I want to look like this. I want to dress her. I used to wear arm bracelets like that. Hope (Mazzy Star vocalist, and a solo artist in her own right) is a huge inspiration for my band and has a new record coming out with her current project, Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, a collaboration with My Bloody Valentine’s drummer. Sigh.

I don’t think I’d ever seen a flock of sheep until my first visit to the English countryside a few years ago. A hillside was dotted with little black things. “Ooh, look,” I said to my British friend, “sheep! Look at all those sheep!”

“No wait,” I said after thinking a minute, “they’re cows! Wow, cows!”

“Um, wait… no, I think they’re sheep!”

That friend, Andie, who has yet to let me live it down, got me a sheep breeds poster as a Christmas gift.

While we urbanites usually think about organic farming in terms of crops, it turns out animals themselves are also subjected to pesticides. Because it grows and regrows, wool is an inherently sustainable material—if the land is managed sensibly and cleanly. Unfortunately, in most parts of the world, it isn’t.

To control fleas and mites, sheep are sprayed with pesticides—14,000 pounds of them in the U.S. in 2000—and those chemicals affect humans and surrounding soil and water, too. According to the Organic Trade Association, “sheep dip,” as it’s called, is not only moderately toxic and a suspected endocrine disruptor (like parabens, the likely culprit for the recent rash of hermaphrodite fish and underdeveloped sex organs in baby boys), it has a long track record of causing nerve damage in workers exposed to it—with side effects including reduced bone formation, anxiety, and depression. Oh, and there’s probably some residue on your winter scarf.

And then there are the antibiotics in sheep feed—which travel from animal waste to drinking water.

I’m not trying to scare you, but this is why I picked organic merino wool for the Love Dress, which I love.

We’re getting ready to start shipping the fall collection to stores in a few days, and that means working on the hang tags that accompany each garment. Because you can only fit so much on one tag, the provenance of the fabrics themselves to the blog.

Did you know that even ‘domestic’ fabrics are likely to use raw materials from elsewhere? The Canadian t-shirt jersey uses organic cotton from Turkey, while  the sheep shorn for organic wool seem mostly to live in China.

I didn’t know this at first. Now that I do, I have major carbon guilt. Alas, I’m not going to stop making clothes, and organic is better than not, and it’s a global economy (we’ve gone over this before), but it’s something to think about, anyway.

As soon as I can figure out why images aren’t loading, we’ll go through the stories behind the styles, one by one!

…I am having trouble uploading photos for my planned posts, but in the meantime, check out the new site! Thank you Michael Harper!