Today's post is something a little different. I'm very pleased to be publishing a guest blog post written by Grace from Bad Mom, Good Mom. In fact, she is also posting this content on her own blog, so if you already follow both our blogs and are getting a sense of déjà vu, then that is why! Grace is a very clever and knowledgeable lady with qualifications in Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics, and when she's not sewing and looking after her daughter, she finds time to work for the goverment within the field of space and environmental science.
As you may be aware, as someone who sews and works in textiles, I am deeply concerned about the damage fabric and clothing production has on our planet. Yet I find it frustrating that much of what is known by governments regarding this damage has, to date, had little effect on those governments' policies and neither has that information been disseminated successfully so that consumers are suitably informed before making their choices. Grace has taken the time to educate us on a topic that I admit I previously knew nothing about: the cashmere industry.
So Zo asked her readers what bullshit they had uncovered recently. I emailed that I have a whole blog series about bullshit and that I felt a rising rant about cashmere bullshit. I promised to write this post and cross-post it on her blog.
So why was I so upset?
Last month, I had toured the giant Macy's in Union Square (San Francisco), which contained racks and racks of cashmere. They represented a lot of goats! 20-30 years ago, cashmere was a rare luxury, not an ubiquitous gift sold for $49.
Where did they all come from? How could there be enough goats in central Asia to make so many sweaters in so many outlets?
The media was full of stories about how to be a discerning consumer of quality cashmere or how to avoid being fleeced by adulterated cashmere. Newspapers need to write upbeat stories that draw many readers and teach them how to consume (products from their advertisers). But fearless bloggers like Zoe question whether this consumption is even necessary.
I was in San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and had met Ryan Boller from NASA Goddard, who was showing an improved algorithm for the detection of aerosols from space.
The global dust belt has not received as much press as the global fashion weeks so you might not be familiar with this story. (Aerosols can be dust, clouds--both liquid water and ice, pollution, sea spray and volcanic ash). Occasionally, dust can be injected into the jet stream, a fast-moving river of air that circles the globe. Asian dust ends up in north America, American dust ends up in Europe, European dust ends up in Asia and so on.
The Sahara desert used to be THE major source for dust, but there are other smaller seasonal sources, such as glaciers grinding rocks in Alaska. The amount of dust is rising, and global dust season is lengthening due to both growth in dust sources (industrialization and desertification) and lengthening of local dust seasons.
In recent years, Mongolia has become a major source of dust. The Gobi desert is spreading up into the Mongolia Steppes and the goats did it. Or rather, we did it, with our shared lust for cashmere.
Pastoralism Unraveling in Mongolia explains
Sukhtseren Sharav has a herd of 150 goats and 100 sheep, and as they chew their way through everything else, and the sharilj spreads, he must shepherd them ever higher into the mountains to find fresh grazing land.
The lack of foraging terrain is not Mr. Sharav’s only worry. The price for cashmere, the wool made from the fleece of his goats, has plunged 50 percent from last year. The price of flour, his most essential food staple, has more doubled.
These are hard times for Mongolia’s cashmere industry, which provides jobs and income for a third of the country’s population of 2.6 million and supplies about 20 percent of the world’s market for the fluffy, feather-light fiber, prized for its warmth, delicate feel and long wear.
To compensate for low prices, herders have been increasing supply by breeding more goats — a classic vicious circle. Mongolia’s goat population is now approaching 20 million, the highest ever recorded.
Environmentalists and social scientists say this is destroying biodiversity and pastureland, and undermining herding livelihoods. But goats are hardier than other livestock, breed faster and can survive on sparser resources: so, the more the land is degraded, the more herders are driven to switch from cows, camels or other less destructive herds — another vicious circle.
This is a tragedy for the herders with global consequences. Aerosols are a strong feedback to the global radiative budget. In plain English, this means that dust traps heat. This can have both local and global consequences as the trapped heat changes the global air circulation, impacting storm patterns, heat waves, etc.
Ryan shared some examples. You can find more in the NASA Earth Observatory Dust, Smoke and Haze page. Take a look at the dust traveling from Mongolia toward China in April 2011.
The sparsely vegetated grasslands of the Gobi frequently give rise to dust storms, especially in springtime.
Here's another example, from May 2008.
According to a May 27 report from the Agence France-Presse news agency, dust from this storm pushed Beijing’s pollution levels to the highest level, prompting the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau to warn sensitive individuals to stay indoors.
