0101001101010011no2

[0101001101010011no2]

Vera Molnar, Slow Movement Roundabout, 1957

[0101001101010011no2]

You watch Wild and read Bill Bryson and think, yeah, I want to do that. It’s raining outside after a week of hot sun and I want to be in the forest. The weather changed yesterday and my housemate and I could smell the rain coming in. I also grew a headache. It was a lovely moment when the rain came in. I’m from the North; I don’t do well with heat. So, why I’d want to walk the PCT... But I will be hiking some of the Pyrenées in early September and that’ll still be hot. Actually, if I manage to do good enough physio, I’ll be hiking a non-stop 62 miles in Southern England in July - and that will also be hot.

[0101001101010011no2]

Some quantitative stuff on where donated clothing ends up. Surprise surprise, we consume so much textile product that inevitably a lot (about 1.4 million tonnes in the US alone) goes to landfill from what is donated. Clothing is generally no longer made from quality materials or made to last, and we crave new things. But we're going to suffocate. And it makes me really sad to see things go to waste. It's this that makes me not want to make clothing anymore. What's the point? Making for the process of making... Donating is better than not donating (meaning, don't just throw it in a bin as your council may not send the rubbish to a place where it'll be sorted). Easier said than done with not buying new things. Buy better? (And then, what's better...) Bloody hell.   

[0101001101010011no2]

[0101001101010011no2]

[0101001101010011no2]

[0101001101010011no2]

[0101001101010011no2]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIuFFrFAOMo)

Soundweaving is a recent project by Hungarian design student Zsanett Szirmay that turns patterns used in traditional folk embroidery into music by translating them into laser-cut punch cards fed through a custom music box. The project was partially inspired by actual paper cards used in some weaving looms to easily reproduce patterns for various textiles.

[0101001101010011no2]

Zac Goldsmith really doesn’t know much about London’s fashion industry or what it needs.

[0101001101010011no2]

Sounds good... but how will the labelling system appear? Is it just on paper tags? Will it be accessible online? It’s difficult with so many products. It was difficult enough just to do 20 pieces at Honest By...

[0101001101010011no2]

H&M’s sustainability report 2015. Looks good...

[0101001101010011no2]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MskKkn2Jg)

I’m really not sure what H&M are trying to get across with this... Does anyone else think that it sounds like “INCINERATE” at the very beginning before merging into “REGENERATE”? The song talks about resetting the rhythm, about the bubble needing clean air, about regeneration. Some video links are captioned things such as, H&M tackling the environment. They��re not. It’s an advertising campaign set to catchy music. What they need to do is show that the clothes - that their clothes - have been recycled, or upcycled. Nothing in that video shows that, apart from tents made of the same colour garments, seemingly t-shirts.

And really H&M, how can we recycle garments if you don’t create them for recycling in the first place? If the cotton garment is sewn with polyester thread, how is it going to be recycled - or composted? Whilst technology is changing so that this may be possible in the future, not everyone would have access to that facility. You’d be better off using your ad campaigns to educate, not glamourise. And if you design your clothing to be made out of lesser quality materials with lesser quality manufacturing, the pieces might not even get to the point where they could be recycled because they’re too poor to do so.

‘Regenerate’ should be what you do within your company - your designers should work cyclically with your production team, with your manufacturing managers, with your marketing... and all of this should be under the sustainability team, not as a side project. How about you tell us more about the structure of your company? How about honesty and authenticity, not cool songs and filtered cinematography.

[0101001101010011no2]

Sick of ‘sustainability’ being bandied about.

So WGSN have posted an article about yet another designer who embellishes on second-hand and vintage clothing and calls it sustainable. This act doesn't make something sustainable. It means that it's possibly a little bit better than using completely new clothing, but could just as easily be a little bit worse than using completely new clothing. Has the end of life been addressed any more than for a new garment? Has consumer use been addressed any more than for a new garment? Have the additional materials been assessed for their sustainable qualities e.g. where did they come from, who made them, how will they be disposed of, can they be disposed of, what thread did you use to stitch them on, how well is it stitched... 

[0101001101010011no2]

I had spent the weekend up north visiting family, an in-between all of their birthdays sort of occasion. My train was delayed, I was desperate to get home, it was 1am. Somehow, that all collided to make me miss the bottom step of the bus and the culmination of a heavy backpack, the heavier stepping and the bus still slightly moving meant that I fractured my ankle in three places. Having my earphones in didn’t help, as I didn’t hear the cracking that would have told my brain how serious my fall was. I tried to get up of course, expecting it to be a sprain. I’d never broken anything before. My anger rising at the bus driver’s handling of the situation, at the ambulance not coming, at being in the cold for an hour, at a swollen ankle, at myself for being so mindless, at emergency services asking me if anything was broken when I’d not broken anything before... by the time I got to A&E and was left by the taxi driver in a wheelchair on my own facing triage, with the cleaner mopping around me because it was 02:20, seeing that no one else was around, well, I was sobbing. I’d been holding my leg up for an hour because any resting of the foot itself would cause the bones to move. The severity of what had happened had sunk in. The shock had worn away and I was just pissed off.

