Time Travel

Back to a Sustainable Future in Willimantic

by Mark Svetz

Time Travel.

Science Fiction has never been my favorite genre, but every day when Sarah and I walk across the Footbridge to our shop on Church Street in Beautiful Downtown Willimantic, I feel like I am traveling back in time, maybe 50 to 100 years.

It isn’t just that we’re in the shop where Phosy Saba, I was told recently, had one of the first permits for a “Package Store” in post-Prohibition Connecticut. I have no idea if that claim is true, but it sets the stage for the way I think about our shop.

If this has a kind of “Sturbridge Village” sound to it, I’m not surprised. We look to the past for inspiration on how to live sustainably into the future.

We are two people who live, love and work together in Downtown Willimantic. Our goal is to run an ecologically friendly business that promotes a sustainable economy. We use our skills as pattern makers, dressmakers, dyers and stitchers in the context of community life.

Equally important are the many ecological benefits of Industrial Hemp. Hemp is ideally suited for the US climate. It is a fast growing crop producing 250% more fiber than cotton and 600% more fiber than flax on the same amount of land. It has long tap roots which help prevent soil run off. It is naturally blight resistant and requires little or no pesticide use.

Sarah Winter and Mark Svetz run Clothworks, a shop on Church Street in Downtown Willimantic, where they make and sell clothing and bags with hemp.

For us, better working conditions for all the women and men who work in the textile industries is an important part of what it means to be “sustainable.” Today the benefits of human labor go disproportionately to the owners.

Unfortunately, the garment industry is spread out across the world. The pattern and design might be made in New York, Paris or Hong Kong, the fabric cut in Mexico and the garment sewn in Russia. The decisions are dictated by where the cheapest prices for labor are and don’t consider the needs or commitment of the people who have learned the skills to produce the clothing.

At Clothworks, we believe the interests of the workers (that’s us!) and the consumer come together. We get to have some control over the conditions under which we work. The consumer gets a well-made product that does not require trampling on our community and natural resources. And most of their money stays right here in Willimantic. And that, we hope, will help sustain the local economy.

Now, if we could only start growing hemp in Northeastern Connecticut!

The anachronistic quality of our shop is important to us. It comes from the fact that we make most of the things we sell. I mean we make them from Whole Cloth. The fabric, mostly Hemp and Organic Cotton, comes to us in rolls of natural (slightly off-white) cloth, 100 or 500 yards at a time. From this, we design our line, dye the fabric, cut it, and make it into a beautiful and colorful collection, from shoulder bags to sweatshirts.

And we make it right there in our shop. In theory, at least, you could hang out in the shop, watch me cut a shirt out of fabric I have just dyed. Then watch Sarah sew it up into a shirt, which you could put on and go to a party. Of course, you pay for it, and we hope we can make a living, as many of our grandparents, or great-grandparents did: with our hands, making things needed in our own community.

We are “branching out” a little and bringing in a few items that we didn’t make ourselves. We look, first, for locally made goods. If not locally made, the things we sell are always, to the best of our knowledge, made in the US, or by people with a stated commitment to environmental and economic justice.

Industrial Hemp has been our fabric of choice for just under a decade. The way hemp fiber takes the dyes is far superior to cotton. The colors are strong and vibrant. It is a pleasure to stir new dyes into the fabric. In the course of using it we have come to love the bags and clothes it sews up.

WILLIMANTIC –March, 2007