It's Difficult to Buy Flax and Flax Tools

     It is expensive to buy flax ready for spinning into yarn.  If you want to grow or buy flax straw and process the fibre yourself so it is ready to spin, it's difficult and expensive to buy flax tools to do that.  To spin flax into yarn, it works best to use specialized tools.  

     This is why for so many years I have put off getting into flax, other than weaving a bit with commercially-spun linen yarn, despite loving linen textiles so very, very much.

     Flax fibre comes from the tall, unbranched stalk of a flax plant.  The plant grows from seeds bred to produce fibre and the seeds are planted closely together to prevent the plants from producing branches.  The product line flax is fibre that is as long or nearly as long as the original flax plant stem.  It is not chopped up.  The best linen fabric is from line flax.  To process flax plants to make fibre from them that is ready to spin into yarn, you have to ret the flax, break it, scutch it, and hackle it.  Respectively, this partially decomposes the stalks, breaks away the outer material, and combs the fibers to align them and eliminate short fibers.

     I found flax hackles for sale on the Windham Woolwork website.  A set of coarse, medium, and fine hackles would cost hundreds of dollars, and I couldn't find any information on the site about whether they ship from the U.K. to the U.S. or not.  The only other place I could find that sells new flax hackles is TelTechArts on Etsy.  Unfortunately TelTechArts hackles only come in one coarseness, not as a set.  The Woolery lists one flax hackle but it is out of stock.  The Woolgatherers website sells plans to make flax hackles as well as plans for a flax break and scutching board.  Cindy Conner, author of Homegrown Flax and Cotton, has a description on her blog about how she started with an antique hackle and rounded out her set by making a couple of other flax hackles.  I remember a long time ago reading a statement from Indigo Hound explaining that they did not make and sell flax hackles because they could not do it more cheaply than people could buy antique hackles.

     Then there's the labour.  According to the website Flaxland, "It will take around a day to break, scutch and hackle 1 kilo of long line fibre and 1 kilo of tow from retted flax stems, using hand tools."  A kilogram, 1,000 g, is 2.2 pounds.  So in other words, in a day, not including the retting process, you could process by hand as much flax as you could buy already processed for $220 USD, assuming $25 for a 4 ounce (112 g) flax strick.  However, you would have to build up the grip strength needed to process flax all day.  I tried processing a small bundle of flax fibers once, as much as I could hold in my hand, and my hand got very sore.

     First, of course, you'd have to get unretted flax straw.  I don't know of anywhere local that sells it.  The one place I do know of that sells it, Landis Valley museum, has a website that puts my computer's security feature on high alert so I wasn't able to check the current price.  The museum also sells the right kind of seed.  It's no wonder that Cindy grows her own flax and saves her own seeds.  To grow flax you need land or access to land, again costly.  Elsie Davenport's book Your Handspinning states that the soil needs to be sandy.  Here is central Virginia we have clay, so you'd probably want to amend the soil.  I assume the soil needs to be somewhat enriched.  Cindy has a DVD for that, Cover Crops and Compost Crops In Your Garden.

     I should point out that for $27, slightly more than the cost of a flax strick, The Woolery sells a 4.4 ounce (123 g) cone of commercially spun linen yarn that comes from line flax.  It is comparable in quality to a flax strick.  My conclusion is that you have to really want to spin flax to pay for flax stricks.

     I have seen handspinners spin yarn countless times with wool and sometimes with cotton, angora, mohair, alpaca, and blends that contain silk.  But I've seen them spin flax less than a dozen times.  It's rarely done and from what I can see the skill is not being passed on, save for at the occasional class at places like The Folk School.  My guild has wool combs, spinning wheels (one with a distaff), and a floor loom for rent but nothing for processing flax.  The tools, equipment, and supplies for spinning flax are costly and hard to obtain and I think that's a reason why handspinners don't get into flax.  And since they don't get into flax, that means the market is small and that in turn means there is little incentive for businesses to cater to the market.  I think it's a cycle.

     It is easier to spin flax if you have special equipment, such as a distaff and a spindle meant for flax or a spinning wheel meant for flax.  Examples of spindles meant for flax are the Medieval spindle shafts and whorls from NiddyNoddyUK on Etsy, but if you order a spindle shaft with spiral tip there, ask for it to be counterclockwise or S because flax is spun counterclockwise due to its physical properties.  I've heard that Turkish spindles are good for spinning flax, and I'm told the best Turkish spindles are from Jenkins.  A distaff holds the flax arranged so it can be drafted easily.  Distaffs are hard to find for sale.  Few handspinners I know have this stuff.  Cotton takes special equipment too, yet I know handspinners that own tahklis and charkhas.  Nice and expensive charkhas too, from Bosworth Spindles.

     It is rare for a handweaver or knitter to use linen yarn to create a linen towel or a linen sweater.  I can't remember the last time I saw any finished objects in linen in show and tell at a guild meeting or in a festival display.  Whatever it was, it was probably a woven garment of Cindy's.  I'll see on Ravelry garments knitted with a commercial yarn containing a small percentage of linen.  Now, there are some handspinners that tell me that they will still spin yarn they have no use for, but you can see why it might inhibit most handspinners.

