Homegrown Flax and Cotton–the book is here!

My new book, Homegrown Flax and Cotton: DIY Guide to Growing, Processing, Spinning & Weaving Fiber to Cloth is here! If you want to learn how to clothe yourself from your garden, this is the book for you. Even if you never grow your own clothes, it is interesting to learn how one could do […]

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Flax to Linen Workshops at Snow Farm

From the response to the Mother Earth News article about my homegrown cotton shirt in their April/May 2018 issue, there seems to be much interest in growing your own clothes. For those whose weather is not conducive to cotton, you might want to consider flax. Cassie Dickson is teaching a Flax to Linen class at […]

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Flax to Linen: Hackling

Hackling takes freshly broken and scutched flax and turns it into fine fiber ready to spin. You toss the ends of the flax onto the hackle and draw it through. With each new toss, add more length of fiber until you get to the middle. Then turn it around and do the other side, beginning […]

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Flax to Linen: Breaking and Scutching

Being able to grow your own flax fiber to spin and weave into linen clothes is a wonderful experience. The growing is the easy part. Once flax straw is retted it can be stored indefinitely until you are ready for the fiber. When that time comes, you need to have some equipment that may not […]

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Flax to Linen Workshop

Last month Clotho’s Handspinners, the handspinning group I am part of, sponsored a Flax to Linen Workshop. My husband, Walt, and I hosted it at our place and it was wonderful! Cassie Dickson, our instructor from North Carolina, has been working with flax for many years and teaches the Flax to Linen class at the […]

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Flax to Linen: Retting

It is time to harvest the flax that I planted for fiber in early March. I wrote about harvesting (pulling the stalks) and taking the seeds out (rippling) on May 23. The nice thing about flax is that, once the flax is pulled and dried and the seeds removed, there is no rush to process […]

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Flax to Linen: Flowering to Rippling

The first of my flax plantings started to flower last week. I planted this bed on March 9 and it was 70 days later when I noticed the bed full of blooms. It is important to note the time of flowering so you can estimate when to harvest, especially if you are new at this. […]

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Flax to Linen: Spinning

I have promised to take you through the whole process of seed to garment with flax this year. You start with getting seeds in the ground, then once harvest occurs—which is about 100 days from planting—a whole lot more needs to happen before you have fiber to spin. Nevertheless, I have decided to jump right […]

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Grow Flax For Linen In Your Garden

Growing flax in your garden and making it into linen is a great experience. Linen is the name for flax fiber once it is made into thread. It is hard to believe that what you harvest in the summer, something that looks less vibrant than the straw that results from growing wheat and rye, can […]

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Flax to Linen at the Folk School

In November I had the wonderful opportunity to take the Flax to Linen class at the John C. Campbell Folk School  in Brasstown, North Carolina. I don’t remember when I first heard about the Folk School, but it was many years ago. Whenever I met someone, most often broom makers and blacksmiths, who had taken […]

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