![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/33jUY7q
gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester,…”
yay flax! growing and processing flax and spinning and weaving linen is a super ambitious questline of mine! I have some grinding to do first though.
missbuster replied to your post “I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester,…”
I’d like to know what happens to the flax after it’s been cut and… laid down? Does it soak?
(replying to both at the bottom because interspersing plays merry hell with formatting)
I love linen so much, but I don’t know how to weave at all, and I barely know how to spin, and yet. And yet! Attainable things, perhaps? Who knows how far I’ll get in this new-ish hobby.
I also took up papermaking as a hobby, ostensibly, because I want to use the not-suitable-for-spinning waste material in papermaking because that’s apparently a desirable thing to use. I cannot find much information about doing that, though, and I have yet to actually do any papermaking at home. So…
So the process for flax is basically: 1) grow it, 2) pull it up, 3) let it dry (this is where I am; it’s in sheaves, upright), 4) “ripple” it to remove the seed pods, 5) ret it, which can be done either by letting it lie in the field or on a lawn to be repeatedly wetted by the dew and dried by the sun, OR by submerging it in either still or running water; the former method is slower but apparently better-quality in the end, and the latter is faster and more controllable, and then 6) brake it (physically beat it to break up the outer layer of the straw), 7) scutch it (scrape it to pull off the broken outer layer, 8) hackle/heckle it to comb the remnants of the straw off of the “line”, or interior bast fiber of the stalk. Then you can spin it and weave it.
I have done basically none of this before but I’ve watched demonstrations in the past, so. *shrug* here’s hoping!
gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester,…”
yay flax! growing and processing flax and spinning and weaving linen is a super ambitious questline of mine! I have some grinding to do first though.
missbuster replied to your post “I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester,…”
I’d like to know what happens to the flax after it’s been cut and… laid down? Does it soak?
(replying to both at the bottom because interspersing plays merry hell with formatting)
I love linen so much, but I don’t know how to weave at all, and I barely know how to spin, and yet. And yet! Attainable things, perhaps? Who knows how far I’ll get in this new-ish hobby.
I also took up papermaking as a hobby, ostensibly, because I want to use the not-suitable-for-spinning waste material in papermaking because that’s apparently a desirable thing to use. I cannot find much information about doing that, though, and I have yet to actually do any papermaking at home. So…
So the process for flax is basically: 1) grow it, 2) pull it up, 3) let it dry (this is where I am; it’s in sheaves, upright), 4) “ripple” it to remove the seed pods, 5) ret it, which can be done either by letting it lie in the field or on a lawn to be repeatedly wetted by the dew and dried by the sun, OR by submerging it in either still or running water; the former method is slower but apparently better-quality in the end, and the latter is faster and more controllable, and then 6) brake it (physically beat it to break up the outer layer of the straw), 7) scutch it (scrape it to pull off the broken outer layer, 8) hackle/heckle it to comb the remnants of the straw off of the “line”, or interior bast fiber of the stalk. Then you can spin it and weave it.
I have done basically none of this before but I’ve watched demonstrations in the past, so. *shrug* here’s hoping!
