Charley Mullin
Julie Mullin
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If you're familiar with Fiberactive you'll notice that we've changed our name. I started 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, the Fiberactive Quilt Company started the transition to organics.
I have been using Hobbs organic cotton batting for many years, at finding organic cotton fabrics in any variety was quite difficult. I finally realized that the only way to get the variety of colors. I wanted was to hand dye fabrics. So my husband Charley started dying for me (and we've carried that pun about as far as we can go with that, you can imagine the jokes!).
Charley uses fiber reactive dyes and low immersion techniques. We've experimented with many ways to purify and recycle the wastewater, but we haven't found anything that satisfies us yet. My favorite recycling technique was the solar distiller at Charlie built; but since our goats destroyed it last summer, we've been looking for a better answer.
Most of the prints used in our work come from Harmony Art. Harmony’s environmental and fair trade standards match my own. And we've become good friends over the years.
Over the past three years I have expanded our palette of colors and fabrics, and changed our focus from quilt production to organic cotton house wares. Our bestsellers are napkins, placemats, and table cloths.
I had organic cotton batting and fabric, but there was no source of organic sewing thread that I could use in all of our sewing machines. So, in November of 2007 I entered into a joint venture with thread company, YLI Corp. and announced our newest and most exciting product, organic cotton thread. Our first offering is Tex 40, natural colored cotton, grown in Texas and in the in spun and spooled in North and South Carolina. It can be used for everything from domestic sewing to industrial overlock. We will continually add to the variety of threads and will have an array of colors over the next few months and years.
With the release of our thread, the Fiberactive Quilt Company became Fiberactive Organics, LLC.
Fiberactive Organics has two missions, one is to increase the market for organic cotton in order to promote organic farming throughout the world and especially here in the US. We would like to purchase all of the cotton for our thread from US farmers, but there just aren't enough of them growing organicly. We have been forced to buy cotton from overseas, which is wonderful quality, but I don't like using the petroleum to transport it to the US.
Our second mission is to provide work for those who would otherwise be unemployed. In our home studio in Apex, North Carolina, all of our house ware products are made by Montagnard women who came to America as refugees from the mountains of Vietnam. They work on an as-needed basis, only coming to work when they are not needed at home with their families. I also provide them with the necessary tools so that they are also able to work from home if they choose.
These Montagnard women survived in the jungle gathering food and working in rice paddies while constantly under the scrutiny, of the tyrannical and abusive Vietnamese government. They come to America and other Western countries as refugees, allowed to work but with no marketable skills.
At Fiberactive we start with on the job training. Our ladies get good wages, free transportation, on site free child care, and lunch. We also do daily lessons in English, reading, writing, and a million other things they need to know in order to get along in a technically advanced society. Our first trips to the bank, post office, and grocery stores were exciting, confusing, and very rewarding!
With the release of our new thread, we hope to put people back to work who were laid off from textile jobs here in the Carolinas. That will happen as more and more of our thread goes out into the world. Hand-in-hand with YLI, we have distributors in the US, the UK, Netherlands and soon Australia.
Fiberactive is a family business. Much of the financial gobblety-goop is done by my husband, Charley. The website that you are looking at is constructed and maintained by my son, Geoff. And 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 produce organic products, it's something else to live lightly on the earth, but our goal is to actually enhance our environment with our work. I know we're reaching for the stars, but if we don't reach we’ll never get there. We're taking steps to get our home studio off the electrical grid. As soon as possible, we will transition to solar power.
What little water, we use comes from our well and captured rainwater. Water used in processing our fabrics is collected and re-used in our vegetable garden and landscaping. 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. Food scraps from my family and from my workers feed the chickens and rabbits that we raise here at the home studio.
We're not self-sustaining yet, but we're trying.
Who am I?
I am
Julie
Mullin. I received a BFA in illustration and graphic design from the
University of Missouri in Columbia in 1980. In 1983 I began designing
and constructing pictorial quilts made from recycled fabric items and
scraps. Then in 1993, I opened
Fiberactive,
offering custom quilts, art quilts, machine quilting, and antique quilt
restoration.
As an illustrator, I have created a series of continuous line quilting designs entitled Earthlines, which I publish and sell.
I teach and lecture locally and across the country. I have been featured in international quilting publications and appeared on television, several times, both locally and nationally. Fiberactive has been featured in magazines such as Natural Home, Textile Intelligence and QuiltMaker. This spring and summer we will be featured in Vogue Sewing, Better Homes and Gardens Decorating, and Green Business Quarterly.
This summer, my husband and I will celebrate our 25th anniversary. I have two babies, my son Geoff (15) and Fiberactive. Both 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.
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