Old Footage of Dressing a Distaff with Flax

      I came across old footage on YouTube of a woman dressing a distaff and spinning flax on a spinning wheel.  It looked like she was using six stricks, or about a pound and a half (680 g) of line flax.  As a four ounce (112 g) strick currently costs about $25 USD, that was pretty expensive.  Not to mention the cost of shipping.  I don't know of anywhere local that sells flax stricks.

     I pulled out my copy of Elsie Davenport's Your Handspinning and was relieved to read that she recommends dressing a distaff with an ounce and a half (42 g) of line flax over a cone of wadded up tissue paper. 

I Tried Making a Sprang Market Bag and Miscalculated Badly

      A couple of posts ago, I said that I had tried and failed to do warp-shaping on a sprang warp.  I did figure it out.  Unfortunately, I did my warp calculations based on plain interlinking but did a pattern of holes all over, the Haraldskaer pattern.  Holes expand more than plain interlinking.  The bag came out much too wide and much too short, so it doesn't function as a bag.  I did multiple thread interlinking on the handles to draw in the fabric and that part biased badly.  The finished object is not good for much except to serve as a horrible example.

     I am still sad about wasting a good skein of linen-cotton yarn.

     The bone darning needle shown in the photo is from WoodwindSilverstone on Etsy.  It has a nice sharp tip.

     You may not be a weaver and be wondering what I mean when I say warp calculations.  On a loom, for weaving or for sprang, there are threads that go lengthwise and are secured at either end.  The threads sit side by side.  So you have length, and you have width with so many ends per inch.  On a loom for weaving, the threads sit a little bit apart from each other so that they are spaced properly through the reed.  The reed is part of the loom, in the front.  The reed separates the threads and you use it to beat the cloth to make the fabric construction consistent after you pass a weft thread right to left or left to right through the shed.  You create the shed by raising some of the threads while others stay lowered.  In sprang there is no weft and no reed, and when warping you can space the threads as tightly as you like as long as they don't get out of order.  For either weaving or sprang, you want know the length of your warp, the number of ends per inch, the width of the fabric you want to make, the way the fabric will change when it comes off the loom and gets washed, and the kind of yarn you want to use.  When you know these things, you can figure out how much yarn goes on the loom and thus you can figure out how much yarn to buy or how much yarn to spin.

     The wrinkle with sprang is that, compared to weaving, the fabric changes a lot when it comes off the loom.  With plain interlinking, I generally expect that the fabric will be about thirty percent wider and thirty percent shorter when it comes off the loom.  I was not expecting the fabric to be more than a hundred percent wider, as it was with the lacy market bag.

I Tried Spinning Flax

      I got a lesson from a kind friend on how to spin flax into linen thread.  Here is what my attempt looked like.  I should try spinning a thicker thread when I practice some more.

New fiber arts interviews are up on my YouTube channel

      You can watch some new YouTube videos on my channel, https://www.youtube.com/c/thesojourningspinner.  They are mostly interviews with fiber artists on their motivations, the tools they use, and the way they got into fiber production, fiber preparation, dyeing, handspinning, weaving, knitting, and crochet.  Some of it is about sustainability, a local mill, and local yarn and local dyes.

     Also, I warped my språng loom for a market bag.  And I got a Gulf Coast Native fleece from a local living history museum.

     Update: the warp-shaping on the språng loom interfered with the interlinking because I put it on the loom incorrectly.  I couldn't pass the twists all the way to the bottom of the warp.  So I undid the warp and went for a plan B.

Past Performance Is No Guarantee

      A friend wanted to talk about what she would knit next.  One of the things I said to her was, I understand the pain of having made something that turned out wrong, and sometimes it can be good to risk again and to be willing to live with the prospect of a new project going wrong for the hope of it going right.

Regional Mills versus Hand Production

      For over a decade I have been a fan of the non-profit Fibershed and its affiliates, mostly because the handmade, regionally-sourced wardrobe of the founder Rebecca Burgess caught my imagination.  I thoroughly enjoyed the YouTube video about it posted by Kirsten Dirksen, 150-mile wardrobe: local fiber, real color, P2P economy.  I read Burgess' dye book.  I had been meaning for ages to get to the nearest library that had her Fibershed book at a local community college but hadn't ever gotten around to it.  Then I found the audiobook version was available to borrow from my public library, and so I got to listen to it.

     Near the end of the book, Burgess asks us to imagine that we sourced our food the way we source our textiles, from afar, without an ingredients list, and with no processing or work done in the country, region, or home.  I hope I have transcribed this correctly:

Imagine living in a community where no one had a kitchen and the closest refrigerator, stove, oven, and cooking pots and pans were all located overseas.  There might be one person who still knew the art of cooking and had a few tools to make rustic meals but it was never enough to feed everyone. Almost everyone would order their food and it would arrive from overseas in boxes with no ingredients list.  In the case of fiber, mill systems are the kitchens within the system, and the one person who still knows how to cook can be compared to a handspinner, weaver, or expert knitter.  We'd never accept a food system with this level of infrastructure dysfunction and yet we are all too willing to accept this level of archaic and unskilled design with our fiber system.

     Burgess goes on to talk about the functional failings of her handmade wardrobe and how regional, commercial milling is the solution.

     I'd just like to say that the tools for home textile production may be archaic in that their designs are very old but they are still usable.  Skills are good to have.  So is control over the means of production, however small the scope.  Some handspun is fine gauge and suitable for wearing next to the skin.