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 making napkins

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.  My hand has recovered over time and although I still don’t have fine motor skills, I have been able to design all kinds of new stuff.

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.  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 their moms.  I get to be everybody’s grandma!

I can’t take the time to teach English any more, the girls go to English class on Sunday mornings at St. Paul’s Christian Church where we are all members.  Lutheran Family Services is also providing an ESL teacher to come to the studio and have a weekly class.  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.

In the spring of 2009 I founded the Montagnard Community Garden St Paul’s Christian Church, 3331 Blue Ridge Rd, Raleigh.  Check out the Garden Journal in our blog.   That summer four wonderful interns from the Fashion Design school of NC State Univ. joined us.  They designed children’s clothing and taught the Montagnard women how to make them.

Fabric vessels made a big splash in the holiday season of 2009.  Tuat and Klum wrapped miles of cording and Jum and I made vessels till we couldn’t see straight.  We participated in several holiday fair trade markets in churches around Raleigh and Chapel Hill.  Jum loves to do markets and though she’s not confident about making sales on her own, she does her best to converse with the shoppers – she’s very charming!   We sold so many vessels we sometimes had to go back to the studio after a full day of work to make more so we’d have something to sell the next day.

At the urging of my friend Jane Hillhouse, I expanded the line of vessels to include cremation urns.  Jane owns Final Footprint, a company that sells bio-degradable caskets for those who want to have a natural burial.  I became so enthusiastic about natural burial that that I began designing organic cotton shrouds, bio-degradable urns, casket quilts and pillows.  And I opened a new division of Fiberactive Organics called Earth to Earth Burial (www.earthtoearthburial.com).  My burial products now sell across the country.  There’s something really wonderful about making something so prescious as a shroud or urn.  As I stitch I try to impress each stitch with love and peace.

2010 has been a tough year for everybody and we saw our retailers shutting their doors all over America.  Needless to say our sales slumped miserably, but God sent us new projects.  We are now making organic cotton futons, bumper pads and a host of accessories for Moses Baskets sold by a lovely little company called Mommas Baby (www.mommasbaby.com).  It’s owned by Lori Helman and she has the same ideas about business, the earth and social responsibility as I do.  So we’re working well together.

Early this summer I got a call from one of my interns from last year.  Kendal Leonard had graduated with an education in fashion design and marketing, she missed seeing the Montagnard kids, and she wasn’t doing anything in particular.  So I asked her to work with us to create a line of organic cotton clothing.  Kendal is a young power-house and has proved to be adept at just about anything I ask her to do.  She has designed garments for men, women and children, as well as numerous products for Mommas Baby.  She even models for me, you’ll see her dotted throughout the web site.

I’m getting back to my roots in quilting and making organic cotton quilts for a wonderful interior design studio in Florida called Avisa Organics (www.avisaorganic.com) owned by Marci Navaro.  We’re starting with whole-cloth quilts featuring quilting designs that I’ve created just for Marci.

What’s next?  Colored thread!  My counterpart at YLI discovered a spinner in Holland that is making a wonderful organic cotton thread in an array of colors.  We have become their North American distributor and hope to bring the thread to market in the next few weeks.

Nitty-Gritty

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 studio.

My second mission is to provide work for those who would otherwise be unemployed.  Six Montagnard women now work with me at different times.  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.

My “business model” (I always chuckle when I call it that) is to create products for the skill level of each of my refugee women so that they can be productive and earn money from the time they arrive here from the jungle.  I keep them moving up the learning curve at their own pace, designing new products that help expand their abilities but don’t press them beyond their limitations.  My aim is to employ, educate and empower.

Who Am I?

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.

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 Fiberactive.

Combining my love for illustration and quilting, 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 I’ve appeared on television several times, both locally and nationally.  Fiberactive’s 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 (19) 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.