Foraging For Fashion
What does Slow Food and Slow Fashion have in common? Everything! Just as we want to know where our food comes from and how it’s grown, the same applies for the clothing we wear and textiles we use. Just as industrial farming has an impact on the environment, so does the clothing and textile industry.
In the Spring, Stone Edge Farm teamed up with Sasha Duerr from the Permacouture Institute to present a collaboration entitled ” Foraging for Fashion:The Slow Food Connection” presented at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Sasha and I spent an afternoon at Stone Edge foraging for wild and cultivated plants to use in the demonstration.I created wonderful and natural things to eat such as acorn pancakes, ricotta gnocchi with Calendula petals, and foraged wild greens and flower salad. Sasha used the same plants to create beautiful natural dyes for napkins, tablecloths, and runners.
Sasha has recently released a book entitled “The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes”. It is filled with photographs and recipes for making the dyes. In fact, it is very much like a cookbook except you don’t eat what you prepare! That’s where I get involved and is why the combination of food and fashion resonates so well together. It is an easy alliance that draws from the same source-the natural world.
We recently combined our efforts to further explore this connection at Stone Edge Farm on a recent brilliantly clear fall day.A small group of serious natural dye aficionados and textilistas showed up at the farm to take Sasha’s class “Fall Color Harvest”.Our new gardener, Colby Eierman, joined the search for fruits and plants to use in the dyeing while I scoured the landscape for enticing ingredients to use in the preparation of lunch.While the participants were cooking up the dyes from grapes, olives, and oaks, I was creating lunch that included the same ingredients. In the end we all sat down to an alfresco lunch under the trees enjoying some Stone Edge Farm Cabernet!
