- So Brenda what do you think
about all this flax to linen stuff? - Awesome.
- It is lovely, isn't it? - It's the best thing! It's cool to wear
it absorbs beautifully and it ages well. Just like us. - Just like us. - But why is it so expensive? - Well, I think we're going to show people how, and why it is so expensive. - Good plan - Because this is the end result. This is where flat changes its name to linen. - The magic! Right here.
- Right here! This is flax, that's linen! - Let's start the story at the beginning with the
project group that made it happen. - The Flax to Linen Project began in 2010 in association with
the programme Transition Victoria. A diverse group in victoria who were concerned for the environment, we came together to revisit an ancient process. We succeeded in growing flax locally and processing it into linen fabric. The project was originally conceived as a re-skilling effort, to engage people of all ages in recapturing useful skills from the past in
preparation for a future of energy conservation. We began by raising experimental plots in our own backyards and allotments, to test the feasibility of the project. Sparked by the dynamic passion of Denise Dunn,
a group researched the possibility of growing and
processing flax, as well as educating and building community. In 2012 we took on the mammoth project
of growing and harvesting half an acre of flax in honour of Denise who died in 2011. Here is what we've learned. - Why don't we show everybody where it all starts
with the planting. - Flax needs quite a good fertility but not overly so.
It doesn't need a lot of compost. It's usually planted in a field with oats. The seed is sewn quite densely to get good coverage. -We don't want to give them too much
room or they'll get all branched out. We want them tall and straight. After they're planted,
we tuck them into their little bed. - Mash them into the soil, so they have
good contact and they can stay damp. -So we water them and wait for
them to grow. And there they are growing! And growing! And oh, there are weeds in there too.
I guess we should take the weeds out. - When the flax plant is between four to
six inches then it is a good time to weed because they are resilient enough to
handle a little bit of mucking about with. - Eventually, they develop enough to have flowers. - And what beautiful flowers they are. -To see a whole field of them is quite wonderful. But the flowers only last for a short while.
When one flower's gone there bloom's a new one. The whole plant will mature in about 90 days. But how do you tell when it's ready to harvest? -Ah it depends what you want to harvest. Do you want to harvest the seed?
Do you want to harvest for fibre? You have to pull up the flax plant at different points depending on what you want it for. - We're looking for fibre.
- For fibre, we want a fairly young plant. - When about a third of the
plant is looking dry and brown, - then we need to pull it. You don't need to worry about the seed heads being developed at that point because you're just pulling for the stalks, you're not pulling for seeds. - Of course, you'd want to leave some of the crop so that
it'll mature for the seeds for next year. - Each seed head contains about 20 seeds, so you don't need to leave a lot for next year because there's
quite a bit of seed that grows on each plant. - We harvested very delicately by harvest pulling up a handful each. I'm sure there are people who do this by pulling out huge armfuls at a time
so that they can set them in the field to dry. The root system is pretty shallow so pulling
up the plants is very easy. - You can see how little root there is when you look at my hand
as I'm pulling up. My hand is right where the roots would start in
the ground. They are very shallow but very tough. We tried with a scythe and the
scythe could not get through the flat stalks so we had to
pull everything up by hand. - Then we bundled them together so they
wouldn't be falling apart all over the place, and put them in the field to dry, in lovely
little stooks - Isn't that a lovely sight
- It is But there's a whole lot of
seed heads at the top of that. Even though they're not mature,
we're going to have to remove them. There's a special tool called a rippler and there it is.
That's an ancient one. You take a handful of the flax and you pull it through
the rippler and that pulls the seed heads off. Oh like popcorn! How do we separate these seeds from all that chaff? - We separate the seeds from the chaff, by various methods. Stomping on it is a good way of doing it. Bundling up the seeds in a sheet and doing a dance on it works well. A rolling pin also works well Then, of course, good old traditional winnowing where we're
throwing the seeds up from a basket and letting the wind take away the chaff. There's many ways of getting getting right to the seed. - Once we have all the seed heads off and
these plants are very dry we will want to do the next step which is to start rotting or
retting it. We made a little pond.
