Alison Garwood Jones

This is the Squill Pillow I designed and began selling last year from my Toronto Studio, PenJarProductions. 🎨

It’s squill season in Ontario and the ravines in Toronto are carpets of purple. The arrival of Spring flowers and beer on patios 🍺 are two phenomena that make grown Cannadians squeal like children in line at an ice cream truck. 🍦 

Now the beer and the flower designs are on hold. 🛑 

Three weeks before we went into Covid lockdown, the wonderful printer who was making and shipping my squill design on pillows shut down after 15-plus years in business. It was due, in part, to the effect of globalization on Canadian companies. 

Talk about local, they were up the street from me! 🏠 🚌

It was a dream while it lasted. 🌞 #ThanksFriends

But there’s hope: this pandemic may be the ass kicking we needed to rethink the global economy and change who we buy from and how we work. 

If we went into this pandemic listening hard to the words of Greta Thunberg,🇳🇴 maybe we’ll emerge from it with a new commitment to reviving #MadeInCanada. #ThinkLocal 🇨🇦

Globalization’s far-flung supply chains have been giving artists and creative entrepreneurs, like me, next to no affordable local options to source blank T-shirts and home decor fabrics. In the last 50 years, the textile industry in Canada has pretty much shut down and moved offshore to India, Indonesia and China. 

But now the provinces are procuring products and services for surgical masks and gowns from hundreds of innovative small and medium-sized Canadian businesses to help reduce the spread of Covid-19. Let’s extend that self-reliance to the time when we’re past this health crisis. Let’s bring the supply chains home. 

If anyone hears of a Toronto-based or Canadian fabric printer who is ethically and sustainably sourcing their supplies within Canada, DM moi, please! I’m looking for a new partner. 

I want to be part of a new solution.

~ Not The End ~