Indigo Initiations from Seed to Cloth: The power of listening to plants with Justine Aldersey-Williams

#59  –  Have you ever tried the ancient skill of listening to plants through your fingertips?

I loved connecting with botanical textile dyer Justine Aldersey-Williams on the initiatory journey she experienced while growing her own pair of jeans from seeds into cloth.

In this episode, Justine shares about her mythic field-to-fashion creation process and of being in a life of apprenticeship to the plants, specifically with the ancient indigo-blue plant called Woad. She offers wisdom on the global lore of Indigo and the sense of deep fulfillment that comes with reclaiming ancestral skills as a mindfulness practice. She also shares about the regenerative process of forming a local fibreshed and how the alchemy of working with natural textile dyes becomes an embodied experience of communication with the plants.

Justine Aldersey-Williams is a regenerative clothing activist, founder of the Northern England Fibreshed, and a botanical textile dyer and educator at The Wild Dyery. She recently made fashion history by producing the UK’s first pair of homegrown jeans - in the process capturing the imaginations of industry, media and consumers alike with her mythic field to fashion initiation story.

Her pioneering work intersects creativity, deep ecology and spirituality. As a lifelong meditator, Justine experiences clothing is an interface between our personal and planetary bodies that needs re-sanctifying. Her practice involves connecting to traditional wisdom and natural lore through the matrilineal textile crafts that transform seeds into cloth.

Nicknamed Woadica, she’s helping develop the commercial upscale of organic British indigo from the heritage plant source Woad with her soon to launch company Homegrown Colour. Her intent is to help fashion manufacturers divest from fossil fuels in favour of our botanical wisdom keepers so everyone can wear clothing that’s regenerating ecology, economy and society.

Find Justine at: https://naturalfabricdyeing.com/
On IG: https://www.instagram.com/thewilddyery/

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Transcript

Sara Artemisia: 0:05

Welcome to the Plant Spirit Podcast on connecting with plant consciousness, and the healing wisdom of Nature. This podcast is brought to you by the plants and my deep collaborative work with them as a Plant Spirit Wisdom Teacher, Flower Essence Practitioner, Financial Coach, and Co-creator of Plant Spirit Designs. To learn how to communicate directly with plant consciousness, you can check out the free workshop at www.learnplantlanguage.com. For Nature inspired financial coaching, visit www.financialabundancecoach.com, and for verbally inspired clothing that is an ode to the plants and the people who love them, check out www.plantspiritdesigns.com. I'm your host, Sara Artemisia and I'm deeply honored to introduce our next guest to the show today. Justine Aldersey-Williams is a Regenerative Clothing Activist, Founder of the Northern England Fibershed, and a Botanical Textile Dyer, and educator at The Wild Dyery. She recently made fashion history by producing the UK's first pair of homegrown jeans. And in the process captured the imaginations of industry, media and consumers alike with her mythic field to fashion initiation story. Justine's pioneering work intersects creativity, deep ecology, and spirituality. And her practice involves connecting to traditional wisdom and natural lore through the matrilineal textile crafts that transformed seeds into cloth. So, Justine, thank you so much for being here today.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 2:04

Thanks for inviting me.

Sara Artemisia: 2:05

I'm so excited for our conversation. So we were talking just a little bit earlier about your connection with Indigo and Flax. And I would love to start there, one of the things I absolutely love is talking to people about plants that they feel deeply connected to, because there's this experience that I have of when we are in deep relationship with someone with anyone, and we talk about them. There's like this doorway of connection that opens up so that other people can access that and I was feeling that really strongly when you're talking about specifically Indigo earlier. So could you tell us a bit about these two amazing plants and and your connection with them and your understanding of who they are really as beings?

