As part of Sustainable Fashion Week 2026, the AK Bell Library is proud to present two Craft Films about sustainable fashion, community engagement and heritage crafts. Woman Grows Jeans and Two Miles Squared share a fascinating insight into the world of small-scale, community-produced fashion and the emergence of heritage skills that have been (almost) forgotten.

Suitable for ages 13 and over. Tickets are available online through Eventbrite.

In the industrial heartland of British textiles, a community sets out to do something unprecedented – grow jeans from scratch. With hopes of helping regenerate harmful fashion systems, they begin planting flax and indigo, spinning yarn, and weaving cloth. When the dream of bringing them to market falters, the challenge of creating a prototype is taken on by Justine Aldersey-Williams, transforming the experiment into a personal rite of passage. What unfolds is a tender, radical act of reconnection: to land, lineage, lost skills, and the ‘more-than-human’ world. Woman Grows Jeans explores what it really means to rewild our world, our wardrobes and ourselves. At once a protest and a prayer, this is slow fashion as provocation – sown by hand, infused with love, and stitched with hope. For anyone who’s ever wondered if a different future is possible, this pioneering story shows that the power to create change is still in our hands.

Two Miles Squared is the story of rediscovering one of Scotland’s most important historic crops and exploring whether it could once again thrive in Perthshire. For centuries, flax was a cornerstone of the economy across eastern Scotland, particularly in Angus, Fife and Perthshire, with the Blairgowrie area playing a significant role in flax cultivation and linen production.

The project set out to investigate whether flax could be grown and processed locally in the modern day. Working alongside PlusPerth, UNESCO Perth City of Craft and archaeobotanist Seona Anderson, Alex Effinger from Culture Perth and Kinross followed the crop’s journey from field to fibre, demonstrating traditional techniques such as scutching and hackling to transform harvested flax into usable fibres.

The project has shown that flax can be successfully grown organically in today’s climate and processed locally using historic methods. The resulting fibres were used to create a beautiful natural fabric apron, bringing Scotland’s flax-growing heritage full circle while highlighting the potential for this sustainable material to play a role in contemporary making, mending and repair.