When I began this blog, it was for me a medium to communicate all of the creative aspects of my life and this means writing about my garden, plants, animals, crafts and other things that I do in my time away from work. However, as time passes, I begin to realise that there is a great overlap between what I do in my home life and what I do in my working life, how I think about this and how it impacts upon me daily. There are no clear boundaries and it is hard for me to separate the two.
This has caused me to struggle with how personal I really want to get in this blog and consider how professional it would be if I shared some of the experiences that I have in my working life. A very dear friend of mine said to me, does it really matter, it’s the total that makes you who you are and if you write something you later decide you shouldn’t share, then you just delete it. Could it be as simple as this?
One of my greatest wishes is to live a life that is sustainable, honest and transparent – nothing hidden, and nothing gained from disrespect to life or others. These values are, I hope, reflected in my personal life but also in my working life and it follows in the products we make in Devon Duvets, the materials we use and the daily decisions we take in the business.
Let me give you an example of how this can keep me occupied:
With a little research you will see it is relatively easy to buy in duvets from abroad knowing nothing about the source of the materials or how the staff are treated in the factory where they are produced. It is easy to have your name stitched into them, sell them on with a clever story written by a clever marketing company and be quite successful as a trader. This has always been an accepted way of doing things, but we never wanted to do that, we wanted to add heart and soul to our products that would leave a positive and responsible impact on the world, even if only a tiny impact, because we feel every positive action counts.
It is only in the effort to responsibly source materials ensuring they are as sustainable as possible, in ensuring that the staff who make the products are happy and fulfilled, in focusing on making sure any unused materials are not wasted, that you can claim a product has a heart and soul. Well, at least we believe that.
All of those things take time and energy and particularly in developing new products. This leads me to what has been keeping me busy of late. Dick and I decided we would like to extend our range of natural products and wished to add a silk duvet to our collection, as we were receiving many calls asking for silk; a beautiful and natural material.
In our research, we found that it is very easy to buy in duvets from China but we couldn’t be certain about the source and quality of the silk used as filling for the duvet, the material used in the outer casing and of course, it wouldn’t be a product handcrafted by our seamstresses here in Devon which is what Devon Duvets is all about!
The outer casing was easy for us to source as we could use our normal lovely cotton that we have woven especially for us and is produced to support the BCI (Better Cotton Initiative) – I’ll put a link in here to BCI as it makes very interesting reading https://bettercotton.org/about-better-cotton/
The silk filling though was quite another matter. The utopian situation for me would have been to use only silk harvested from wild silk moth cocoons, but that would be akin to using cotton plants that grow on Dartmoor to make the cotton thread used to weave our cotton casing. Utopia would see fields of cotton growing on Dartmoor but sadly cotton doesn’t grow in abundance in our climate. Therefore, we have to find a realistic, yet environmentally friendly alternative as it would be near on impossible to produce enough wild fibre for duvets and even if we could, it would be incredibly expensive, making the whole product totally unaffordable.
But how do you responsibly source silk? After a lot of research and meetings with silk specialists, we found a company that produced high quality mulberry silk for luxury fabrics. Before the silk is dyed, it is cut to size and the pieces cut from the sides were then reprocessed for the next batch, but that involves using chemicals to break the fibres down and these fibres are considered too high a quality for duvet filling. We feel that only the best quality fibre should be used in our duvets and asked the question, would it be possible to take this silk and deconstruct it manually to make a silk fibre that we could then have needled into the filling for our duvets?
Nobody knew, so we began the testing to try. To cut a long story short, the answer was yes, the silk could be deconstructed into fibres without using any chemicals. The mill who needle fibres for us were able to make beautiful, soft silky needled sheets from the silk fibres. This is transported to us in huge rolls, all ready to make silk filled duvets. Not only is it very beautiful, but we think it is responsible as we have used something that was there anyway but destined for chemical processing that we have avoided.
I am constantly amazed by the skill of our seamstresses and they were not phased when asked to use the silk to make duvets. We developed a slightly different pattern to our wool duvets, in fact similar to our Botanic Collection, as the silk fibres are very delicate to handle before they are encased in the cotton. However, with their skill, they have now made some very beautiful duvets. I have been sleeping under a lightweight one and have to say it has been perfect in the warm weather. The medium weight one they have made for me is a little too warm now, but I think it will be a lovely winter duvet, so I will try this out when the weather gets colder.
So, a perfect solution to how to responsibly source silk – it’s not exactly recycled but it is a way of using high quality fibres taken from making luxury fabrics, without the use of chemicals.
And this is one of the things that crosses the boundary of personal and business and has been keeping me preoccupied for some time now!