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 2:49

Well, why just start, I think Indigo came into my life first, I began natural textile dyeing, I think in around 2010. My background was in fashion textiles a long time ago, I boycotted the fashion industry and took a meandering path through yoga teaching and then back to natural textile dyeing. And Indigo was one of the first dyes that I worked with pigments that I worked with. And it's not like your regular dye that I don't know if you've ever done any dyeing like my mom and I will when I was a kid, I used to get old clothes and get a dial on dye and flinging in a pan and we'd constantly change the color of our clothing. That was all synthetic dye. So Indigo is a botanical plant dye. It's not like other dyes, because it's not soluble, there's a whole process you have to go through that feels quite initiatory just to manage to get color on cloth. So you have to create a reduction of that. When you say dip your cloth into this vat, it comes out like this bright yellow green color. And the second it touches the air it transforms to blue. So even that is kind of a moment of awe and wonder you're like "wow!, look what's happening". It's like it's reacting with the air it's transforming into this beautiful blue color. So the practice and the process involved in Indigo, even just the dyeing let alone the whole extraction and growing of it is fascinating and enchanting. And this color blue has enchanted humanity. Since the beginning of time. It's the color of infinite sky. It's the color of deep, deep ocean. It's a color that doesn't really exist in Nature that often you don't get blue trees or blue soil. So I think for our ancestors, it was always quite mystical process, getting that blue pigment onto cloth and so, Indigo really is revered in many cultures around the world as the color of God or color of whatever you think of as sacred and the divine. Virgin Mary's robes or Indigo Lord Krishna was blue. We have lots of kind of references throughout history of blue being a very sacred color. So I feel like I'm in service to this color. And I think my practice has deepened over the years and it's possible I've been possessed by this plant to do its bidding. Flax has come in, come in later. But again, you know, flax has this ancient heritage. I mean, both the plants have an ancient heritage. In most cultures, our ancestors would have been naturists forever, or unless they continued wearing animal skins. But, you know, we've been growing clothing for about 30,000 years. Flax makes linen in the Europe. Woad is our native source of Indigo dye. We have legends about our kind of warrior named Boudicca or you though to see or as some people know, who was part of the Iceni tribe, and they used to paint themselves in in Woad blue dye to go into battle, because they felt it had spiritually protective properties. If you need to relate that to scientific fact, it is actually an antiseptic, so it had that kind of protective quality about it. Flax, again, has closed all of our ancestors. It was grown in the British Isles for thousands of years until relatively recently, about only about 70 years ago. It's really so entwined, both these plants are so entwined with human history they are, they've really been a part of all of our ancestors experience.

Sara Artemisia: 6:59

Amazing, and I love how you are so connected to the depth of the connection with the plants that grow right around you. And even to the point where you grew your own pair of jeans. And so this is actually what first introduced me to your work was learning about the fact that you did this. And I'd love to hear you share about that, like what is the experience that you had of growing your own pair of jeans, and how was this an initiation process for you?

