October 2023 Virginia and New York Events

My new book, Homegrown Flax and Cotton: DIY Guide to Growing, Processing, Spinning & Weaving Fiber to Cloth is off to a good start and I’ve enjoyed meeting people who are excited it is finally out. My last scheduled events for 2023 are very soon. I will be processing flax (breaking, scutching, and hackling) and signing books on Saturday, Oct 7 at Scotchtown, home of Patrick Henry, in Hanover County, VA from 10am-4pm. The next day, Sunday Oct. 8, I will be at the Fall Fiber Festival in Orange County, VA doing the same thing from 11am-4pm. This is a great time to see how flax straw is processed to line flax that you spin. Once flax is spun it is called linen.

Cindy at the Virginia State Fair 2023

Then on to New York. On October 21-22 I will be at the New York Sheep and Wool Festival, otherwise known as Rhinebeck. Merritt Bookstore has a large book signing area in Building B where I will be, along with many other authors. Their schedule will show the times I will be there on both days. It will be my first time at Rhinebeck and I am excited to be going. I will travel by train, which I can catch a few miles from my home, and meet up with friends from Indiana. That alone will make for a fun time, but I am looking forward to meeting folks who are interested in the possibilities of growing their own clothes and hope I can be of help.

If you can’t make it to these events and want a signed copy of my book, you can order it from me at www.HomeplaceEarth.com. If you live far from these events, check out fiber festivals in your area by doing an internet search. When you go, be sure to engage in conversation with the vendors and demonstrators and learn what they have to share. Inquire about fiber groups near you. Immerse yourself in all that is going on. You never know what you will take away from that experience. Look for me in 2024 at the Carolina Fiberfest in March and the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in May.

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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 that.

Learn when to plant the seeds of flax and cotton and how to go about getting the resulting fiber into something to wear. (Once flax is spun it is called linen.) To go from seed to garment you need skills in gardening, spinning, weaving (or knitting and crocheting), and sewing. In the case of flax, you will need to break, scutch, and hackle. This book leads you through all that and suggests resources to help you along the way. It even includes detailed plans to make a tabletop flax brake. There are also plans to make a one-yard swift that can be adjusted for the skeins once they have shrunk from scouring. Homemade hackles are covered, also.

You can order autographed copies from me at www.HomeplaceEarth.com or come and see me at one of my book signings. I will be at the Ashland Farmers Market on Saturday, July 1, from 9am-noon. On Saturday, August 12, at 11am I will be at the Ashland Branch of the Pamunkey Regional Library giving a talk and signing books. In October you can find me demonstrating flax-to-linen and signing books at Scotchtown, home of Patrick Henry, on Saturday, the 7^th, and at the Fall Fiber Festival at Montpelier Station, VA the next day on October 8.

Monday, September 25 visit me at the Horticulture Pavilion at the State Fair of Virginia from 10am-2pm. I won’t have books for sale, but will be talking about my work and have equipment and my homegrown clothes on display.

All these events are listed on the Events page of my website. As more things are scheduled, I will update the page, so check back regularly. You may possibly find me at the book signing tent at the New York Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, NY in October.

When I first started on this adventure I often had trouble finding answers to my questions. Sometimes I just had to figure it out for myself. I wrote Homegrown Flax and Cotton to help you have an easier time of following this path—and to have more people in the know to play with. Hope you join the fun!

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Fall 2022 Events and New Book in 2023

I will be at a few events this fall and I hope some of you will come out and see me. First up is the Virginia State Fair. Find me in the Horticulture Pavilion on Monday, September 26 from 10am-2pm meeting folks and answering questions about gardening and growing cotton and flax and taking that fiber all the way to clothes.

The first weekend in October is busy. I will be at Scotchtown, home of Patrick Henry, demonstrating flax-to-linen on Saturday, October 1, from 10am-4pm. The next day, Sunday, October 2, I will be at the Fall Fiber Festival at Montpelier Station, VA., also demonstrating flax-to-linen all afternoon. Look for me at the demos tent.

I have been working on a book about my fiber work for the past few years and am happy to announce that it is now with the publisher, Stackpole Books, working its way through that process. Homegrown Flax and Cotton: DIY Guide to Growing, Processing, Spinning & Weaving Fiber to Cloth is expected to be out in print on July 1, 2023. I enlisted the help of my daughter-in-law, Stephanie, to take photos. I will be wearing my homegrown clothes in all the photos you see of me in the book. In this photo I am wearing a linen dress I made from my flax in 2021. I was a bit short on fiber, but when my good friend Jan passed in August 2020, the flax she had grown came to me. It was enough to finish the project. I dyed the warp with Japanese indigo that I had grown and left the weft natural. I made the shirt from cotton that daughter Betsy had grown as part of our Cotton Project. There is a whole chapter on the Cotton Project in the book. The green and brown cotton had crossed and in the process of growing out subsets of seeds to get back to the original green and brown, we found some white. You’ll have to read all about it in the book.