Seeing the global-scale devastation caused by the cashmere industry, and learning of the suffering it has caused Mongolian herders has taken the luster off cashmere for me. I didn't purchase any this year (though I did knit a cotton/cashmere blend sweater this year with yarn purchased and stashed previously).If you already have cashmere, don't sweat it. Take good care of it so it lasts. I have cashmere sweaters that are 25+ years old (one bought new, two bought at thrift shops).
I hope that, after reading this, you will consume more carefully, and in smaller quantities. I further hope that your natural curiosity and bullshit detector will lead you to delve deeper.
I recommend:
- golden fleece? to learn more about the history of the Scottish cashmere industry.
- A synopsis of the "Cashmerino" yarn that may or may not contain any cashmere at all, and the lawsuit that ensued.
- Zero waste goal for how I use leftovers from the LA fashion industry to make clothes for myself and others.
Many thanks to Grace for writing this post and for allowing me to cross-post it so that it receives a bit more of the attention is so greatly deserves. I don't know about you, but the more I learn about the production, transportation and disposal of clothing and textiles, the more resolved I am to cut out all unnecessary consumption and only use existing/pre-loved textiles to clothe myself and sew with.
At some point, I can't remember when, I announced that I would make Pat one shirt for every year that we are together. Well, our relationship is now almost three and a half years old, and until recently there was only the 
To guarantee a good fit, my starting point was the 
The teal stripe on the left is applied onto the black shirt front with topstitching, rather than creating a seamed panel. I thought that would work better as the two fabric have slightly different thicknesses, and I wanted to avoid any potential wierdness that might occur at the seam when attaching different types of fabric together.
I'm happy to say that this garment was another that cost only my time. I had both the black and teal fabric in my stash, though I cannot remember how either of them got there or for how long they'd made my stash their home. The buttons were also from my collection. However, as ever, using a strickly limited amount of fabric meant I had to be a bit adaptable. The initial plan was to use black fabric for the front facings and yoke, but with not enough black fabric those sections became teal and in that sense the fabric kind of did the designing. Actually, I think I prefer the shirt's overall look with the contrast front facings and yokes, and it would be fun to make a variety of combinations to see how different effects could be created with the application of the different colours.
I hope everyone has had a lovely festive period, or simply a nice period if you don't celebrate anything in particular around this time of the year! But now that is over (with lots of mess and mince-pie assisted belly) and time to taking the ending of one year and beginning of another.
It was good to take a look back at the aims I had for 2011 and to see which I managed to achieve, at least in part, and which I either over-looked or needed to alter or abort. I think the crux of why some people hate resolutions/aims for a new year, is that they'll feel bad if they don't succeed. I'm kind of innoculated against that because I've accepted that life takes unexpected twists and turns and that these aims are to be thought of as guidelines rather than self-prescribed commandments. 
This is the first post dealing with the topic of 'stuff I made for peops this Christmas'. I'm proud to say that a high proportion of the gifts I gave this year were handmade but I always feel like it's bad juju to blog about those creations before the recipient has their mitts on them, even if those recipients are less than a year old and subsequently are not yet avid readers of this blog.
For the three babies on my Christmas list, I made a pair of trousers and pair of shoes each. I know that when these tots get bigger, they'll probably feel disappointed by gifts of clothing. So crazy-sewing Aunt Zo must make the most of these years when they don't as yet feel fobbed off by not receiving a Thomas the Tank Engine-mutant-Power Ranger-in your pocket.
The little dudes' shoes were created using 
The second style of baby shoe was a wholely more complex affair. As you can imagine, Etsy has a squillion baby shoe pdf sewing patterns for sale. In the end I opted to buy 
‘What the hell is Zoe on about today?’ you may be thinking. Well, the idea of WABs only came to me this morning, so I’m not entirely sure myself at this point but I'll start typing and see if it resolves itself by the end of this post. Let me apply some context...
The pressure on the WAGs to appear beautiful, polished, on-trend, in control and happy despite swarms of paparazzi and Sun journalists feasting on any signs of weakness, must be off the hook. All the while, any hiccup in your relationship, large or small, real or fictitious is gleefully scrutinised and analysed endlessly in the press. But I find it difficult to feel sorry for or respect these women when they have, at every stage, courted and welcomed fame and attention.
But thankfully there are many intelligent women that view the values that have seen WAGs elevated to role models as bullshit. These are the WABs: Women Against Bullshit. An alternate term to ‘Feminist’ if you will. I am most definitely a WAB. I’ve been uncovering and then calling bullshit on lots of stuff of late, for example, the way the fashion press creates and exploits women’s insecurities about their appearance to hawk the products sold by their sponsors. Caitlin Moran (pictured above), is another WAB, I dare say. She’s written 
