JOINT VENTURE

Alex Benady Meets The Woman Who Has Won A Scholarship To Develop Her
Interest In Cannabis

As the heavy sweet smell in the corridor of any hall of residence will
testify, many students are more than happy to invest considerable
amounts of their own time and money in exhaustive private study of
hemp and its properties.

Not so Louisa Wood, a freelance fabric weaver from Southampton, who
last week persuaded the Queen Elizabeth trust to part with A33,000 in
the form of a scholarship to finance a month-long trip to the Chinese
province of Yunnan, where she plans to study hemp production first-hand.

Her interest, needless to say, lies not in the weed's psychotropic
properties, but in its potential as an up-market designer textile. On
her return, she will spend three months putting together an
experimental hand-woven collection of hemp fabrics.

Within a few years, she hopes to have single-handedly revived the long
since defunct British hemp weaving industry, and to be churning out
hemp pashminas, scarves and gorgeous hemp fabrics of every variety.

Her initiative has drawn applause from the fashion world. "About time
too," says Bryony Toogood, fashion editor of Cosompolitan magazine.

"Hemp is so bloody hippy dippy and boring. Political correctness is
not a consumer proposition, so any attempts to make hemp beautiful
have got to be welcome."

But before Wood gets into swanky fabrics and the absolutely fabulous
world of haute couture, she needs to learn all the mucky details of
how to actually manufacture hemp yarn from raw materials.

Specifically, she hopes to find out from her Chinese mentors precisely
how hemp fibres should be handled to get the best out of them. "There
are many technical issues involved in producing a material. You need
to gum and wax the fibres to weave them and then remove some, or all,
of it. Silk, for instance, needs to be degummed in boiling water. How
do you treat hemp? No one knows in the UK," says Wood.

She has worked as a fabric designer since leaving the Royal College of
Art five years ago. She first encountered hemp as a fabric in 1997,
while working as a textile designer for an American firm in Hong Kong.

"I happened to visit a Chinese factory and saw them making hemp
fabrics for jeans and T-shirts. I thought, immediately, this is going
to be a trend and how interesting it would be to do something more
creative with it."

Her enthusiasm grew when she realised that hemp also has impeccable
environmental credentials. "It's an amazing fabric. The plant grows
very fast in poor soils and, unlike cotton, where the fibres are often
only an inch long, the fibres are up to seven feet long, which makes
them very strong. This means that insects can't eat it and it doesn't
need fertilisers or insecticides."

Hemp fabric is also extremely practical. "It is three times as
absorbent as cotton. It is very soft, it has the drape of linen, but
it's much easier to iron," she enthuses.

In short Wood wants to reclaim hemp from its primary twentieth century
associations as a recreational drug. The cannabis variety indica, used
to make yarn, is legal in most countries because it has only a
fraction of the THC (the active ingredient) of the more potent
Cannabis sativa. "You would have to smoke a joint the size of a
telegraph pole to get any kind of effect," she jokes.

Historically hemp in the west was a just a workaday source of yarn.
"The American Constitution was written on hemp. And for centuries hemp
was an important part of our domestic culture, used in the manufacture
of sail cloth and ropes," she says. But the result of hemp first being
displaced by cotton and then being associated with narcotics was that
gradually the craft skills associated with the production of hemp yarn
and manufacture died out. "The hemp fibre only disappeared 100 years
ago, after being used as a staple for cloth for the previous 4,000
years. Now we have to relearn all those skills," explains Wood.

With such obvious enthusiasm it's easy to see why The Queen Elizabeth
Trust, which specialises in helping people develop craft skills which
will contribute to the UK pool of talent, was so taken with Wood's
application. And before you ask, yes, she was at art school, but no
she didn't inhale.