By Tracy Chait

What are you wearing right now? Do you know where it was made? By whom? Under what conditions? Since 97 percent of America’s clothing comes from across the globe, chances are it wasn’t made anywhere within the Washington State Ferry system. The shirt you have on today may have come secondhand from Granny’s, but if it was purchased new, it likely traveled thousands of miles to get here and has some pretty dubious origins.

In a desire to bring more of that textile production to our own backyards, a group of islanders came together one year ago to establish a local fibershed. So what’s a fibershed? Similar to a watershed, it’s simply a geographical area for textile resources ­— a defined bioregion that includes all materials and makers. Initially a project launched by Rebecca Burgess to source an entirely local wardrobe within Marin County, California, Fibershed is now an educationally-focused nonprofit with affiliate groups, including ours, all over the world.

In October, our fledgling fibershed hosted a potluck at the Presbyterian church. Sheep rancher Faith Hagenhofer traveled from her farm in Western Washington to share her insights about raising fiber animals and trying to produce locally made garments. As so much of our clothing production has moved overseas, she spoke about disappearing mills and machinery. The following day, camelid ranchers, fiber artists, spinners and shepherds came together at the library to talk about how we might better share our resources — everything from floor looms to manure ­— and sustain our local artisans and farmers.

By 2015, Vashon Island Fibershed had become a project of VIGA. Together, we’ll be highlighting the wool and dye plant production that’s part of Vashon’s local agriculture. We enjoyed our first booth at the Vashon Farmers Market this spring, and, in the same way the market invites us to get to know who grows those beautiful tomatoes, we hope you’ll come to know the farmer growing flowers for natural dyes, the shepherd whose sheep produced so many pounds of fleece and the artisan who spun that fleece into soft golden yarn.

In addition to connecting fiber artists with local sources, we’ve planned workshops that will encourage skill sharing and support farmers. In the fall, Dana Ness, veterinarian, will host a Q&A about caring for alpacas, llamas and sheep. The Sheepdog Trials will host its first Fiber Village this year, Sept. 10 to 13, with an exhibit focused on the history of wool on Vashon and featuring local interviews and a display of antique tools used to spin, ply and weave our wool into yarn.

Fibershed is also a movement, here and worldwide, parallel to, and perhaps inspired by the farm-to-table folks: How do our clothing choices affect our world? Do 40 million garment workers struggle to survive on $2 per day so we can buy T-shirts that cost as much as a cup of coffee? Catchphrases such as “soil to skin” or “farm to needle” remind us that our clothes, like our food, come from real places, and some of those real places are suffering the consequences. The majority of Bangladesh’s waterways, for example, have become so toxic as a result of the wastewater dumped by textile mills and tanneries that most of the fish have died and children in schools surrounded by factories often faint from the stench. To learn more about how the fashion industry affects our world, come see the new documentary, “The True Cost,” which Vashon Island Fibershed will bring to Vashon Theater on Oct. 6.

As a Fibershed affiliate, Vashon Island Fibershed has vowed to use local labor and materials gathered within 100 miles of the island, though we get an exemption for sewing notions such as zippers and needles. Sourcing yarn closer to home and choosing fewer garments in our wardrobes is a way to reconnect with our past as we simultaneously protect our future. Like so many grassroots movements, this project about what we choose to wear is greater than the cloth we weave: It’s a mission that further connects us as a community, bringing farmers, artists, human rights activists and environmentalists together.

Like many fiber artists I speak with, I learned to knit and do needlework from my grandmothers. In our increasingly eager-to-outpace-itself world, it’s soothing to work with wool by hand and imagine grandmothers all over the world sitting in the same way, at spinning wheels, at looms, plying yarn from animals they’ve cared for, skills our group hopes to share within our community and pass down to the generation set to inherit this fibershed and all that surrounds it.

— Tracy Chait is a fiber artist on the steering committee of the

Vashon Island Fibershed.