Monday 12 March 2012

Organic and fair trade sewing supplies

In July I'm going to stay with my boyfriend's godmother in France for a week. As a thank you gift, I thought I might make a French-inspired quilt for their home. This lady works in the fair trade industry, and as you can imagine, she is very into fair trade goods. According to my boyfriend, she is also into homemade crafts, so a quilt seems perfect.

However, the stumbling block of my project is trying to source fair trade materials. Hundreds of US websites show up on Google when you type in "fair trade sewing supplies", but not many UK ones. 

Here are two sites I have found  (the first is particularly well-stocked): Organic Cotton and Fairtrade Fabrics. At Organic Cotton you can buy an 8m roll of fair trade bamboo and cotton batting all for under £40--that's £5/ mtr. Sounds like a bargain to me! I plan on getting my batting and plain white cotton from these sites and then using these Moda charm squares to make a lattice quilt, like this. It'll have a plain white back and a thick white border on the front, shown off with a thin red strip between the end of the lattice work and the border. So the quilt won't be totally fair trade, but some of the evil of the cotton industry will be offset by the  other ethically sourced fabrics.

If you know of any other UK based suppliers of fair trade and organic cotton let me know. Especially if you find somewhere that does cool patterns (rather than the limited repertoire of stripes, spots and gingham). 

Alix xxx

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