Going Green

Our work is heavily influenced by Jane Morris, Elizabeth Burden, and John Ruskin in style but more importantly in principles: craft, art, nature, and social ethics inform all our decisions. People can hardly make art when they are struggling to survive, so we pay a living wage and fight for a better, kinder world with donations, time off to vote, petitions, protests, and an eye to sustainability in everything we do.

Wool roving dyed with locally-sourced, sustainably-harvested mushrooms, lichens, and plants in preparation for a sweater. 

 

AI

We are staunchly anti-AI for the theft it commits against humans and the enormous amount of resources it wastes in order to generate mediocrity. It's an insult to us all. Here are some of the ways we fight it:

-We specifically disallow 'agentic' (AI) sales channels, even though it throttles our traffic

-Our chat is human-only (so please forgive slow responses! Sometimes humans sleep) 

-We've edited our website code to make it more difficult for our work to be stolen by AI bots, though nothing's foolproof.

-We never willingly use AI either on our website or in our studio. Or in daily life. We've switched to a browser that doesn't force it on us when we browse the web, either.

Every word of copy on our website was written by me, a human being. Every picture was taken by a human.  Every embroidered stitch was made by a human, too.  If you've got another way to resist the endless onslaught of mindless garbage that is AI, please let us know so we can check it out. Thanks for coming here and supporting me in developing and teaching my craft, rather than settling for a soulless copy. It's appreciated more than you know - thanks. Insisting on purchasing from real artists and craftsmen is a fantastic way to rebel against this exploitation.

Remember, they wanted us to think the divine right of kings was inescapable, too. (Paraphrased from the great Ursula Le Guin). 

 

Trees Planted

Every year, we plant trees through the National Forest Foundation to reforest after wildfires, aid in carbon sequestration, and provide habitat for at-risk species. We plant at least a hundred trees yearly. Our trees have sequestered more carbon than we could ever produce, making us not carbon-neutral but actively carbon-negative, meaning Broiderie Stitch is actually making the world a cooler place. So far (November 2026), we’ve planted 1,000 trees!

 

Every year a little greener

 Recyclable/Biodegradable Packaging

Our boxes, envelopes, business cards, and unbleached kraft paper wrappers are all fully curbside-recyclable. Depending on your local recycling plant, they may or may not take tissue paper; if they do, great! Ours is compostable, so even if they don’t you can always put it in your compost bin as well as the little bow we tie your order up with, which is raffia, a compostable fiber as well.

 Reducing Studio Waste

Waste not, want not – and we do produce some waste knots and snips of thread stitching up orders. Whenever our snips teacup is full, we wrap up the snips to form the center of a new temari ball. Temari have been wrapped around scraps of cloth, thread, or rice hulls for hundreds of years, so this small but beautiful measure of sustainability has a long cultural background.

We buy our linen by the bolt from Ireland and cut it to have just a narrow strip of selvedge left over from a batch of hankies. It’s too good to throw away, so when we have a basket full, we dye them and quilt them together to make other articles.

 

About time for another temari - the snips cup is nearly full

Green Energy

After years of work and hardship, uncertainly and adventure, our off-grid, solar powered studio is nearly finished and liveable! The electricity is now generated by a series of 18 solar panels mounted to the roof and stored in a set of LiFePo batteries so I can stitch even when the sun's down. 

We heat with an energy-efficient wood stove (using wood culled on-site as we work to improve our forest, or bought locally from a neighbor who also manages his woodlot regeneratively).

 

Off-Grid Punk

Being off-grid has certainly opened up - and sometimes, necessitated - more sustainable living. From the solar array to the compost pile that fuels the veggie bed, from using local lumber and skill in building to planting a field of native wildflowers to recapture nutrients and promote biodiversity instead of grass, I do my best to follow the tenets of these craftsmen and activists in building a better, more beautiful world. - sometimes, one stitch at a time.