Take a look in your closet. Read the labels in your clothes. What are they made of and where were they manufactured? My go-to garments contain polyester, polyamide, rayon, nylon, acrylic and spandex. Their manufacturing sites include Cambodia, China, Lithuania and Vietnam.
Ninety-seven percent of the clothes sold in the U.S. are imported, meaning my wardrobe has traveled more widely than I have. In some cases, raw material is produced in one country, processed in another and turned into garments in a third. A cotton T-shirt can travel 39,000 miles before it hits a store shelf. What’s more, most clothes aren’t made of a natural fiber such as cotton. Sixty to 70 percent of garments produced globally are made from synthetic fabric, much of it derived from fossil fuels: They are plastic.
Those of us who faithfully recycle and religiously reject plastic straws to protect marine life nevertheless release microplastics into the environment every time we do a load of laundry.
It doesn’t have to be this way. A nascent “farm-to-closet” movement appears to be taking shape in Vermont. Like its foodie cousin, farm-to-table, which emphasizes the importance of local food systems, farm-to-closet aims to create a similar local supply chain for textiles, from clothing to kitchen and bed linens. Among the movement’s proponents are Laura Jacoby and her son Cyrus Brooks. They are the co-owners of Muriel’s of Vermont, a company whose sweaters are knit from wool collected and processed within driving distance of their North Hero shop.
Across the state, farmers, spinners, weavers and knitters strive to slow the runaway train called “fast fashion.”
Jacoby and Brooks are key players in Vermont’s “fibershed.” The term refers to a geographical region where natural fiber is produced, processed, worn and, ultimately, composted. From soil to soil, as proponents say. As with farm-to-table, the benefits of farm-to-closet are manifold: higher quality, less waste, revenue that remains in the region.
A nonprofit called Fibershed was started in California 12 years ago to create such systems and to support sustainable practices there. It now has affiliates around the world, including Northern New England Fibershed, which encompasses Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. The independent Vermont Fibershed, a nonprofit started by organizers of the Vermont Sheep & Wool Festival, operates with the same goals.
While the State of Vermont has provided grants to sheep farmers and to the Vermont Sheep & Goat Association, it has no formal program in place to develop plant and animal fiber production.
Regardless, across the state, farmers, spinners, weavers and knitters strive to slow the runaway train called “fast fashion,” as they produce natural plant and animal fiber products, many destined for their neighbors. No one expects to return to the production levels of 1840, when 33 woolen mills operated here and 1.7 million sheep grazed in Vermont pastures — outnumbering people nearly six to one.
Today’s fiber producers and processors are primarily small operators, but they appear to be gaining traction. Vermont fiber mills have long wait times. At 44-year-old Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, the state’s largest, “We’re busier than we’ve ever been,” marketing and sales employee Kate Salomon said. Two mills have opened in just the past four years, and one of those, Junction Fiber Mill in White River Junction, has had such success producing its own line of yarn that it no longer accepts custom processing jobs.
The Vermont Sheep & Wool Festival has attracted increasingly larger crowds in recent years and has a list of vendors waiting to get in. The 37th annual festival, expected to draw 5,000 visitors, will be held at the Tunbridge Fairgrounds on Saturday and Sunday, October 4 and 5.
At their latest annual meetings, two agricultural organizations — the Vermont Sheep & Goat Association and the Farm to Plate Network — featured sessions on producing fiber.
While wool is the state’s biggest fiber crop, Vermonters also raise alpacas. Weathersfield, home of the state’s first merino sheep, is now home to New England’s largest alpaca farm. Jennifer and Ian Lutz of Cas-Cad-Nac Farm Alpacas have been raising their award-winning alpacas to produce prime fleece since 1997.
Plant fibers, too, could thrive in Vermont, proponents say, although they require processing equipment that is not currently available.
Laura Sullivan serves on a team of University of Vermont Extension researchers growing test plots of hemp and flax in Alburgh. They are trying to determine which plant varieties and growing methods will produce high-grade textile fiber here. They grew their first fiber flax crop this year, but they have been growing hemp since 2016 and have produced six yarns that are hemp-wool blends. Muriel’s recently knit some of the yarn into sweaters and vests.
Hemp and flax, referred to as bast fibers, produce soft, woody fiber. Vermont’s climate is well suited to grow both of them, Sullivan said: “All we need is an investor.”