The message in the book is not only to grow your own clothes, but to think of where the clothes you wear come from and how the earth and the people responsible for their production are compensated in the process. Each action we take affects everything else. We have to not only think about those people on the planet now but look to taking care of things for future generations. To that end, I thought it would be fun to have another generation of Conners in the book, so I included our twin grandsons. However, if they were in the book, they would need homegrown clothes. You will see them wearing overalls I made. Since my shirt and their overalls are new this year, I was quite busy deseeding cotton, spinning, and weaving from January through the spring. Here is a teaser photo of the boys that Stephanie, their mom, took when we were doing our photo shoot. You’ll see that photo and a complete one of me and the boys in the book.

It has been quite a journey getting this book done. Besides all the how-to of going from seed to garment, there will be plans for a tabletop flax brake and for a small swift. You can thank my wonderful husband, Walt, for making that happen. I want folks to have no barriers to getting started. This can be done in your garden. I had a lot of catching up in my garden to do this summer, since I had to let some things go. I am caught up now and it is nice to not be quite so busy, although somehow, new projects seem to pop into my mind from time to time. There is always something to do.

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2022 Events

I have just posted the events in 2022 that I have committed to. You can see the list here or view it on the events page of my website at www.HomeplaceEarth.com. Except for the talk about transitioning from a home gardener to a market gardener at the Virginia Association for Biological Farming conference (VABF), all the talks are about fiber. I love to give the transition talk, by the way. I want new farmers to start out strong. I was a market gardener myself for 10 years and spent 11 years teaching sustainable agriculture in order to put more farmers out there and have seen people jump into selling their produce before they have thoroughly thought through what they need to do to be successful.

I am looking forward to talking about my work with cotton and flax/linen. As you know, the pandemic has changed the way we communicate and there is no going back completely to the way things were. Fiber guilds that have kept active have quickly adapted, allowing folks to attend meetings and classes that would have been prohibitive before. The Central Virginia Fiberarts Guild is an example of that and has attracted new members from further afield. I’ll be speaking on Zoom at their February meeting. When in-person meetings resume I’m sure there will be a virtual component to the guild’s offerings. Nevertheless, I will be doing some in-person events at other places, as you can see. Hope to see you there!

January 12  Richmond Weavers. Cindy is giving the talk The Sustainability of the Fibers We Use.  This is a regular meeting of the Richmond Weavers. Richmond VA. www.richmondweavers.org.

January 23-24  Virginia Biological Farming Conference. Cindy is giving the presentations Transitioning from a Homestead Gardener to a Market Gardener on January 23 and From Seed to Garment on January 24. The Hotel Roanoke Conference Center, Roanoke, VA.www.vabf.org.

February 6  Central Virginia Fiberarts Guild.   Cindy will give the talk Flax-to-Linen: From Seed to Garment.This is a virtual meeting of the Central Virginia Fiberarts Guild. www.cvfg.org.  

March 11-12  Carolina FiberFest.  Cindy will give the talk From Seed to Garment: grow your own cotton and flax/linen clothes on March 11.North Carolina State Fairgrounds Expo Center. www.carolinafiberfest.org. 

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Homegrown Linen Vest

Homegrown Linen Vest

Work with my homegrown fiber, specifically cotton and flax/linen has kept me too busy to post lately, but I wanted to share my most recent project with you–a vest from my homegrown flax (Linum usitatissimum). I grew the flax, processed it, spun it into linen yarn, scoured it, and wove it into fabric for the vest. The processing involves rippling, retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling. I have used my homegrown linen as weft in my weaving before, but this is the first article of clothing where I used it as warp. Warp has to endure abrasion from passing through the heddles on the loom and, since linen is such a hairy fiber, I knew that I would have to address that if I used it for warp. Otherwise those “hairs” would hinder the weaving. I tamed the hairiness by dipping the fiber in a sizing solution that I made from gelatin. There are many versions of sizing you can make yourself. It washes out easily after the cloth comes off the loom. Although I ply cotton before I use it as warp, I used the linen as singles (no ply).The pattern I used is the same one I developed for my cotton vest and you can find the details here. This linen fabric was woven at 12” wide, as was the cotton vest. Since linen does not shrink as much as cotton, I was able to use ⅝” seams rather than the  ¼” that I used for the cotton vest. I wanted to add a bit of color to my vest, so I dyed some of the fiber with my homegrown Japanese indigo and used it for every other warp thread. The color is subtle and you don’t see it as stripes. The other warp threads and the weft is the natural linen color.

