About Us

Jum

H'tonh

Tuyet 4 years old

Natalie 2 years old

H'nam, Nhup & Cayley

Design team

Tuat's gargen plot

Party Urn

William 1 year old

composting fabric scraps

First, let's get one thing straight, I'm an artist. I have a degree in Illustration and Graphic Design. I have zero (0!) training in business management. Therefore, I came into business ownership with a completely open, if not blank, mind. My "business model" was developed from my ethics and "creativity". If you don't know how to do something, you do it the way you think it should be done, and that's what I did.

History
I started my business as the Fiberactive Quilt Company in 1993, designing and making quilts on a 45 year old Elna Supra and a Nolting Pro quilter. I began having health problems. And after being told by three separate doctors that I should be wearing a respirator in my studio because of the carcinogenic chemicals on conventional fabric, in 2005 I started the transition to organics.

I wanted beautiful rich colors for my quilts; but in those days organic meant earth tones. So my husband started dyeing fabrics for me (yes, we carried that pun about as far as we could go). I have since taken over the dye works myself. I use fiber reactive dyes and low immersion techniques to minimize the environmental impact.

In summer of 2006 life came to a crashing halt. Due to long years of tendinitis, I lost the use of my right hand. I was told that the tendons were dead and I would never regain dexterity in my fingers. I went into a deep and terrible depression. After months of therapy I was able to do basic things, but still functioned mostly with my left hand. It was time to get a life again, but I needed a right hand.

A few years earlier, my church sponsored several Montagnard men, refugees from the mountains of Vietnam. These men had escaped through the jungle leaving their wives and children behind. When they were settled here, efforts began to bring out their families. The first of the wives to arrive was Jum.

Jum had spent her whole life gathering food in the jungles of Vietnam, she had her first baby when she was 14. She worked for the Vietnamese farmers, sometimes felling large trees with as machete, one baby on her back, one in her belly. To say that she is a strong woman is to put it mildly, and yet she was meek and helpless in our high tech society. On her first day in my studio it was hard to tell which of us was more needy. She had never used scissors or threaded a needle, I could hardly show her how. Suffice to say, somehow, she became my right hand.

We changed Fiberactive's focus from quilt production to organic cotton table linens because they're easier to make. After working a whole day to produce one napkin, Jum was dumbfounded that we had spent that much time and resources on something to wipe your mouth! Jum taught me how to forage for food in my own yard. I taught her sewing, English, and important concepts like, lunch. Jum's niece H'tonh soon joined us. Suddenly, life was full again.

The company grew. We expanded our line of linens with beautiful fabrics from Harmony Art. Everything was organic except for the thread, and there was no organic cotton thread on the market anywhere in the world So, in November of 2007 I entered into a joint venture with South Carolina thread company, YLI Corp. to make and sell certified organic cotton sewing thread. With the release of our thread, the Fiberactive Quilt Company became Fiberactive Organics, LLC. (the "LLC" stands for "Looks Like a Company")

Jum had a baby, Natalie, in March of 2008. By summer it was clear that we had outgrown my home studio. So in October we moved to 4224 Beryl Drive in Raleigh. Three times the space, sky lights fill the studio with light, we can walk to restaurants and the post office, on one side is the Arboretum and on the other is NC State's dairy farm. Jum's apartment is only 2 miles away. More space, more work, more jobs for Montagnard refugees. Welcome H'nam, Tuat and Klum. We usually have only two or three women working at a time because the children, too young for school, come to work with Mom. I get to be everybody's grandma!

I can't take the time to teach English any more, the girls go to English class in the mornings at Lutheran Family Services, then we open the studio at 1pm. I am learning to speak Plei Grak Jarai, the children, especially, delight in teaching me.

I take everybody to their medical visits to “translate”, but since they have never been exposed to medical care of any kind, they have no words in their language for most medical concepts and procedures. I do my best to explain - good thing I'm trained in anatomical drawing. My biggest thrill is delivering babies! I have attended five births so far, Jum's was the first. The thing she liked best about the hospital experience was having warm water to bath the baby in.

Now it's Spring, 2010; Fiberactive is not a family business any more. It just feels like family.

Last summer we had four (4!) wonderful interns from NC State University. They developed a line of cute children's clothing for Barley & Birch of LA. They taught the Montagnard women lots more about sewing and made great friends with the kids.

