Rustbeltfibershed

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Rustbeltfibershed

Local fiber. Local color. Local labor. Regenerative Agriculture. Creating hope, health, and belong

01/20/2026

SO many reasons to shop locally this Saturday 1/24 at 78th street studios from 2-4!!

This is your opportunity to support local, responsible economies! Our vendor list is filled with folks who have taken the more challenging (but dare we say rewarding!) path to use their business to make a more beautiful, creative, intentional, and relational world.

Why shop local this Saturday?
1. Your money stays where you live. It won’t disappear into corporate systems.

2. You can have conversations with makers and participate in the whole story of what you’re purchasing. This makes the item purchased have far more intrinsic value, creating a cascade of care for the items, shared stories, and feeling of connection and self-worth.

3. At this specific market you’re supporting the use of materials that REGENERATE rather than extract. This means healthier soil, cleaner water, healthier landscapes over time.

4. You’re paying for fair wages and real craftsmanship, time, care, and skill. You’re honoring the human work.

5. Shopping the vendors on this list with strengthen our creative and cultural ecosystems! It helps keep traditional skills alive and place-based materials circulating, allowing for greater cultural shifts towards economies of care.

6.it builds our community resilience! And do we ever need it now!

7. It invites you to INVEST, not just “shop”. Youll@make intentional choices for pieces that carry a story, are beautiful, and are worth it.

8. It connects you to here! To our place!! You can carry your landscape with you and feel a part of something larger.

Check out our amazing vendors, like and share, and we will see you on Saturday at 78th street studios in Cleveland!

.studio .bene

01/18/2026

FREE EVENT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC! 1/24, 2-4pm at 78th street studios in Cleveland, OH.

We are getting sooo excited over here! Less than one week away!

Even if you aren’t attending the morning speaker event, you can still check out what all the fuss is about!

Everyone can find their entrypoint to thinking about where our textile materials come from (and thanks to , where they’re going!).

Crocheting w
Cordage and weaving with
Flax processing with
Angora fibers with
Wet felting with Steve Lucius
Flax paper making with Jules
Natural Dyes with .latham
Recycling plastics for buttons with
Weaving Demo with
Interactive Mending with
Algae yarn with .det
Composting with
Natural Building with
Sheep snuggling with
Choosing wool w Denise Williams

Info tables , Britta Bielak,

Stay tuned for our Vendor Spotlight post! Great Lakes Natural Fibers .bene .studio

01/14/2026

Not in the Cleveland area? Unwilling to travel? You’re still invited!

Join us from anywhere! Live stream our morning speaker sessions.

If one of these places looks like home to someone you love who also lives fiber and textile systems (or systems thinking or place-based design or fashion or gardening or mushrooms or local economies or or or…!)Let’s get folks tuned in around the world!

Recording is available (we’re looking at midnight for you, Australia!)

🗓️ Saturday, January 24. 9 am-12:30

Ticket link in bio

01/03/2026

SPEAKER ALERT!  The symposium is just about 3 weeks away! Let’s get excited about our speakers!!

First off, our community is so lucky to have these speakers come and share their time and expertise with all of us. Our speakers have always been passionate members from all parts of the textile supply chain, and this year is no different.

This year we’re asking questions about what might be possible? If we have the opportunity to rethink textiles here altogether (and all, together) what can we dream up? What if we really believe that textiles is one system that can actively create a more vibrant future??  This year we’ll be hearing from people who steward sheep, shear animals, cultivate flax-for-linen, use flax to remediate soil, use cooperative structures to create regional blue, involve students in this work, create textile recycling projects in partnership with local municipalities, use mycelium to design interiors, use mycelium to remediate textile dyes, create a container for a Midwest fashion hub and how to do that while being a good ancestor, and offering waste material as a way for artistic expression and everyday wear.

You can find out more info about each of our speakers on our website.

IT IS GOING TO BE INCREDIBLE AHHHHH!!!

Just being in the room with these speakers and the One Year One Outfit fashion show and all the vendors and learning station hosts from the afternoon— it is sure to be an inspirational, connecting time where we can really focus on what we want to dream up here.   How much can we all actually live into a future worth making? What do fiber and textiles have to do with it?

