We are a bioregional textile community growing hope and resilience through local fiber, local color, and local labor.

Rust Belt Fibershed consists of 250 mile radius outside of Cleveland, Ohio including parts of Michigan, southern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania and Western New York. It is our goal to build a community that collaboratively supports locally grown textiles in a way that decrease consumption of fast fashion and works to restore soil health. We aspire to connect everyone in all parts of our local fiber system: farmers, fiber processors–from large mills to home spinners, weavers, dyers and fiber artists–to designers, shop owners, fiber enthusiasts, and all consumers of textiles. We are creating a collaborative network of regenerative fiber farmers, processors, and designers from the Rust Belt Region to explore the possibilities of working with the resources in our fibershed, in particular wool, alpaca, flax, and plant dyesWe teach stewardship of our land and resources, foster friendship and creativity, and facilitate conversations and strategies that address the challenges of a localized fiber supply chain.

The land, farmers, processors, and designers behind this work all demonstrate a commitment to creating a ‘soil to soil’ textile ecosystem.

Textiles come from the Soil and can go back to the Soil

A truly circular fashion system creates textiles from the soil that return -after decades of loving care- to the soil. This system functions in a way that emphasizes regional assets and supports and protects our human health, happiness, and our environment. Starting with the soil as our focus (bottom of the graphic), we focus on building relationships with farmers, processors, designers and makers, sellers and consumers. And guess what- every person (if you wear clothing!) falls somewhere in this circular system!

The Rust Belt Fibershed often uses United States political boundaries to describe where we operate for the general public, but there are other ways to describe our place:

Those who’ve stewarded this land:

We are operating on occupied indigenous territories of the Erie, Osage, Hopewell, Myaamia, Shawandasse, Kikaapoi, Odawa, Sauk, Anishinabewaki, Attiwondaeronk, Haundenosaunee, Wenrohronon, Susquehannock, Massawomeck , Calicuas, Moneton, Yuchi, Adena, Cherokee- East, Kiikaapoi, Peoria, and Meskwahiki-asa-hina people.
**It is our desire to create relationships with our living land and steward it with the care and attention of those who came before us.**

A Note about Our Watershed

We operate in both the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin watersheds. This means that much of the micro-plastics and dyes that shed from our textiles during the washing process accumulate in these bodies of water. The top-soil run-off, manure, herbicides, and more from fiber farms that use conventional farming practices run into these watersheds.

We operate within a huge variety of microclimates in our area: The microclimates of the mountain valleys and coastlines and plains and woods. There is so much potential to not only care for this diversity but also to mimic this biodiversity as a model for the intersections of farming and fashion, of textiles and culture, of economies and ecologies.