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 7:33

Well, it's a longer winding channel, which I'll try and be a bit more succinct about. I am part of the Fibershed organization. So this is an organization actually set up in your neck of the woods in California by a natural dyer called Rebecca Burgess, who was trying to tackle the huge social and environmental exploitation issues involved in fast fashion supply chains. And her approach was to regionalize textile production and the Fibershed strapline is local fiber, local dye, local labor. We are working towards growing these crops again using agro-ecological or regenerative principles. Basically, you know, what Indigenous peoples today would still practice and what many while all of our ancestors practice before Ecocide so I founded the Northern England branch of Fibershed in 2020, and entered into a collaborative community project with a friend of mine who's a clothing manufacturer and a fashion designer called Patrick Grant, and a community arts organization. And we were growing these crops in the heartland of British Industry, trying to grow jeans, there have been a few twists and turns there are certainly issues trying to do this. This is what we were hoping to tackle. There are no natural dye growing or processing facility. There are no linen, Flax to linen processing facilities in the country anymore. So we knew it was an impossible task. At certain point in the proceedings, I decided to sort of loop back and fulfill a prototype stage that we hadn't quite achieved by making this pair of jeans. I mean, I didn't do the whole process, every single section of it myself, the idea was that I would learn all of the seed to cloth skills. I was already trained in pattern cutting and sewing so I needed to fill in some gaps in those skills. And these are just things that all of our ancestors knew how to do. So I felt it was important to kind of understand the the materials involved and the human labor involved in producing items that we just, frankly throw away today. So often. I think, you know, the stats are quite horrific around fashion. There's, I've heard two different amounts quoted as quite a bit different. I think there's around 150 billion items of clothing produced per year. That's the Fashion Revolution statistic that is online. And of those around 70% of all fibres, and around 100% of all the dyes come from the fossil fuel industry. And we only wear a third of what we buy. So we have a big disconnect in our understanding of the value of planetary resources off of our plant kin, and of human labor. So for me, going through this initiation process, it was really to understand what rewilding means I've been talking about rewilding for years in my practice, and you know, offering little rewilding workshops, really, I needed to embody and understand what that practically meant for someone who wants to wear clothing. And going through this initiation with these plants, completely rewired how I felt about sustainability, about clothing, about fashion, about materials, about life. I've been a yoga practitioner for many years, I would say sitting for a year. Every day hand spinning a spinning wheel was one of the best forms of spiritual practice I've ever done. It invokes ancestral muscle memory, it communicates to your friend by time before ecocide and plants I believe, and I feel, communicate and teach through your fingertips. There is something inherent in the skills they require that teaches you kinesthetically. So, that's a real area of interest for me. And that is a way to bring people back down to Earth through very relatable topic. We all have a pair of jeans. Most people wouldn't really consider where they'd come from. And this project was inspired by product Rebecca Burgess had done a California called, called, Grow Your Jeans. And so we decided to kind of bring that to the British Isles using our native textile crops. It was cotton in California, it's flax and linen. Flax becomes linen that we use over here and our, our form of Indigo. I mean, Indigo has this entwined history with colonialism and the enslavement of people. In Europe, we had off our form of Indigo, which was Woad. When Vasco de Gama opened the trade route around the Cape of Good Hope around South Africa in 1498. Suddenly, Europeans found that in Asia, they had Indigo that was four times the strength of Woad. And that's when you have Europeans thinking right. Well, we're going to enslave people, we're going to exploit that plant, and we're going to have that stronger pigment or we're going to make a load of money. So it's very much entwined with the colonial story. And to kind of bring the project like this, to this area of industrialization in the UK was quite profound, really, it was kind of bringing our humble blue back to these islands. Yeah, there's a sort of a healing that needs to go on there, I think and these plants, they teach us, like I said, about the wisdom that existed before ecocide and they require you to slow down. And they're not readily modifiable, really, in this day and age. So it challenges our current economic system, or both these plants challenge the current economic system we're in, ask us to consider other ways of living and being in relation with our ecosystems or kin.

Sara Artemisia: 14:15

Love that! Oh, my goodness. So, it's so, it's I just love how it's so interconnected with every facet of life.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 14:21

Yeah.

Sara Artemisia: 14:22

It's amazing. Could you tell us a bit, what is a Fibershed? How would you describe that?

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 14:30

It's a sort of geographical region of resources, I suppose if you want to call them resources, it's say for Rebecca's initial project that founded Fibershed, she wanted to create a whole wardrobe from within 150 mile radius of her home in Northern California. And she did that over the course of a year. And that's where this whole organization has sprung from. I think I was the northern branch was, I think, Because the 15 that in now there's over 60 Fibershed affiliates globally, it's really capturing people's imagination. Because it makes so much sense. It's bringing the fashion industry down to Earth. Waste consumerism has run completely out of control. As I say, we were buying stuff we don't even want for some kind of emotional psychological need. Because I think we've been de-skilled, skills gives you that skills give you the self esteem, that money can't buy. So there's something really wise about the practice of working with these plants in that they require you to reclaim the skills of survivalism that empower your confidence and your self esteem so that you then don't need to get that from buying crap you don't need and wasting planetary resources. So yeah, there's a deep wisdom, which I'm really only just getting to know I'm probably 10 years into my practice with Indigo, and I'm very much a beginner. I'm a perpetual beginner with this deity. That's how I think about it is some deep wisdom going on around well, both these plants, but in particular, Indigo.

Sara Artemisia: 16:27

Yep. How would you articulate the energy of the of the deity of Indigo, it's so interesting to me how that plants eat, when we really tune in with them on this deep level, how they have this different sort of intonations of archetypal healing energy.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 16:44

