Woman grows her own dress from flax in Vermont backyard, rejecting fast fashion

A Vermont woman is challenging the fast-fashion industry by growing her own dress from scratch. Eve Ogden Schaub began the project in April 2025, converting a roughly 600 sq ft vegetable garden into a plot for growing flax, the plant used to make linen.

Schaub has already harvested two flax crops and is learning the traditional steps of turning the plant into fibre: retting, breaking, scutching and hackling, followed by spinning and scouring the yarn. She plans to dye the finished yarn eventually, and is growing indigo plants for that purpose. Family and friends have occasionally helped with the labour-intensive process.

From seed to garment

Once spun into linen yarn, Schaub intends to weave the fabric on a large loom and then cut and sew it into a dress, working from historical dress patterns with the help of an experienced friend. Her own sewing background, she admits, extends only to making Halloween costumes.

Schaub, who describes herself as a "fibre-person and maker", has previously written books documenting other family lifestyle experiments, including a year without sugar and a year without producing rubbish. The zero-waste project, she says, made her more aware of the synthetic and plastic materials hidden in everyday clothing.

Through the flax-to-dress project, Schaub hopes to draw attention to the wider consequences of fast fashion, including poor pay and conditions for garment workers abroad. She says many followers on social media have told her the project helped them understand why cloth was historically such a valuable and expensive commodity.

Schaub cannot say when the project will be finished, but she has promised that she will eventually wear the finished garment, adding that it will hold deep personal meaning for her regardless of how it turns out.