My linen yarn measured 38-45 wpi (wraps per inch). I wove it at 24 epi (warp ends per inch), putting two warps through each space in a 12 dent reed. I wove it on a heavy Nilus 4 harness floor loom. Linen warp needs to be held at a tight tension, which may be harder to achieve with a lighter table loom. It also needs a good shed to separate those hairy fibers. The greater distance from the heddles to the back beam on a floor loom, as compared to a table loom, also helps with that separation. I used 7.5 ounces of homegrown yarn for the warp. or 1,660 yards. The weft required less, since the warp includes loom waste. That was enough for the vest fabric plus the side panels on the lining.

intended lining side

I have begun to weave the lining fabric for my garments and wove this lining from my homegrown linen. Rather than spin more flax for the lining, I thought I would use up the leftovers from other projects, knowing that there would be a difference in color. Color differences may occur as a result of different harvests, retting conditions, processing times during scouring, etc. Since I would be the only one seeing the lining, it didn’t really matter. Right?

As you will see, it did matter. The leftover linen yarn that I had  was not enough for all the lining, but I had enough extra outside fabric to make up

linen buttons

the difference. I used the outside fabric to make the side panels and one pocket. I didn’t have enough of either fabric for both pockets, so there is one of each. The color difference on the shoulder is from different batches of flax/linen, not dyeing. As I was nearing completion I showed it to friends who said they liked the lining at least as much as the outside, so I made it reversible. For the first time ever I made dorset style buttons. I wrapped my linen around a ½” dowel 30 times to make the core for each button. The loops for closure are made using my linen for a kumihimo braid. The only thing in this vest that I didn’t grow is the cotton thread that I used to sew the fabric pieces together.

Weaving with homegrown yarn is much different than weaving with commercial yarn. I had gotten quite comfortable weaving with my homegrown cotton. Although I love the all-cotton clothes I’ve made, I also love the texture of the fabric I have made with a cotton warp and linen weft. In this photo you can see my cotton warp/linen weft shirt and dress. The color in the dress is supplied by the colored cotton I grew, not dyes. I enjoy challenging myself with these projects. You may not be into producing your own clothes, but I hope you find something you are passionate about. Then jump in and enjoy the adventures that present themselves.

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Grow Your Own Clothes Workshop

Cindy Conner in her homegrown, handspun, handwoven, naturally-colored cotton vest

Have you ever wondered if it would be possible to make your own clothes from what you could grow in your garden? Well, I have done that and would like to teach you how to go about it. I am talking about growing cotton and flax for linen in your garden, processing it for fiber, spinning it, and weaving it into fabric to sew into clothes. Or, if you prefer, you could knit or crochet what you spin. In order to pass on what I have learned, I am giving a workshop on June 8, 2019 at my place, Sunfield Farm, near Ashland, VA. It would be just for that day from 9am-4pm.

The day will start with a garden tour. That is a big deal because I don’t normally open my garden to the public. You will see cotton and flax growing there and the flax will be nearing harvest. You will also see the other crops I have growing, including grains nearing harvest and the compost piles that are in the rotation on the garden beds. I will explain the growing conditions for cotton and flax.

flax straw and the line flax it becomes

Everyone will receive a pound of retted flax and have the chance to work with it on flax brakes, scutching boards, and hackles. You will produce the line flax that you will learn to spin in the afternoon. You will also collect the tow from your flax and learn how to make it into something useful.

There will be an hour lunch break at noon. Iced tea and water will be provided, but you will have to bring your own lunch and snacks. I am located only a few miles from the small town of Ashland. If you don’t pack a lunch you could get something to eat there. Of course, if you don’t need the whole hour for lunch, you are welcome to go back to working with the flax after you eat.

spindles you will receive in the workshop

The afternoon will be filled with spinning and learning what to do with the spun yarn. You will receive raw cotton and a metal tahkli spindle to spin it with. Spinning on a tahkli is not something you learn quickly. It will take a lot of practice to get proficient at it. However, the lesson and practice you receive that day will get you started. You will also receive a wooden spindle to spin the flax you processed yourself. Once flax is spun, it is called linen. In the future you can use that spindle to spin tow and to ply the cotton that you spin on the tahkli.

closeup of Cindy’s homegrown cotton shirt

There is much more to learn besides spinning before you can weave and sew and you will be exposed to all of that in the afternoon. I will be showing the garments I have made from my homegrown, handspun, handwoven fiber. You will also witness fiber being scoured, learn about shrinkage during scouring and weaving, see the looms I use, and learn about the equipment I have acquired and how much of it is actually necessary.