Oh, I would just say like, all, all wonder mystery. It's interesting in the very intellectual research I had to do as part of this project that scientists admit they don't fully understand how Indigo works. And I love that about Indigo. I really like that there is still some mystery remaining there. I think mystery is a very useful thing for humans to humble themselves before. Yeah, I mean, Indigo, just the whole process of it is magical. So when you extract the pigment out of the leaves, obviously, you're getting blue dye from a green leaf that's like interesting, you'd normally put it maybe you'd put something red in the pot and expect to get red. Indigo is just confounds that so you soak your leaves, and you you smell the vat that you've soaked them into the pot, you have them in every single day, and you check for the color that's emerging. And after maybe two, three days, depending on your climate, something called mermaid water appears and it's like it's unlike anything I've ever seen before. It's like it's almost iridescent sort of turquoise. I think some people have never seen antifreeze or people say it looks like antifreeze, but it just looks otherworldly. And then you would add a little bit of alkali, a little bit of lime to that solution. So you've got to know when the right moment is you've got to be sniffing it, you've got to get that language, that communication with the plant. And then at the right moment, you'd add your alkali and pour it from jar to jar and you watch it transform into blue pigment. And so it's just a magical process. And I guess historically, because of the kind of transformation that takes place during Indigo dyeing, it was held with this kind of esteem of reverence. It would be the very select few people who were initiated into those arts and crafts. And in Japan, you know, they before they would die with Indigo, they create a little paper God and Indigo dye God and they pray to vat. And I always pray to the Indigo dye Goddess because she can be temperamental, she can go out of balance. If you put air into that vat, you're going to oxygenate and the pigment is going to drop to the bottom. So there's a respect and reverence required for working with it. Flax and Flax, transforming Flax into linen. Again, hours of skill. We're talking like to become a linen spinner. It's even more difficult than spinning wool. And it takes dedication, I did feel a little bit over as having karate kid you know the wax on wax off moments during my practice of learning to spin with linen. Because you have to spend to a verry particular whip of thread if you're going to have any chance of weaving with it. And when it came to the actual weaving of the jeans that our untold issues are just many, many factors. It highlights the fact that our ancestors had so much skill. And the quality of their work was incredible. And what has happened through the process of colonialization. And the kind of enslavement of people in the offshoring of our skill in our educational curriculums in the West have often been funneled, so that people are pushed into careers that just perpetuate the current economic system. Creative topics are dropped, you don't get to learn certain things anymore. My passion is really bringing these textile skills in particular back into the curriculum for their holistic value, not only will we one day have people wanting to work in that industry, in this country, again, we should have a practical solution for this, these issues of lengthy supply chains. But you have people developing self-esteem from having had that disciplined practice that these crafts require. There's not something you're going to learn from an Instagram post. It's not something you can fake. It's not going to work if you don't put the time and the hours and the relationship in with these plants, particularly if you're growing them. I recently gave up my, we have allotments, I don't know if you've heard of allotments over there. We have allotments in the UK little patches of land, community land. And I had a greenhouse full of Japanese Indigo. And I swear it would sing to me, just walk in the greenhouse it had Tomatoes one side and pick a lovely, warm ripe Tomato off the vine which was just such another pleasure which I hadn't previous experience. But the Indigo was singing. It's the most joyful. Just abundant plant you can cut Indigo, strip the leaves, dye with it. Put the stem in water, it sprung new roots within about a day you put it back in the soil, off it goes again. Booming, just loving life. Just energy of yeah, vibrancy. And yeah, just really thriving, thriving life. It's beautiful, beautiful plant that I love.

Sara Artemisia: 22:27

Oh my goodness, amazing. And so much and what you just shared there. So incredible to hear about the energy of the vibrancy of Indigo, that is not a plant I have previously connected with I'm super excited to, to go introduce myself deep and learn from Indigo.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 22:45

Difficult to sort of talk about some of the elements of this topic, you have all the joyful aspects of it. But at the same time, I don't know if you're wearing jeans, are you?

Sara Artemisia: 22:55

No, not.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 22:56

Most of us have a pair of jeans, and the Indigo used in those jeans. And where I think we sell about 70 million pairs in the UK alone. That's just about the most toxic dye there is it's exactly the same chemically as the botanical Indigo, but it's derived from fossil fuels. And most people just don't know that, if that's one of the thing people will just understand is that right now, we're wearing the death of the planet. And we've got no choice about it. And what I'm doing is trying to create choice. And that's what the entire Fibershed organization. And so many people working in the area of sustainability or regeneration are trying to do create choice. And also, you know, I envisage a day in maybe 10 years time, maybe it'll take generations. I like everything to be done by lunchtime because my creative mind works so quickly. But there will come a day when I hope to be sitting here in clothing that resonates with the provenance of the restoration of people and planet, the healing of people and planet. The reuniting of relationship and understanding. We can't do that right now. But I do. That is the way things have have to go.

