Invasive Species Embroidery Kits - (NY)

Learn invasive species and stab them before they stab you. 🔪

Daylily is one of our most divisive invasives. Beloved by many for its beautiful summer color, this "ditch lily" invades damp and wet habitats and displaces native wood lilies and wild ginger. It's a real menace to remove, and aggressively returns via thick (edible!) tubers and spreads by people tossing plants from their gardens into nearby ditches. Celebrate your victories against the tuberous masses with this daylily badge!

Garlic mustard is a favorite find amongst a certain crowd, who love its spicy early-spring bitterness. It's also a terrible invasive species that emits alleopathic chemicals strangling out our native spring ephemerals in damp forest underbrush! Celebrate springtime by yanking it up and letting it shrivel in the sun, or enjoy it as a fresh foraged snack!

Ah Japanese Barberry, one of the worst invasives at Flax Fiber Farm. Woody and aggressive, with sneaky thorns that make it impossible to grab and pull by hand, this plant is an ideal habitat for lyme disease-carrying ticks and spreads so widely that it crowds out native friends. (Kits in Green or Purple)

Multiflora Rose is a rogue by any name, but earned the epithet *trash rose* on our farm after we spotted it climbing up into our wild apple trees. With long, arching brambles covered in evil hooked thorns, it takes over, giving you one wild week of blooms before producing a million seeds and choking out all you hold dear in its overwhelming tangle. 

Stab your own badge. Embroider a 3" badge with New York state wool felt and naturally-dyed wool embroidery floss, all tidily packaged in a recycled & recyclable envelope. Also contains biodegradable cellulose sequins, nickel-free needles and an instruction booklet for both embroidering the badge and managing barberry in your life!

Natural Dyes

This embroidery kit contains naturally-dyed wool embroidery floss. Natural dyes are not as light-fast or enduring as synthetic petroleum or coal-based dyes, which means on the one hand that they’re not poisoning the earth… but on the other hand, they are more prone to fading, especially if you display your piece in bright sunlight. UV protective glass can help, if you frame your piece, but it’s also important to remember that hey, you made this one. You can also make another if the colors one day fade! Change comes for us all, even this little woolen patch. 

If you sew your patch to a garment, please keep in mind that you’ve now turned that garment into something hand-wash only. It’ll need delicate care to not continue to felt once it’s sewn onto a garment you’re washing frequently. Please do NOT use an enzyme-based cleaner, it will degrade the wool over time!