We didn't have a stream or a pond handy so we made our own. And uh the flax will be put into it. Then you have to wait it down,
it keeps trying to want to float away. There it is in action. it sometimes looks bubbly and fermenting towards the end. This usually doesn't take very long,
probably less than a week. How do you know when it's ready? - You know when the stalks of flax are ready for the next process if you bend them and you can see the fibres. - Fibres grow on the outside of that stem.
I always thought they were in the middle, but they're on the outside. If you bend them and these fibres come away,
you're good. If the whole thing just bends,
then you better keep retting. - Unfortunately, if it breaks you've retted too much.
The enzymes have degraded the fibers inside So it's always good to
check each day especially when you're doing pond retting
because that happens much more quickly than due retting. Check each day and make sure that those
fibers are coming out and the boon is releasing those fibres that are bundled in the middle. Pond retting is an anaerobic process
where the fibre is completely underwater and the enzymes from the flax produce a
chemical that helps break down the boon. Dew retting takes much longer.
It can take up to four to five weeks and the flax is laid flat on the ground, usually
in April, and the dew or rain or both does the same enzyme action where it breaks
down the boon but it happens much more slowly. - The part that's laying on the grass
is going to get more moisture than the upper part that is wind and sun-dried. So this whole thing has to be flipped over with a stick. You can flip it weekly until the
fibres will come away from the boon. We don't need to check this one every day. It takes long enough that we're pretty safe
to leave it quite a few days in between. There's less smell and there's no toxic
water produced. - The environment re recovers quite quickly after this process. It does take more space.
It does take more time. But we found it a very good
method for retting the flax. Then you need to gather it up again into hand-sized bundles, tying it up again for storage and drying. There is some practice required in doing this and if you're taking the green plants taking some of the skinnier ones to tie up the bundle was helpful. Once it's dried it's a little bit more difficult. So we've got the whole thing ready for the big
long processes of stooking them up from drying. - Stooking up really helps the airflow
going through all the bundles of flax. In that way, they dry much more evenly,
besides looking gorgeous! - This machine is a break. It breaks up the stem so that they can fall away from the fibres. The root is kind of a hard
one to crunch through. And the wispy tip where the seed bolls are,
sometimes don't break away nicely. - This is a tool that we have found in
pictures from so many cultures for millennia this is the kind of tool that's used for breaking flax. And it hasn't changed much
because it just is this is what works best. - We found out how very weather dependent
the flax is. Because if this is a damp day, breaking doesn't do a good job. On the perfect day, the sound of the crunch of the breaking boon in that contraption is very satisfying. - Oh nice and crunchy!
- Dusty! Once it's nicely broken by the break,
we can take it to the next step which is the sketching board. This is a lovely old sketching knife
used to scrape away more of the boon. - We need to scratch because this helps
soften the fibres as well as release much more of the boon on the bundle of fibres
that we're working with - that we're processing. It just helps all of those little
bundles from each stalk coalesce more into a fibre mass as opposed to a woody mass. Rubbing that bundle of flax together,
just to release more of the bone. The more you can get rid of now, as in every process,
the better job you do the easier the next step is. - The more careful you are and the better you
do step one, the better and easier step two is all the way through the
process. As soon as you pull the plants up from the field keep those roots together. The more boon you're able to remove through the break, and the scutching, and the manipulation, the better and easier your next steps are going to be. After one has been scutching till the fibres are
looking pretty good, you can take it to the next step which is hackling. This is a bed of very sharp nails and we can pull the bundle of fibres through. Notice how carefully the hand is holding onto those fibres. You don't want to lose all of them in the hackling so you hold
on to one end really tightly. Then you can turn it around
and hold on to the other end. You get rid of all of the shorter fibres
and you have a handful of the longer fibres. Eventually, you'll take those to finer and finer nails and get a long line
that is strong and long and ready for spinning. After the first pass through and getting
the longest fibres, one can go back and take a second length of fibres away
from the hackles and maybe even a third. So that they're still long line
but not as long as the first pass through. Eventually, you're left with the little
short stubby bits and that is called tow. When you get to the tow fibres,