It all seems a bit of a surreal blur. I’d been x-rayed, sedated and ‘manipulated’, taken to a ward, had blood drawn, had my swelling checked out and taken to surgery within about 7 hours. I woke up to a new metal ankle and a soft cast. The next day I was on crutches and being discharged.

I was terrified of the crutches. Really nervous. One of those big-deep-breath-and-go sorta moments. They’re just not as stable as legs - but then again, my own legs weren’t stable previous to that. I’m a bit more steady now. I’ve been looking at exercises that can be done whilst on crutches to help keep muscle strength. If you’ve read other posts, you’ll see that I’m a hiker. That photo above shows a moment when I had just managed to make myself coffee (on crutches) and realised that the cup said, “I’d rather be on Helvellyn” where I was supposed to be next week. I spent my day in hospital after surgery cancelling trips: the Lake District next week, Wales two weeks after that, Scotland a month later... I’ve left a navigation trip open in June. Mainly because I’ve paid for it so there’s not much I can do... but as a sort of motivation, I’ve not cancelled completely. I’m supposed to walk 62 miles non-stop in July for Oxfam. I know deep down that it’s tough going anyway, so with a technically new ankle, it’ll be even worse. But I can’t give up hope that I’m strong enough to get myself to the point where I can at least do something. So the Peak District navigation trip is far enough away for recovery, but close enough that I can see some sort of light... Of course I would rather be up Helvellyn. But I’d had this feeling that maybe I was being too cocky, pushing myself too much. I have a tattoo that says, “Our steps seal fate”. Well, my steps (or mis-steps) have sealed fate. I either take this as something to slow me down (and maybe it will physically do so), or I take it as a strengthening whereby I err on the side of caution but am more humble about what my body can do.

Seeing my blood and bone draws, I can see that I’m massively low in phosphate, protein and red blood cells. So, perhaps I would have fallen sometime anyway, and maybe it would have been up a mountain. As my dad was driving out of the driveway on Sunday, me waving bye to my mam, I’m trying not to think that it’s the last time, that really I am terribly scared of what I’d gotten myself into with wanting to do ridge walks. I still want to do them, in fact, feel like I need to do them, because now I’m even more scared, because I’m now even more aware of how quickly things can change. Looking at ankle fracture physio with two months before that point rears it’s painful head, I can already feel the struggle it’s going to be, even for such simple movements that I would do in normal training. It’s making me anxious, but this isn’t going to be it. I really miss the ease of making a cup of tea when you’ve got two working legs! It’s heartbreaking when something that had become part of you is suddenly taken away. After I’d made that coffee and was sat in my kitchen alone, the realisation that it’s going to be a long journey sank in. But I only momentarily dropped in optimism. There’s no point in being pessimistic about something that has already happened. I just have to get on with it. It was a stupid accident that was no fault but my own. The ambulance could have got to me sooner (rather than a taxi), but all in all, it was all down to me. And despite help of very good and caring people, it will be down to me for... the rest of my life. SO. Physio, protein, not too much over the top planning... take it easy, you’ll get there! Time for drugs.

[0101001101010011no2]

So interesting. Probably what is most pertinent to me - someone who has just happily scoured the beach for interesting rocks (finding the ones made of slag especially inspiring) - is that in time to come, plastic will be found in the strata record. I forget her name, but she did her MA Material Futures on the geology of the Anthropocene, and it was this conundrum: that Earth's geology is being altered because of humans. And whilst it's not a nice thing to have plastic fossils (unless like me, you find the combination of synthetics and natural inspiring), it's something we have created and now have to live with -- for generations to come. So even if we somehow slowed down our usage, there would still be traces in millennia to come of our current industrialisation, just like millennia later we are finding hewn flint arrowheads. It's our tools, our communication, our mark. I don't believe we should be digging for more oil, rather harnessing renewable energy, but it has already been set in motion, so what already exists just exists and it can't go away. This part in the article about the Anthropocene being "arrogant" and "narcisstic" is something I agree with; we are self-mythologising ourselves as if we're higher than nature, yet that comment disregards the fact that nature will find a way. When (if) we're no longer here, the world will return to it's current period of the Holocene and nature will resourcefully get on with how we left it. With craters of nuclear waste and slag heaps...

[0101001101010011no2]

I've just found this on one of my Pinterest boards. I posted this over a year ago when everything was just falling apart. The other day I really despised London and just could not wait to get home; the cycle, the people, the weather...It wasn't really all that bad, but I'd just come back from the solitude of Arran and was feeling claustrophobic. I wasn't going to fall apart, either, like these words suggest, because I have nothing to fall apart over now, and a slightly bad day need not be so heartwrenching. But I needed a comforting and familiar space. And I found it. Pretty much every day I feel thankful that I am where I am now, and who I am now. Things still need to be sorted out, but at least I'm not falling apart like before, and I have a safe place to return to when the world gets a little bit too much.