Turning Flax into Linen

[Music] welcome to revolutionary gazette i'm will well thanks to our strategic partnership with our friends at alfam we've been able to meet eva mergen and her team here at colonial plantation in philadelphia and we're back and this evening let's talk about linen linen yes so linen was a very important fiber in the 18th century and it comes from the flax plant so this is flax that we grow here right on site um and uh we'll talk about how we use it great well i'm wearing linen give i find it very common at the shirts linen talk to me about where we would employ linen in the 18th century so linen is very absorbent it's very easy to wash and it's very durable so you're going to use it for clothing you wear next to your skin because you can scrub it boil it get it really nice and clean whereas wool if you tried to do that it would felt and shrink it's also really absorbent it absorbs moisture very easily which is why we use it for things like aprons towels and things like that it also helps keep us cool in the summertime because the absorbentness it will absorb sweat and when that sweat evaporates it's actually going to help cool us down and in the economy of the revolutionary war era a family can grow flax and make their own linen on their own farm yes in fact we probably would have been growing flax here in the 18th century because we've got a really ideal location we've got those low lands right next to the stream so it's going to be nice and wet flax likes wet ground cool springs all of which makes this a really ideal location well if you go down to your grain lot now you can actually see flax growing yes yes yep we planted our flax back in april and it will be harvested late june or early july talk to me about harvesting flowers okay so when you harvest flax it's not like other crops uh you're going to want to actually pull it out of the ground and that might sound hard but it's actually quite easy the roots let go easily but the reason for that is where the fibers are in this plant so the fire so this plant has a woody stem with fibers running up and down the outside and those fibers go all the way from the tip all the way to the end of the root so by pulling it you get the longest fibers possible great now how do we get the fiber out of that and turn it into a shirt or an apron okay so there are a bunch of steps you need to go through uh once it's harvested you're gonna set it in the field to dry uh once it's dry you're gonna do something called retting which is basically a controlled rotting process so how do we wrap flax so there's two different ways of reading you can do reddit which is basically laying it out on the on the field after you pull it and it's got a ref do rep for a couple of weeks it's a really easy process you don't need any special equipment you don't need to have a pond but a faster way to re is is is tank reading or pond reading and in that you will actually soak these stalks in water for a few days and they would have done it in a pond or a stream in the 18th century we do it here in a tank because we're in a state park and we've got to be careful about what we put into the water here but they would have they would have used the pond or a creek in the 18th century fantastic so when it's done reading you're holding something i assume you let it dry yep you get yep after it rhetts you're going to let it dry really really bone dry because if you don't let it dry well and you store it it's going to get moldy and it's going to damage the fiber the nice thing is is once it's ready it can be stored for a long time so again you're going to read it and then store it for a time of year when you don't have as much going on so you'll be harvesting in the summer but probably processing over the winter okay and in front of us these are processing tools yep these are all of our processing tools they're very different than the tools that you would use for wool um and i'll show you how the different tools work so this one in front of me is called a flax break and it's basically like a giant wooden pair of scissors wow the flax goes in here and what this does is this starts to break up that woody stem into smaller pieces rather violent yes this is not for the faint of heart so now we've gotten one end nicely done and we want to go through and do the other end because like i said those fibers go from end to end so you can see we've already changed this pretty significantly but you can see we've got a lot of pieces of woody stem stuck in there that we don't want in the finished product all right so talk to me about this next step okay so the next step is called sketching and i have a sketching knife which is basically a wooden knife and a sketching board so your sketching knife is basically scraping out i'm going to get you a little bit dirty there it's scraping out that those pieces of woody stem this is almost the flax version of separating the wheat from the chaff yes yes it's very similar and are we going to save any of this woody stuff that comes out of here not so much i mean you might you might collect it up and use it for fire starter but this is not our main byproduct of flax production that will come later in the toe okay so we've gotten a lot of that woody stem out the rest of it's going to come in the next step this is a hetchel that looks dangerous it is i i've drawn blood more than once what's the goal of it i assume drawing blood is not that is not