July 14, 2025 · AlabamaFIBERSHEDS: STORIES FROM THE FIELD
Collecting and Connecting for a Sustainable Future
The following interviews were published in the Southern Cultures “Future of Textiles” issue, guest edited by Natalie Chanin.
Fibershed is a non-profit that fosters regional networks, with a stated focus to build local textile economies, grow climate-beneficial agriculture, and support education and advocacy. Project Threadways started the Southeast Fibershed affiliate to connect growers, producers, and makers across the US South, with the goal of building stronger and more equitable futures. By creating a database of people and entities working in the regional fiber industry—from farmers and mills to gins and dye houses—they aim to bring visibility to this piece of the regional economy and, hopefully, facilitate more domestic production. And through the affiliate program, they connect people and collect stories on sustainable fiber, clothing, textiles, and manufacturing across the South.
Natalie Chanin: If you could just take a little bit of time to tell us about your journey to Fibershed and how the organization nurtures hyper-local fiber systems globally.
Rebecca Burgess: The journey started just about two hours north of San Francisco, on the Pacific coast. I had day jobs [at the time], so I needed to be able to go to a farm, learn about fiber and natural dye production, and get home at night and sleep in my own bed, then get up and go to work. I started a little Kickstarter campaign and raised some money to pay people to help me work with the fibers and the dyes from within 150 miles [of my home] to manifest a garment that I would wear for a year. My focus was working with only those materials, and removing from my wardrobe anything not from the region. So, it was kind of like a self-focused, but also bio-regionally connected, art project, in a way. In the process, I heard so many stories of people not seeing a home for their fiber, not seeing markets for their passion to grow natural dyes, and a lot of skill, an incredible amount of skill. I met many amazingly skilled people who had built their skill in their own time or had been taught by grandparents or great-grandparents and were carrying lineages with them.
The experiment provided a wonderful education, and revealed the reality of how connected we become through cloth. It was a very hands-on practice that brought people together. It’s been wonderful to now to see regions standing up their networks and their communities. And it’s been incredible to learn about these regions, and learn about policies that have affected them, about economic choices that the country’s made that’s affected them, about their ability to come together in the face of those conditions and still make beautiful things.
Read the full interview via Project Muse.
Snapshots: Fibersheds
At the Fiberhouse Collective in Marshall, North Carolina, we envision a future of textiles that is place-based: a textile economy that supports small-scale farmers and producers while benefiting soil health and community resilience… The Collective is a living laboratory and homestead where we grow food and dye gardens along with our chickens and pigs, which help with land management.
— Nica Rabinowitz, Fiberhouse Collective
Acadian Brown Cotton or Gossypium hirsutum is an eco-variety upland cotton originating in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. It is uncertain how or when it arrived in Louisiana, but there is a long, well-documented history of its use. Archives, oral histories, and photographs reveal how beautiful blankets were woven as dowry gifts for more than two hundred years in Southwest Louisiana… At Acadiana Fibershed, our vision is to preserve this unique history and cultural tradition, and, at the same time, to bring the fiber to its fullest potential in the twenty-first century.
— Sharon Gordon Donnan, Acadiana Fibershed
I believe the future of textiles rests in the hands of small independent designers, artisans, and mills that are supported by local customers and regional markets… In 2011, I helped found the nonprofit Local Cloth to help grow a local fiber economy in the mostly rural region of Western North Carolina. We began with an effort to identify and fill the gaps in our local supply chain, which was disconnected and largely invisible. In doing so, we discovered there were more than three thousand textile makers and nearly five hundred farms raising fiber-producing animals within a one-hundred-mile radius of Asheville. Yet few of them knew each other.
— Judi Jetson, Local Cloth
I’ve long been fascinated by the creation and craftsmanship of the materials that fashion relies on, as well as the meaning and beauty in how we choose to adorn ourselves and our spaces. To me, fiber is more than a commodity or resource, it is a canvas for expressing our values, histories, and hopes… Fiber production taps directly into the heart of the region’s shared history, one that today is being rewritten and sustained through collective effort, cooperation, and collaboration.
— Keisha Cameron, Peach State Fibershed
I work for Piedmont Fibershed, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a sustainable regional fiber and textile economy in central North Carolina. We want to revive our textile culture in a way that honors traditions, workers, and the land… Textiles are joyously tactile. They invite, “Please touch.” And, in doing so, they inspire questions—or so I like to think. In my work, I want people to consider: What is the material? How does it feel in your hands, against your cheek? How was that material made, and from what? Why are the cuffs stiffer than the sleeves? Who made it? Questions lead to more questions.
— Courtney Lockemer, Piedmont Fibershed
Photographs courtesy of Paige Green, Rachel Pressley, Fiberhouse Collective, and Piedmont Fibershed.