Come find out! Link in bio! January 24, registration opens at 8:15 am— bright and early! We will have the coffee ready!

We still have a couple weeks left to register, but we do expect we will sell out. Please be sure to register ASAP!

We love you ❤️

12/28/2025

Fiber Brunch on on January 4th in Akron!

Thanks so much to for organizing and hosting a fiber art crafternoon to promote the upcoming symposium in Cleveland on January 24th! It will be a potluck-style meal of breads/teas/jams + whatever dish you feel like sharing on a cozy afternoon! .spargo and will have a set of natural dye pots going! With another fiber craft TBA. Music by Dustin Mayle. And we will be sharing a little bit about the RBF!
$10 suggested donation to support the symposium!!

12/26/2025

We are opening up the symposium with something special, and we hope you’ll be a part of it!

Join our “future worth making” Textile Banner Parade, a joyful, collaborative opening ceremony celebrating hope, care, and the world we’re building together!

Details:
-anyone can participate (as long as you’re registered for the Symposium!
-create a textile banner with a message of hope or joy
-bring it to the symposium on the 24th and parade it with us!
-see it displayed throughout the space during the event

Think: reused quilts, blankets, hand-stitched words, painted phrases, pinned letters, wearable banners, capes, flags- whatever your imagination dreams up!

Please note this is not a protest. This is an act of collaboration, place-making, and shared joy!

More info in sign-up link in bio!

12/17/2025

TICKETS ARE OFFICIALLY LIVE, FOLX!!! 🎉

What if the future of textiles was already close to home?!

On January 24, Rust Belt Fibershed invites you to our 3rd Annual Symposium:

Close to Home Collaborations: a Textile Future Worth Making!

It’s a gathering of all sorts of people (farmers, designers, educators, researchers, students, community leaders, systems-thinkers, fiber enthusiasts, makers, anyone who wears clothing…)! We are going to reimagine what’s possible when we invest in regional fiber systems, shared. Knowledge, collective action, and each other.

Click the link in bio to get your tickets now! Please reshare/pass the word around- tickets have sold out the past two years!

There is also a virtual streaming ticket option for any friends from near or far who won’t be able to attend live.

For full list of speakers and activities and all the goodies- all those details are up on the website and we will start rolling out and featuring them on IG in the coming weeks!!!

10/19/2025

One of our favorite questions from yesterday’s artist panel involved asking about time. Time to make an outfit from scratch from our place. The “one year” aspect of the project. The slow fashion of it. Ultimately: does it feel sustainable to create clothing this way, using so much time to make an outfit?

We wish we would have recorded the answers because they turned the question on its head. Instead of thinking of it as a time sink, the artists shared in their own ways: making an outfit like this is something they WANT to do. It’s something they do to think. Something to relax. Something to have time to themselves. Something instead of doomscrolling. Something where the smallest amount of daily actions- a little spinning here, a few rows of knitting there- before you know it these actions add up to an outfit. Hey talked about the importance of fitting it into their life, making time for it.

We couldn’t help but note the through line of joy propelling the action, and that it feels so good to create something.

Of course some said they hit their points where they would rather not see knitting needles for a bit, but ultimately creating a slow fashion outfit from scratch was very, very worth the time.

We try to be clear with this project: we aren’t ever saying that making all of your own clothes from scratch is an at-scale solution for our fast fashion problem.

BUT we do say: if you start to mend your own clothes, overdye your own clothes, care about where they come from, swap em with friends, upcycle them, and then maybe make a garment from scratch once in awhile… things will absolutely shift.

And the biggest of those shifts might not even be lowered carbon emissions … it might be in what else this world can become that we can’t even envisage yet because instead of spending time consuming, we are spending it creating!

Thank you so much to everyone who came to yesterday’s panel! Special thanks to for hosting this show, and for , , , , , and for participating in the panel!

Address

1305 W. 80th Street
Cleveland, OH
44102

Website

https://rustbeltfibershed.com/

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