I organized a Montagnard community garden at their sponsoring church, St Paul's.

My hands have recovered over time and although I still don't have fine motor skills, I have been able to design all kinds of new stuff. My fabric vessels took over the company last fall and through the holiday season. This winter I expanded them to include cremation urns. I've opened a new division of the company called Earth to Earth, fabric burial products. Making organic casket quilts and pillows, organic shrouds, bio-degradable urns and I'm organizing a Natural Burial Expo for April 2010.

My hand dyed products are very popular! So this spring I will introduce a line of organic cotton embroidery floss in all the colors that I now offer in my ribbon.

The newest member of the staff is Mercy. She's a 1985 Mercedes station wagon that has been converted to burn vegetable oil instead of diesel. The Montagnard men are fascinated by her and they all want grease cars for their families. If you've got an old diesel care we could convert, give me a call!

The Business Plan

Fiberactive Organics has two missions, one is to increase the market for organic cotton in order to promote organic farming throughout the world, especially in the US, specifically here in North Carolina. We would like to purchase all of the cotton for our thread and fabrics from US farmers, but there just aren't enough of them growing organic. We have been forced to buy cotton from other countries, which is wonderful quality, but I don't like using the petroleum to transport it to the US. My ultimate dream is to take my products from the soil to retail-ready within 400 miles of the home office.

My second mission is to provide work for those who would otherwise be unemployed. Five Montagnard women now work with me. They can, and do work from home; but they like the studio better. It's sort of a Montagnard community center, where they can visit and the children can play together. The husbands hang around before and after work just talking and having me read their mail for them.

To give “the girls” more work we also do cut-and-sew for other organic companies. The more work we get, the more Montagnard women I can employ, I have a waiting list. Someday I'd like to provide each of them with health insurance. This summer I plan to bring in a teacher to help them get ready for their citizenship exams.

Here at Home

I raise endangered breeds of chickens that give us eggs, meat and fertilizer while disposing of kitchen scraps, ticks, fleas and the occasional snake. New Zealand white rabbits provide meat and fertilizer while consuming the weeds from the garden. We have two cats; one is in charge of keeping the cob webs cleared off of the shelves that are too high for me to reach. The other is in charge of pushing everything off of my desk so that it won’t get too cluttered. He also keeps the mice out of the chicken feed. We have a one-year-old Boxer, I’ll be darned if I can think of anything productive that she does, but she’s very cute.

Finally, I have to give credit to my father, Fred Moore, who started me off in organics and environmentalism when I was a little girl.

It's one thing to make organic products, it's something else to work and live lightly on the earth. My goal is to actually enhance our environment with the way we live. We're taking steps toward solar power. What little water, we use comes from our well, captured rainwater and we collect the water that the air conditioner pulls out of the air. Fabric and batting scraps are used as nesting for chickens and rabbits. After the animals are finished with it, it becomes mulch, or goes into the compost pile. We're not self-sustaining yet, but we're trying.

Who Am I?
I am Julie Mullin. I grew up on a small horse ranch on the south side of Kansas City, Missouri. I received a BFA in illustration and graphic design from the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1980. And in 1983 began designing and constructing pictorial quilts made from recycled fabric scraps and found items. Then in 1993, I opened the Fiberactive.

As an illustrator, I have created a series of continuous line quilting designs entitled Earthlines, which I publish and sell.

I have taught quilting techniques in shops and symposia all across the country. My designs and I have been featured in international quilting publications and appeared on television several times, both locally and nationally. Fiberactive organic products have been featured on the Today show, in magazines such as Natural Home, Textile Intelligence and QuiltMaker, Vogue Sewing, Better Homes and Gardens Decorating, Sew News, Green Business Quarterly and many more.

I have two babies, my son Geoff (17) and Fiberactive. Both of my babies are exciting and difficult, they both take a lot of work and a lot of love and reward me in ways I never imagined.

I'm an artist turned businesswoman, and the standard business suit doesn't fit me very well. Everyone here at Fiberactive lives by my philosophy: Business Is Personal.

I don't think outside the box, at Fiberactive there is no box.

Julie Mullin.
Alpha

Linens

Fashion

Art

Sewing

Vessels

Sacred

Retailers

Purchase

Origins of Us