fiber arting

When I'm not beating my head against the novel, or staring in blank despair at the Internet, or attempting to drag myself through my workday, I've been spending a lot of time thinking and reading and researching about linen production. I feel like I've talked about this on here so indulge me if this is repetitive.
unicornduke grew some flax last year and plans to grow more, and we were talking about it and I remembered that a former coworker of mine's mother went to grad school with my mom; they both studied to be museum curators, and the coworker's mom stayed in that line of work much longer than my mother. She worked at a number of historic sites and one of her pet projects at each of them was to grow flax and process it into linen, because that was a big part of American rural life from before the US was the US up until about the 1910s, when cotton finally took over entirely.
So that coworker, who had long ago moved away, recently moved back, and has stopped by a few times. The most recent time he stopped by, I had him give me his mother's email address.
She wrote back instantly with a list of people I should speak to, and in several cases, gave me the people's email addresses by emailing both of us, so. She also volunteered to set up appointments for me to come and see the equipment at these various places.

So, I thought, well, I might as well persuade my sister to grow some flax on her farm too, and now I've been thinking about linen. I think unicornduke's motivation was largely that at all the sheep and wool festivals, nobody's got linen roving at all, which is an excellent motivation. I happen to just love linen.

I got thinking, yesterday, about paper. We make paper out of wood pulp nowadays, but early paper was all made from rags, and linen rags were best. So I Googled it, and found that yes, linen is still used in making paper-- mostly specialty papers, specifically 1) currency, 2) cigarettes, and 3) Bibles. I guess that's how you get thin paper that doesn't fall apart, from that evidence. Nowadays of course they don't take old linen fabric and recycle it: they use "flax waste", left over from seed production mostly.
But the one paper was fascinating because it did acknowledge the struggle with flax: if you harvest it in time for the fibers to be fine, the seeds mostly aren't ripe yet. If you wait until the seeds are ripe, the fibers have become coarse. Most of the paper was dry impenetrable shit about chemical composition, but a ways down there was a table that discussed different seed varieties and they had two entries for the variety Ariadne, acknowledging that you could harvest it early or late for different results. (They were talking about industrial-scale stuff, of course, and one of the options was growing it as winter cover somewhere warm, so it was a shortish season for the flax, I think, and it being better for the fiber was an incidental bonus.)

Anyhow. I have a tentative date to go see the flax processing equipment at Hull House, and will at some point be checking out the equipment at what I thought was the Amherst Museum but they changed the name, which is where this former coworker's mom worked for quite a while and so it's largely equipment she herself made or acquired, and she's given me a contact name but I'll probably get my mom's input too for the program director at the facility affiliated with the program where they both studied, which has been doing a flax-to-fiber program for about fifty years now I think.

Then the weird little side thing I've been looking into is that uh. It's super easy to raise silkworms, and in fact a common thing to do is to get a box of silkworm eggs (they store fine in the fridge for long periods) and then incubate them in an elementary school classroom, and once the silkworms are big enough that they probably won't die (a lot usually die right after hatching) you give each kid a worm in a little habitat that can live on their desk and they can feed it every day and watch it and give it a name and stuff, and they're really easy to keep and have been used in all kinds of science experiments because they're so easy and fast-growing.
I have no idea what they do in classrooms once the caterpillars spin cocoons-- probably don't boil them and reel off the silk right there in front of the kids, they probably let them hatch into moths, but silkworm moths can't fly and don't live long, so I dunno. Anyway.
If six-year-olds can do it, so could I, at least for fun and Art. (And I'd boil the caterpillars because I'm an asshole, but I know 500 chickens who would be delighted to put the caterpillars to good use afterward. I know they're a delicacy in Chinese cuisine but I'm not there yet.)
(Of course I was like, clearly i have to grow mulberry trees so i have organic silkworm food so they're safe to feed to the organic-certified hens, and i researched it, and the native North American mulberries aren't great for silkworms but mostly because the leaves are too fuzzy, the nutrition content is fine, so if you threw the leaves through a blender you'd be fine. ORRRR you can feed silkworms on a North American native mulberry relative, the Osage Orange!!!!, which is a thing I've been dying to grow because they're evolutionary ghosts from days of megafauna (!!!!) and I want one, but. This is a crazy side thing; you can just buy dried mulberry leaves along with silkworm eggs and none of it is necessary. BUT. HOW COOL.)

(BRB just planting Osage Orange hedges around all the hog pastures, don't mind me.) (MAYBE OSAGE ORANGE HEDGES WOULD KEEP GOATS IN.) (I need to Stop. Listen, I'm having a rough late-winter.)

Vegetable Manager did a lot of tie-dyeing in college and has planted weld all around the farm. It would not take a great deal of prodding to get him Super Into natural dyeing. I'm just saying. (I have a lead on some madder roots, I just need to lean on my contact about them. Indigo is not possible in our climate unless/until we get that beautiful glass Victorian-style conservatory that I'm absolutely going to build them someday, but we could grow woad.)

I wanna be a textile artist, you guys. No, of course it wouldn't earn me any money, but I've come to realize that none of the skills or dreams or desires I have are in any way monetizable, so I'm just going to have to live poor. That's fine. Just let me make cool stuff. Maybe I can help unicornduke make roving for fiber shows and that'll subsidize my stupid textile art habit. LOL.