Sara Artemisia: 24:16

Yes, absolutely. And just how integral a deep relationship with the plants is in in this. It's essential.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 24:25

Yeah. And it's interesting in that, you know, I was volunteering for the three sisters organization, which is kind of global reforesting program, Claire DuBois was a big inspiration to me. And I think, you know, she, she was sitting here the Earth gives everything for free. And I do feel, you know, obviously, there's been a lot of historical trauma created by the commodification of what I consider a sacred plant Indigo. And yet there is this conflict now in that if you want to bring that back into this transitory period where we still functioning in this capitalist extractive economy. There is an element of commodification, and that's the, perhaps conflict here, or perhaps it isn't a conflict, perhaps Indigo knows best. I'm pretty sure Indigo knows best.

Sara Artemisia: 25:20

I'm super curious what Indigo would have to offer about different models of economy? And in which you're clearly you're living that you are living, that it's just amazing.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 25:29

Interested, I am so interested in that, because I recognize how this work gets sabotaged by the economic system is emerging from and transitioning away from. And yet, you know, what we just, I just need to keep returning to faith in the wisdom of those plants, and tune into the truth of that as much as I possibly can. Because there is a lot of noise. We're all being brainwashed, I am about being usefully brainwashed by sources of intelligence, who are perhaps more connected to the web of life than the human species have been for a few, quite a few generations. I think plants bring that and I, the work I'm doing now is a spinoff from the projects that I was involved in. And the jeans that I helped produce, is that I've set up a course called Growing Slow Textiles, which offers this initiation to other people, and takes them from seed to cloth over the course of nine months. And I'm collaborating with other brilliant people who are doing this work. Indigo authors, and yeah, I'm collaborating with some brilliant people to offer this. But yeah, people on the ground, so textiles course I moved to tear, they create maybe a little postage stamp size of cloth, but they have gone through every stage. They've journeyed physically, spiritually, emotionally with those plants. And what a transformation those seeds undertake, in co-creation with humans, we do beautiful things together. It's really quite profound. So my focus is really in in offering those kinds of educational experiences that can join up the dots between the jeans you might be wearing and the service you can offer to regenerating the planet.

Sara Artemisia: 27:44

Amazing. So how can people find out about, about your courses? Tell us more, how can people find you? Find out about your work?

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 27:52

I'm gonna get something on my website, which is naturalfabricdyeing.com. And it's d-y-e, for dye as in dyeing clothes. I'm also on Instagram. I'm mainly on Instagram. That's where I communicate the most. And it's @thewilddyery again, d-y-e-r-y.

Sara Artemisia: 28:10

Yeah. Wonderful. And so can people find out about your course there as well?

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 28:15

Yeah, there's I mean, I run three core curriculum trainings in natural fabric dyeing, but also the growing slow textiles initiation, in collaboration with other people, and it started last month, but it's not too late to join that. You can everything's recorded and you can catch up and we haven't started planting yet. So if you're in Northern Hemisphere growing zone, and you want to grow your own little patch of Indigo linen, Men Georgie into the become a fashion rebel produces little act of rebellion, this little mending patch, then yeah, you can look up the website and join us. It's just a beautiful community.

Sara Artemisia: 28:56

Oh, wonderful. Well, Justine, thank you so much. Thank you so much for honoring the call fully. And for joining us today. Just so incredible to hear your journey a bit. And I know this is even just the tip of the iceberg, but for just sharing a bit about your experience and your deep relationship and connection with these incredible plant beings. So thank you.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 29:19

It's nice to, it's kind of a bit of a full circle moment in that you interview my friend Pip Waller, who's a Plant Spirit Medicine Practitioner, and actually the project I feel was catalyzed by a journey we did together, we did a little workshop with Woad which is British Indigo. Way back years ago, I went on this kind of journey with this plant. And somehow it has catalyzed this whole process. And I've done other Plant Spirit Medicine sessions with with Pip and Lucy and great just really deepening that connection to so many other wonderful plants. So yeah, it's nice that you've interviewed those as well.

Sara Artemisia: 30:07

Aww. Thank you. Yeah, love Pip and Lucy. Well, thank you again so much.

Justine Aldersey-Williams: 30:12

Thank you.

Sara Artemisia: 30:14

And thanks so much for listening and joining us today on the Plant Spirit Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and please follow to subscribe, leave a review and look forward to seeing you on the next episode.