Linen Production

Today Jim showed us how to prepare the stems of the flax plant in order to create linen. I forgot my camera this morning, and it would have been mighty helpful to have some pictures to illustrate this process, but alas. The other interns will be demonstrating it later this summer anyway so I'll add some pictures then.

The first thing you have to do when you want to make linen is pick some flax. The average farmer in colonial Pennsylvania had about three acres of flax under cultivation for this purpose, that's about three football fields. Textiles were so expensive in the eighteenth century because they took so much time and resources to produce.

Once your flax is ready to be harvested in late July or early August you can't just cut it down like you'd do with hay. You have to pull it out of the ground BY HAND because most of the fibers are closer to the root. Jim tells us this is hard work. I'm taking his word for it.

Now that you have your flax you have to rot it or, eighteenth century speak, ret, it by soaking it in water for two weeks. This will soften up the coarse outer layer. After that you pull the flax through a big wooden contraption that kind of looks like an enormous hair crimper, called a flax break, in oder to break up the outer layer. Once the outer layer starts falling off you scrape by of it off by beating it with a big wooden scraper. Then finally, you comb it through hackles, which are pieces of wood with big iron spikes, until you get a substance that looks and feels a lot like hair. In fact flax resembles blonde hair so much that an eigteenth century term for it was "flaxen" hair.

After that you have to spin it and finally weave it to get linen. Quite a production! The most desierable flax fibers were the longer ones because you could produce fine linen with it. The shorter fibers we called toe, and they would produce a coarser fabric.

And there you have it!