No facilities to process hemp or flax exist in the Western Hemisphere. For now, it all must be processed by hand. That’s what happens in East Barnard, where Robin Maynard Seaver oversees the production of flax, the plant fiber used to produce linen. The owner of Green Mountain Linen introduces and educates others about the fiber at the company’s annual East Barnard Linen Fair and other events around the state — and soon at her company’s new store in South Royalton.
Natural fiber is the future, according to Andrea Myklebust, another bast fiber educator who grows flax and hemp and raises sheep in Danby. “What drives me is we need to think differently about how we produce cloth,” she said.
As the leaves start to turn, sheep farmer Dave Martin expects to see cars parked along the road near his Underhill farm. Three or four times each year, he said, artists show up to paint en plein air. “They’re painting the view of my sheep and Mount Mansfield and my farm,” he said.
What he hopes they understand is that consumers need to buy Vermont meat, vegetables and wool in order to preserve that view. An array of fibershed disciples join Martin in spreading that philosophy.
Read on for a look at two Vermont enterprises leading the way in the state’s budding farm-to-closet movement.
— M.A.L.
Just the Flax
Green Mountain Linen, 3135 Broad Brook Road, South Royalton, 547-3252
Dirt turned to mud beneath the shoes of folks clad in homespun blouses or dresses — or in thoroughly modern rain gear — as they milled outside the East Barnard Community Hall on a rainy Saturday in early September. Sheltered on the building’s porch, musicians played old-timey tunes, while under a series of pop-up tents, people took turns grabbing bundles of dried flax plants and pulling those bundles through boards studded with spikes to break down the fibers. Nearby, a group gathered around a spinning wheel tossed around the terms “stooking,” “retting,” “scutching” and “hackling.”
These words, rooted in Middle English, French and Dutch, define steps in the process of converting flax into thread and then into linen fabric. Linen, which may be the most ancient textile, was woven in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt — it’s what mummies were wrapped in — and can last for hundreds of years. The cloth is stain resistant, has properties that make it feel cool in hot weather, and can be sewn into clothing, kitchen items, bed linens and other household goods.
Robin Maynard Seaver, a 64-year-old landscape architect, is a cofounder of the East Barnard Linen Fair. A dual citizen of the U.S. and the United Kingdom, she grew up visiting the family farm in East Barnard. Maynard Seaver is also the owner of Green Mountain Linen, which sells goods that are designed by her five-person team and manufactured in India with fabric commissioned from a Belgium-based linen maker.
These products include aprons ($75), kitchen towels in various sizes (a tea towel is $40) and oven mitts ($25), all undyed and checked with indigo blue. Beginning next week, the wares will be available at the company’s new store in South Royalton, just steps from the local co-op.
The folks at the Shepherd’s Hearth, a Plainfield catering company that specializes in cooking over fire, already are sold on Green Mountain Linen aprons. “We source everything we can thoughtfully and locally, so we figured our ‘uniforms’ should be no different,” Shepherd’s Hearth co-owner Lucia Kaufman said. “They’re classy and timeless and really great quality. Plus, [we’re] supporting Vermonters and friends with great values … It’s a no-brainer.”
By the end of November, Green Mountain Linen will offer a new selection of bespoke linen goods, including tote bags, vests, sheets, a bath towel and a kimono. These will be available in a variety of colors and produced at the same overseas plant as their current line. Her company’s ultimate goal, Maynard Seaver said, is to create its products with fabric from plants grown in Vermont.
That aim will not be easy to achieve, although flax was planted statewide during colonial times and is well suited to Vermont soils. The rangy plant, which has long stems and delicate blue flowers, can thrive without irrigation or pesticides, but it takes three expensive pieces of equipment to get the stems harvested and baled.
Maynard Seaver already owns the whole trio, which she purchased in a lot with the help of a Belgian broker. Because of the ins and outs of international trade, getting the machines cleaned, properly coded and through U.S. customs has been a challenge.
Once the machines arrive, other barriers remain. Except for a small pilot project in Nova Scotia, there isn’t a single scutching mill — where baled flax is turned into fiber that’s ready to be spun and woven — in the Western Hemisphere, according to UVM research specialist Laura Sullivan. That’s why Maynard Seaver and her compatriots at Green Mountain Linen are founding members of the North American Linen Association.
By working with flax producers across the country and in Canada — “I call them my ‘flax sisters,’” Maynard Seaver said with a chuckle — the association hopes to find a way to get a scutching mill built on American soil. In doing so, they would spin up a new industry that fosters environmentally conscientious farming, ethical manufacturing, and the wearing and use of fabrics that are free of the pesticides and toxins inherent in more contemporary clothing.