you can give them treatment with hand cards and spin it rather like wool
because they're shorter fibers. For the long ones, you'll want to have
something to control them there's just no way you can hold a handful of those long fibres. This is my method of getting all
the fibres ready for a distaff. As Hazel Murray says,
"Make sure you go to the bathroom first. This could take a while" I tied the tops of all of those to my waist, and then spread it as thinly as
possible in a big fan in front of you. And if there's a handful left,
you spread it very thinly the other direction. Until you have a mass of
crisscrossed fibres in front of you. Eventually when that's ready,
you can roll it up on the distaff and set the distaff near your wheel. You probably want to tie those
onto the top with ribbon. It looks pretty and it keeps the
wind from taking it all away. But if you don't have a distaff,
there is another way of preparing the fibres for spinning. - After you finish the hackling process,
you have a lovely bundle of flax that is straight and you'd
like to keep it that way. To do so, I roll it in a linen towel that keeps all
the fibers in one bundle going all the same way. I use water to spin the flax fibres because
it helps them stick together it activates the pectins in it and you get a much smoother thread
when you spin with water. It's a good idea to have a towel on your lap as well,
as the water tends to go everywhere. As I spin I'm very mindful of the number of fibres and consistency of the thread. Flax has a very long staple,
so it does not need much twist. You can treadle very slowly with the
thread being fed onto the bobbin much more quickly. Once you have a bobbin or few ready for
the next step you need to start scouring. Just put equal amounts of borax and dish soap in
a big pan of water. Simmer for an hour
and you will notice that the water becomes coffee-coloured. It is a real shock the very first time you do it. Scouring takes the rest of the pectin out of the thread,
and makes it ready for the next process. Whether that's weaving knitting or anything else
you'd like to do with it. You keep on changing the water
and adding more borax a dish soap. You keep doing this until the water is clear. And then one more good hour simmering
with just clean water to rinse. The more pectin that is released from the linen,
the softer and wider it becomes. This also opens up the cells in the thread,
to make it ready for dyeing. - They say it's really hard to work with linen and
that's partially correct. Here are a few qualities that might help you with working with Linen. It's a long lustrous fibre. It wrinkles easily. So if you have a piece of linen that you're treasuring don't fold it.
Roll it The fibres will break with repeated bending
and this wrinkling bending part is something that you can see right from the plant
that it's not going to straighten up all on its own. It shrinks less than cotton
and is more absorbent than cotton. It gives up dirt easily.
It dries quickly. And it's a pretty strong fibre in all.
It increases in strength when it's wet. The opposite of wool,
When wool is wet it is much weaker. Flax is stronger. It's the strongest natural fibre in common use,
so it can be recommended for upholstery. It has no elasticity. That helps ensure that the fabrics and garments
retain their shape. But it's really hard to work with if you want it to stretch because it doesn't. It has excellent resistance to degradation by heat
so it may be ironed with a hot, hot iron. And it's not affected by sunlight. Some of the things I have learned
when weaving with linen. It's really important to get every thread in
your warp the same tension as every other thread. So when I was taught it was,
taking a small bunch of fibres and making sure each thread within that bunch is the same tension, and then tying a knot. Work away across the loom and then lash all of those bunches onto your front beam so that you can adjust and make sure that everybody is the same tension in there Weaving with wet bobbins or wet thread on your bobbins. I was weaving along and finding out that
my salvages were awfully bumpy and awful. I wet the bobbins and immediately the selvedge
improved. The wet fibre will bend more easily around the corners of those salvages. Dampening the warp if you need to. I know if someone who said she had woven a
couple of ten yard warps in linen, no problem. No problems at all what's the big deal? Until her third warp when threads started breaking all over the place. And she noticed this time she had the fireplace on. Humidity! If you have to dampen your warp
you can use a cat sprayer or paint with water that's at the back of the loom behind the heddles. or maybe even set a humidifier underneath the back of your loom to keep the threads moist enough so that they have the extra strength to be woven. - Of all the process we've shown there's many
more ways and as we've demonstrated,
we've been approached by many people from different cultures They said well my auntie used to do it this way. So there's great joy in doing research
and experimentation with flax to linen. oh thank you thank you thank you thank you
