I am hand-sewing grommets onto it for the real historic effect. Once that portion of the dress is finished I am hoping the rest of the ideas I have for the design go relatively quickly to keep labor time down to a minimum.
I also read a study called “Embodied Multi-Discursivity: An Aesthetic Process Approach to Sustainable Entrepreneurship” by Kim Poldner, Paul Shrivastava, and Oana Branzei that has been really helpful for me in putting the mission of sustainable design into words. The study argues that sustainable entrepreneurship, in essence, is a much more emotional venture than a lot of other different business models. In fact, the emotions of the creator of a “sustain-ably constructed” product is often transferred over to the consumer in the form of education and explanation of design. Because the venture is more emotional, oftentimes entrepreneurs can get away with charging slightly higher prices than other products.
The authors also argue that this is very much a visual aspect of the design process and is an advantage for the business person and designer. In fact, they state that the choices the sustainable designer makes to create a product become an art in itself that can be expressed visually in the product, and become part of the portfolio of the business as a whole. I believe this hold particularly true to what I am attempting to do with upcycling, and I am really hoping to be able to express those choices through my own finished product.