Even then, fiber will still need to be spun abroad. Sullivan said there are no “long-line” spinneries, those that can spin long fibers such as flax and hemp, in the Western Hemisphere.
Once there’s a facility that can process flax, Maynard Seaver plans to share her Belgian equipment with Vermont farmers. She hopes they will include flax in their crop rotations and call her when it’s time to harvest so she can send the tools their way. The resulting product would be aggregated, sent out to the scutching mill and, eventually, make its way back to Vermont to become Green Mountain Linen products.
Back at the fair, thoughts seemed far away from the challenges of international commerce and European harvesting equipment. A pair of chestnut draft horses, their coats rain-streaked, picked up linen-curious visitors in a vintage cart, ready to transport them to a field where Linum usitatissimum, the Latin name for flax, was being harvested.
Nearby, Sheila Brown, a weaver, artist and Green Mountain Linen staffer, chased her towheaded 3-year-old son past a picnic table, at which visitors dipped brushes in indigo watercolor paint made on-site by Barre artist Pamela Wilson.
In addition to weaving Green Mountain Linen’s first piece of Vermont-produced linen, which was processed laboriously by hand between the field and the loom, Brown also helps with nearly every other aspect of business operations. That includes creative directing and organizing an artist-in-residence program that pairs a teacher — this year it was Wilson — with people interested in making art from fiber and cloth. “We have a small, tight-knit team,” she noted, pun not intended.
Even though it will be years before there’s enough Vermont-produced linen to use in manufacturing, every step of the flax-to-linen process can already be accomplished on a small scale, at home. Before the Industrial Revolution made fabric widely accessible, many Vermont farmers grew a small plot of flax, which they or family members processed, spun and wove to make the family’s clothes, sheets and towels.
While she’s waiting for her outsize linen dreams to be made reality, Maynard Seaver is focusing on creating and selling high-quality goods using resources that are already available, as well as promoting the art of working with linen on that small, homey scale. As such, the Green Mountain Linen store will offer tools that can be used to process flax at home, as well as classes and seminars to guide the flax-curious. “Along with our [own] cottage industry, we’re teaching people how they can do this for themselves,” she said.
— S.P.
Vermont Sheep & Wool Festival, Saturday, October 4, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, October 5, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., at Tunbridge Fairgrounds. $10; $5 for kids under 12; free for toddlers. vtsheepandwoolfest.com.
Shear Resolve
Muriel’s of Vermont, 3537 Route 2, North Hero, 730-4715
When Underhill native Laura Jacoby worked with the Peace Corps, she introduced soybeans to farmers in Africa and helped youths build economic development programs in Bulgaria. With the International Rescue Committee, she hopscotched from war zone to refugee camp to bombed village, dropping into desperate situations to help provide water, sanitation, health care and schools to people who had fled their homes.
In 2016, after 20 years living abroad, she moved back to Vermont, arriving home as she had arrived in Mali, Bulgaria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq and Uganda: boots on the ground, ready to do her part to improve locals’ lives. Farmers were struggling to earn a living, she observed. The farm-to-table movement was helping, she said. “But I didn’t feel like I had anything to offer in that arena, so I just started researching. I saw farms with sheep, and I thought, Hmm, I wonder what’s going on with that wool.”
Most of it ended up in compost piles, landfills or stashed in barns, she learned, because the 40 cents per pound it would bring wasn’t incentive enough for farmers to find a buyer or to take the extra steps required to keep burdocks and hay out of it every day as the sheep grazed, ate and slept. Wool prices didn’t even cover the cost of shearing.
That, Jacoby decided, was where she could make an impact. By providing a market for wool, she could give farmers an additional revenue stream, help them stay on their farms and help Vermont’s landscape remain pastoral. With her son Cyrus Brooks, she launched garment-knitting company Muriel’s of Vermont, named for her mother, a hand knitter who grew her own vegetables and bought milk and meat from neighbors.
In this, its sixth year, the North Hero enterprise bought 1,200 pounds of wool from 15 farmers — all but five in Vermont. It uses whole-garment knitting machines that work like 3D printers to produce sweaters and vests from wool, alpaca, and responsibly sourced cotton, linen, Tencel (from wood fibers) and hemp. The company produced 1,000 garments last year and, with the addition last month of a third knitting machine, is on track to make 2,000 next year.
Underhill farmer Dave Martin sold all of his wool to Jacoby this year, earning more for it than he has in 30 years of farming. “She came and picked it up,” he said. “Even better.”
