FROM SHIRT TO DIRT
BLACK FRIDAY EDITION
Hi again, Earthworms!
It’s Black Friday—scroll down for treasures, everything is 20% off today (and all weekend)!
This edition of The Specimen Monthly is about our friend Cass Marketos. If you don’t know who she is, then you’re in for a real treat! If you’ve landed here via Cass and don’t know who we are, The Specimen Monthly is a reader-supported rag made by Cactus Store Studio and Nonhuman Teachers 501(c)(3). It’s where we share our thoughts and feelings, and updates from our studio in Los Angeles.
Yours,
CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers
QUICK UPDATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS
1.) New clothes just dropped! Get your great aunt the t-shirt she never knew she wanted for Christmas.
2.) Black Friday sale is live: 20% OFF the whole dang lot, discount taken at checkout.
3.) Our Holiday Party Lot Sale is Dec 7th & 8th in LA. Gifts galore, we are breaking out the good stuff for this! 3209 Fletcher Dr. 11a-3pm.
SPEAKING OF TABLE SCRAPS…
Cass Marketos is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles who works at the intersection of creative practice and decomposition. She’s the author of Compost This Book (Apogee, 2023), writes a newsletter about composting called The Rot, and has experimented with composting not just her table scraps but also parts of her body, her memories, and even pieces of the Berlin Wall.
A few months ago, we approached Cass about collaborating on a shirt with us. Since then, she’s been modifying fabrics using the microbes in her compost heaps, and the results have been incredible (scroll down to see). But, as it turns out, microbes aren’t so easy to train. For example, Cass might check on a shirt in the morning that’s fully intact, only to find it brittle as wet graham crackers by sundown, while another shirt in the same pile for the same duration shows no noticeable changes. With so many variables at play, there’s an element of Cass’ peculiar connection with her piles—almost psychic transmission—that has made this process a wonder to witness.
In the first chapter of a book Cass recommended to us (Parallel Minds by Laura Tripaldi), the author discusses the influence woven fabrics have had on human civilization—an influence that’s impossible to measure, given that organic fabrics don’t survive as long as, say, Neolithic stone axes. Tripaldi then makes the curious observation that the success of human civilization going forward may well depend on our ability to make our material traces disappear, much like natural fabrics have over time. For some, it’s counterintuitive to imagine that the greatness of a civilization would depend more on its ability to leave no evidence than on its Parthenons and pyramids. But for Cass, someone who spends her days thinking about and participating in decomposition… it’s all dust to dust.
Getting her start as a precocious young person working at the White House in climate conservation for the Obama administration, Cass witnessed firsthand the impact grassroots citizen science can have on real-world issues, and she’s been elbows-deep in grass roots and table scraps ever since.
Caveats: This is Cass’ first foray into composting commercially produced fabrics, which means soil testing still needs to happen to determine if, and to what degree, bacteria and fungi can remediate inorganic compounds from industrial chemical dye processes. We’ll share those results as soon as we have them, so stay tuned.
As for the dyes in these tees, after experimenting with various blanks and researching different materials, Cass settled on Everybody.World as the best option due to their hyper-local supply chain, plastic-free cotton, and utilization of very low-impact dyes. Their shirts, unlike others she experimented with, also maintained their structural integrity in the pile, even as microbes modified colors and textures. Here’s a blurb from Everybody.World’s about page:
Since 2016, Everybody.World has diverted over 640,000 lbs of cotton waste from landfill into mindful basics, in pursuit of making the world work for all of humanity. We believe this sustainable transformation of trash into world-first 100% Reclaimed Waste Cotton has the potential to change the industry’s status quo.
As part of this project, we asked Cass to draft a guide detailing how one might turn their own shirts into soil. That text is included below. However, if you decide to try it for yourself, please don’t grow veggies in composted shirt dirt without proper soil testing first.
Finally, this is an ongoing project that we plan to revisit as things develop—including some cotton seeds that we planted in Cass’ composted shirt dirt. Who knows—maybe we’ll even make shirts from the cotton! In the meantime, follow Cass’ Substack, The Rot. It’s wonderful.
FROM SHIRT TO DIRT
By Cass Marketos
Any compost is a balance of four key components:
High-carbon materials
High-nitrogen materials
Moisture
Oxygen
High-carbon materials come from things like dried-out leaves and old sticks, sawdust, cardboard, paper products, and even cotton fabric.
High-nitrogen materials are food scraps or manure, fresh green grass, and coffee grounds as well. Moisture comes from rain or a hose. Oxygen comes from creating airflow, either passively (by building a pile with bulky materials mixed throughout) or actively (by turning with a shovel).
Your compost pile will need to be built from 2 parts high-carbon material, 1 part high-nitrogen material, with sufficient aeration, and moistened to the point that the entirety is damp to the touch.
