Saturday 22nd Feb 2025
10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Belfast Exposed,
23 Donegall Street,
Belfast BT1 2FF
In an effort to build a fairer, more sustainable textile industry, teams from both Scotland and Northern Ireland have been working to reinvent processing equipment for natural fibres.
Their work will be installed in Belfast Exposed as part of the ‘The Clean Blue of Linen’ exhibition by Yvette Monahan, in collaboration with The Gaia Foundation’s campaign “We Feed The UK”. We invite designers, engineers, textile workers, artists, coders, developers, fashion students, robotics specialists to join this challenge. Explore how natural fibre is processed and get involved in designing open-source machinery that can transform an industry.
Hosted by Fantasy Fibre Mill, Tiernan Stuart and Mallon Linen.
About the event
Our mission is to design and develop fibre processing equipment that can be used within local processing systems. We want to learn from the success and the failure of the linen industry in Ireland.
We believe that adding as much value as possible at a farm or very local scale is the way to build an industry that is truly sustainable – we scale by replicating small regenerative systems many times. To do this we need to develop simple machinery. Everything that we do will be open source allowing it to be easily adopted and replicated.
If we succeed it will be a game changer, not just for textiles but also for natural fibre use in bio-composites for interiors, automotive and aerospace. An opportunity to help local businesses in those sectors to decarbonise.
This event is a one day challenge bringing together people from many different disciplines to apply their skills and experience to the problem at hand. We will share the progress so far from the Northern Irish and Scottish projects, the insights that those teams have found along the way and the problems they still need to solve. The two teams have taken very different approaches.
We are looking for a real mix of skills, the more diverse the better.
The event is free and we will provide refreshments and any equipment needed.
Format – interactive workshop
10:00am Introduction to the challenge
- Understanding fibres and traditional processing methods
- Progress so far and challenges to be tackled
11:00am Playing with the machines
12:00pm Teams work on solutions
3:00pm Presentation of ideas and prizes