the goal the the goal of this is a couple of things we want to remove whatever is left of the woody stem we also want to remove any short fibers that might be in here we talked about how flax is very durable and that comes from the length of the fibers so short fibers in there are going to mess with that so and then the last thing it's going to do is going to comb all those fibers out and start to soften them okay so we're going to put this through the hetchel and what you see collecting here this is our flax toe and right now flex w right now it's got a lot of woody stem in it this is fabulous fire starter okay you use this as tinder in your fires as we go along and it has less woody stem in it that toe is going to be used for rope flax rope is wonderful because it's durable when wet and then it'll also be used for sacking material sacking yeah so grain sacks any and storage sacs you can hear this you can hear it starting to run better yep and it's getting smoother and smoother and you can see i've got a lot less material in there and then would you separate that toe separately yeah i will often sort the toe as i'm going the stuff that i'm going to use as a fire starter versus something that i'm going to use as rope is there a length of staple difference between a fire starting toe and a rope toe uh not so much i'm mostly looking at the presence of the woody stem cause that woody stem is gonna make it more frustrating to spin okay so if i've got if i've got less stem in there it's gonna spin up better for for rope seems like the byproducts every bit is important and we can get more out of this crop that we've grown on our farm yep exactly in the 18th century they were very good at using everything and and when you're working with flax you have like 70 percent that doesn't actually end up in your clothing by weight because because there is a lot of these by-products so you need to do something else with it right or it's not worthwhile and you can see it's starting to look like hair if you've ever heard the term flaccin haired that is where it comes from somebody with blonde straight hair would be called flaxon-haired and you can see how different that is now from what we started out with it's not totally finished if i was really doing this to produce clothing i would actually go through a number of successive hetchels where the the iron spikes were finer and closer together and i would be producing different grades of linen whether i'm using coarse linen for aprons and towels or your finest linen for your gentleman's shirt great so okay you've got beautiful flaxsen not quite hair but flax and flax there yep what's next so the next process is to put this on a tool called a dis staff which is basically a stick that holds these fibers so with wool fibers when you're spinning them you can hold them in your hands but these fibers are really really long so holding them on a disk staff is going to help you control them as you spin them and then of course the next step is spinning these into yarns you're going to spin with water on your hands because that's going to help create a smoother yarn in the end the flax still has some of that pectin in it and with the wetness on your hands it's going to create a really beautifully smooth yarn so not fuzzy and then once the spinning is done we're going to weave this into fabric on a loom okay in 18th century do we find this work is this split up by gender or is the whole family work on this or does it stay women's work or men's work in the barn so not every family in colonial pennsylvania was producing clothing during the colonial era we were importing a lot of fabric from england and so most families would be going to markets and buying fabric however if you have an ideal location like this for flax yes you would be producing flax in general the work in the crop field would have been the men's work once it got to this area it would have been more women involved spinning in pennsylvania was generally a woman's chore so it was rolled in with all their other housework again often done during the winter time in pennsylvania once you move to weaving you're back to a man's profession so this would have been a profession where you apprenticed and then became a master weaver so generally families would send their spun yarn to a weaver and he would give them back fabric they may pay for that service by leaving some of the fabric with him to sell to other people or they may make a cash payment for that service well eva thank you for sharing this piece of story with us we appreciate it you're welcome thank you for being with us at revolutionary gazette we don't think twice about clothing we go to the store and buy it in the revolutionary war era you may be able to you may not have that option and here's a look at how one of the most common cloths went from the field to my shirt we'll see you next time

Channel: Revolutionary Gazette

Views: 18,579

Keywords: Revolutionary Gazette, spinning linen, flax break, flax, linen, making linen from flax, flax processing, spinning flax, aLHFAM, revolutionary farm, 18th century skills, 18th century, history, American Revolution, connection, history matters, living history, fiber craft, Revolutionary War, education, research, old craft, linen production, history documentary, history channel, history buffs, living history museums, Living history documentary

Id: Vufzi13xxng

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021