Composting your clothing
Cotton fabric is 20–30 parts carbon per 1 part nitrogen, on average, depending on how the cotton is grown and processed. This will suffice as part of a high-carbon input for a pile, although you will need more and more variant material that is high in carbon in order to ensure a successful rate of decomposition.
Here’s what you need to do:
Build a compost pile using the principles above. You may also access an existing one.
Take your piece of clothing, once it has reached its end of life.
Shred it into small pieces. Scissors may be required.
Thoroughly moisten each scrap.
Incorporate them into the pile as you build, making sure that they reside at the bottom-middle of your compost. If you are accessing an existing compost, open the pile-up and make sure to bury the scraps deep within.
Wait.
The cotton fabric is sturdy and will take time to fully break down. It will decompose more quickly in a hot pile than a cool one, but both conditions will eventually result in full bio-degradation.
Please note: these shirts are dyed using a low-chemical process, the ingredients of which are acetic acid, table salt, soda ash, and dye pigment. Thus, it may be best to utilize any compost made with them on non-edible plants only. However, if you find yourself aghast at the idea of composting items containing these elements, I would invite you to explore the tension between the materials we produce and the ultimate inability to dispose of their components without contaminating the environment, however minimally. It’s an important tension, worthy of our collective focus and care.
Ingredients of compost:
Strawberries
Bok choy
Broccoli florets
Orange and lemon peels
Sawdust
Dried leaves
Twigs
Temperature at peak:
141°F
GIFTABLES
Eden:
When one of our designers picked up his laundry from the local fluff-n-fold he discovered a mix-up had occurred: instead of his clothes, his bag was filled with the random old duds of a stranger (including lots of weird old man polyester slacks and dingy worn-out underwear). Before returning the bag, he snapped a pic of one of the stranger’s tees, which inspired this design. Just goes to show how our lives ripple into the lives of strangers in unexpected ways.
From Shirt to Dirt (by Cass Marketos):
Shirts modified by microbes! 50% of proceeds from this tee go to the food justice nonprofit Seeds of Hope.
DISCLAIMER: “Modified by microbes” means that these tees have been partially digested by fungi and bacteria. In other words, they’ve got little holes and other imperfections and won’t last nearly as long as a brand-new shirt. This project is to support Seeds of Hope and to do something weird and cool that has never been done before with an artist we admire. Just so that’s clear!
Did you know that fungi can have up to 36,000 sexes? It’s true!
Never tango with a Mandragora officinarum aka Mandrake: a plant steeped in magic and mystery. Believed to scream when uprooted (killing all who heard it), mandrakes were said to grow from where the blood of hanged men dripped. To harvest one (trigger warning), tie a rope to a dog, attach it to the plant, and let the sacrificial pooch do the pulling. But once in your devious grasp, mandrakes make for powerful hexes, aphrodisiacs, and poisons.
Caution: This shirt may cause hallucinations, drowsiness, confusion, rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, dilated pupils, difficulty breathing, and excommunication.
A 1933 book about these South African graffito petroglyphs attributes them to herd boys carving pictures into stone the way today’s 13-year-olds carve bad words and sexual anatomy into school desks. A 1969 book claims they’re far older and that they played a role in local religious practices—used them for healing and other shamanic activities like out-of-body travel and controlling large game animals. Joe Rogan acolytes would probably say they’re the handiwork of space aliens. We prefer herd boy theory.
This is our third science fair tee, this time looking into organisms that, in one way or another, defy “death”.
Eating shit is more common than you think (don’t knock it ‘til you try it!). This tee is a tribute to the unsung bottom-feeders of our world who keep ecosystems tidy, one snack at a time. From dung beetles and bunny rabbits to gorillas and elephants, poop-eaters practice what’s known as dietary coprophagy, the act of consuming feces for nutrition, digestion, and recycling nutrients. Proops to the creatures who make the circle of life a little more circular.
Every year we make a greenhouse hoodie and tee for our beloved crew. Proceeds from this year’s design go to support our greenhouse operation in Los Angeles.
Edward Palmer (1829–1911) was a self-taught British botanist, early-American archaeologist and pioneering ethnobotanist. His plant collections shaped the archives of institutions like the Smithsonian, Harvard, and Kew Gardens.
This shirt comes from an unusual set of field notes Palmer kept during his trips to Mexico. They contain stark descriptions of plant scenes but are oddly devoid of actual plant names, making them hauntingly poetic. This one says:
“One plant prostrate with yellow flowers in a vacant lot.”
This tee is inspired by Louis Thomas Hardin, aka Moondog (1916–1999), a blind avant-garde composer who dressed like a Viking and, in the early seventies, wrote an anthem for nonhuman rights:
What about whale rights? What about snail rights?
What about seal rights? What about eel rights?
What about goat rights? What about stoat rights?
What about worm rights? What about germ rights?
etc.
Proceeds go to support Nonhuman Teachers 2025 Programming.
FIND NONHUMAN TEACHERS!
Thanks for reading The Specimen Monthly!