My "100% Australian wool" is "made in China". They shipped this stuff halfway around the world, spun it, dyed it, then shipped it back. Every time I see shit like this I'm reminded of how absurd it is that worldwide wage inequality makes this the most cost effective solution.
My country produces so much wool. It's one of our main industries. There is no practical reason why it's better to build the factories for cleaning and spinning and dying that wool in other countries, except to take advantage of worse environmental regulations and worse wages and worker's rights. In practical material terms it makes far, far more sense to build those facilities as close to the sheep farms as is practical, taking into account factory emissions, population (factories need workers) and storage options. This shit was dragged over the ocean twice for the sole specific reason of making it somewhat cheaper for me and letting four or five different types of middlemen pocket the money that was effectively stolen from the Chinese factory workers.
once I started seeing the world through this interpretation it was a lot easier to get into gardening, sewing, and reducing my capitalism-fueled impact on the planet and on people everywhere
I purchased this wool to make my own clothes with. It still went to China first.
grow your own sheep derin
My neighbour tried that, which is why I can tell you from experience that trying to raise sheep in a suburban backyard is a great way to make everyone else living on the block want to murder you in your sleep
A group of archeologists tried making a simple garment from wool by themselves, the entire process, using tools available to ancient humans. Obviously in many countries you can obtain tools to make that process easier, for instance you probably don't need to use a drop spindel, etc. It would have taken over 500 hours, not counting the labor of raising and maintaining sheep. They had to opt out of doing some of that labor/use modern tools because of how much it was. The cost of a simple garment without any adornment would have been tens of thousands of dollars. In today's age, you wouldn't have to do it the same way but understand that every component of every tool would also be made by some industry somewhere, and the more you cut out, the more time and back-breaking labor you introduce.
A big reason why our world looks like this is automation is expensive. To automate many processes you need big machines with a lot of people working them. Another problem is many industries require huge amounts of resources and means to distribute them. Only the rich can invest in this because clothing and feeding people is considered a profit opportunity instead of a public necessity. Instead of collectively pooling our money to produce things, some asshole who stole it from a lot of people gets to concentrate it and then use it to own industry.
So individuals who arent wealthy are disempowered because individually we have no means to create a lot of things we need every day. You individually could make every garment for yourself but you couldn't also have a job or any free time. You might be able to grow your own food but there's a reason no one wants to do that, because subsistence farming is terrible. Most individuals do not have the means or expertise to make or maintain certain objects they likely take for granted. You can't make a smart phone. You can't pretend you can manufacture a smart phone by yourself.
Pretending you can escape the exploitation of the world we live in by just doing everything yourself is absurd. In fact, it's something you shouldn't want to try, because not only does it not end exploitation, it just creates a less quality life for any invidual who tries it. Humans spent thousands of years looking for a way to avoid the extreme misery that endless hard labor to survive entailed, we dont need to bring that back. The problem isn't that you can't make a smart phone by yourself, it's that the people who made your smart phone are being abused and stolen from and enslaved, and people who are empowered by keeping things that way don't want to change it. Thats the problem that needs to be solved, not the fact that you can't make everything you own by yourself.