When they started, Jacoby, 60, and Brooks, 27, knew as much about sweater production as they did about farming. “Cyrus and I didn’t know anything about anything,” Jacoby said. “We didn’t know farmers. We didn’t know how to knit.” Their research led them to Shima Seiki, a Japanese knitting machine manufacturer. They bought a refurbished unit and installed it in the basement of their Grand Isle home. Brooks learned the technology, and Jacoby got to know farmers.
She remains embedded in their world. On shearing day, she is in their barns: She was at Martin’s farm in early February, at Fools Farm in Tunbridge three weeks later and at Philo Ridge Farm in Charlotte four days after that. In her oversize farm coat, billed wool cap and fingerless gloves, she spreads each fleece onto a table, deftly flicks away poop and pulls off soiled unusable edges — a process called skirting. She packs fleeces into bags, sorted by color and coarseness, and loads them into her Toyota Tacoma pickup truck.
Once she accumulates about 500 pounds, she or her son takes it to Mechanicville, N.Y., to be scoured. Though some Vermont spinneries are equipped to clean small amounts of wool, the state doesn’t have a separate scouring facility to handle large volumes.
Jacoby or Brooks delivers the clean wool to spinneries — this year to Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, Aurora Spinnery in Berlin and Battenkill Fibers in Greenwich, N.Y. Finally, they bring the resulting yarn to North Hero, where Brooks programs sweater patterns into a computer and calibrates the knitting machines to accommodate the various yarns.
Employing hundreds of needles, a machine can produce a sweater in about an hour. Each wool garment uses roughly two pounds of wool and requires an hour of handwork to finish edges and repair any flaws, such as broken yarn or dropped stitches.
Jacoby has become a veritable wool expert. Surrounded by volunteer helpers at the skirting table on Fools Farm in February, she admired the fleece they were working on. “This is not too far from a merino crimp,” she said, showing the others a tuft of white wool that zigzagged like an accordion. “See how small those crimps are and how many and how thick.”
By seeing what Jacoby looks for, farmers have learned how to produce quality fleece, shearer Gwen Hinman said. Those previously focused on meat production now breed for wool as well and have adjusted their farming practices to keep that wool clean and marketable.
“She’s doing an amazing thing, and hopefully her business works out,” Hinman said, “because people who are used to getting 35 cents a pound are getting $4.”
Jacoby declined to say exactly what she pays — “a fair price,” she said. The amount varies, depending on quality and color. Consumers prefer natural browns and grays, so dark wool fetches more, a reversal from the old days when white wool was prized because it could be easily dyed. “As soon as you’d have a dark lamb, you’d have lamb chops,” Jacoby said.
Because wool sweaters don’t sell well in the summer, Jacoby and Brooks also knit with linen and cotton. Their popular wool-hemp blend sweaters currently contain European hemp, but, Jacoby said, they will use Vermont hemp if it becomes available.
In June, Jacoby and Brooks moved manufacturing out of the family basement into a building behind Hero’s Welcome general store in North Hero. Their third knitting machine is designed to handle coarse wool, which allows them to buy more Vermont wool — which tends to be coarser — and to support more local spinneries.
The new location gives Muriel’s its first brick-and-mortar retail space. The mother-son team, who offer custom knitting as well, sell their sweaters in North Hero, online and at farmers markets. Wool garments range from the $155 “Classic Vest” to the elaborately stitched $350 “Causeway.” They’ll host an open house at the store this Sunday, September 28, as part of North Hero’s Sweater Weather Block Party.
Jacoby’s last post abroad was in Antakya, Turkey, where the Asi River dried up each year because so much water was used to irrigate crops, including the Turkish cotton prized here in the U.S. Locals lived with the stink of the dry riverbed to send us their cotton. “We don’t think of it as consumers. We have no idea,” Jacoby said. “It’s so cheap to us, but there’s a cost.”
She came home empowered: “You feel like you can still do something to protect the landscape here in Vermont because it’s smaller scale, and that’s why we started Muriel’s.
“We’re not single-handedly saving the family farm,” Jacoby continued. “But if we can help farmers make the numbers work, then that helps, right?”
— M.A.L.
Sweater Weather Block Party, Sunday, September 28, 2 to 5 p.m., at Muriel’s of Vermont in North Hero. Free.
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Fibershed Moment | Vermont textile producers move closer to making a “farm-to-closet” movement a reality”
This article appears in Sept 24-30 2025.
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