Cindy’s shirt with white cotton warp and linen weft

That is the tentative schedule for the day. Of course, if it rains, the schedule of events will change, but we will get it all in. Canopies will be set up outside for the flax processing if rain is threatening. The garden tour can proceed during a drizzle, so dress appropriately. Spinning lessons will take place inside or out, but the show-and-tell for equipment will be inside the house, which will be open all day for participants to use the bathroom when the need arises.

The class is limited to 15 students. The cost is $115 for the day, including the spindles, retted flax, and raw cotton. To hold your spot, I will need a check from you for the full amount. If you prefer to pay in two payments, the cost will be $120 with $60 due as a deposit to hold your spot and the remaining $60 to be paid by May 8, 2019. Email me (Cindy) at cconner@HomeplaceEarth.com to let me know you are sending a check and I will tentatively put you on the list and give you my mailing address.

If you are coming from a distance, the charming town of Ashland, VA offers services you may need. There are a variety of hotels and restaurants near Interstate 95 and Rt. 54 at the edge of town. The historic district includes restaurants and the train station where Amtrak stops daily. If you should choose to arrive by Amtrak you could stay at the Henry Clay Inn and we could arrange to pick you up for the class. I have no connections with anyone there, but mention it because it would be convenient if arriving by train.

I am giving this workshop because of the interest that has been shown in my work growing cotton and flax/linen from seed to garment and I want more people to join in the fun. Unless you have acquired some of these skills on your own already, you won’t be able to go home and do all of this right away. However, you will be exposed to the process and learn what equipment you may or may not need. Although you may eventually move up to using a spinning wheel, you will have the spindles to get you started. I spun all the fiber for my first garment, a homegrown cotton vest, on a tahkli spindle. For a preview of what you will experience at this workshop, check out my blog posts about cotton and flax/linen.

I am looking forward to a fun-filled day and hope you will join me. Since the class is limited to 15 people, don’t procrastinate. Once it is filled (everyone’s check clears) I can only put you on a waiting list in case a spot opens up.

See you in June!

 

 

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Homegrown Cotton Shirt in the News!

My homegrown, handspun, handwoven, naturally-colored, cotton shirt is in the latest issue–April/May 2018–of the Mother Earth News!

 

You can access the article online here, but it is prettier to read in the print magazine.

Enjoy!

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Heritage Harvest Festival 2017

The Heritage Harvest Festival is coming up September 8 and 9. It is a huge deal held at Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, near Charlottesville, VA. This event is sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Seed Savers Exchange. It celebrates food, sustainable agriculture, and the preservation of heritage plants.

Saturday, September 9 is the main event. Up on the mountain there will be booths with vendors, demonstrations on all sorts of stuff, and tents where talks will be held. For one admission price of $28 (children 5-11 $9, under 5 FREE) you have access to all the speakers that day. In years past, some of the talks were premium talks that required signing up ahead and paying a separate fee. Many of the premium talks were held at the visitor center. This year on Saturday there will be no talks at the visitor center.

Homegrown Flax–retted straw, processed fiber, spun flax (now called linen)

There will be premium talks at the visitor center on Friday, September 8 and that is where you will find me.  This is the 11^th year for the festival and the 10^th year that I will be speaking there. The Heritage Harvest Festival celebrates local food and gardening and usually my talks reflect that. I have given talks on cover crops, growing sustainable diets, garden planning, seed libraries, and how to transition from a home gardener to a market gardener. This year my talk is From Seed to Garment: Cotton and Flax/Linen in Your Garden. I am looking forward to sharing my work with fiber. Monticello is working on a textile exhibit that will open in 2018 to showcase the spinning and weaving that was done at the plantation, primarily to clothe the slaves. I am happy to bring a bit of textile production to the place ahead of that.

Homegrown, handspun, naturally colored cotton shirt.

I will still be around on Saturday and you will find me in the Homeplace Earth booth, #RR7 on Retailer Row. If you can’t make it to the talk on Friday and really want to take a closer look at my homegrown clothes, come and find me Saturday. I will have them in the booth, along with my DVDs and books that I have for sale. I won’t be selling any homegrown clothes, though.

This is a unique event. You get to hang around Thomas Jefferson’s backyard and enjoy so many things besides the great view. My friends Kim and Jimbo Cary will be playing music under the trees. They will have some gourds, washboards, and tamborines for you to use if you want to join in. They are great with the kids. When you are not taking in a lecture you can stop by the Seed Tent and do some seed swapping. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange will have their tomato tasting, as always. You can wander through their tent and try varieties of tomatoes that you probably never knew existed. I’m sure Thomas Jefferson is in his glory, having all of this at his home. He so much enjoyed experimenting with new crops at Monticello. When I am there I take the time to stop, look around, and marvel at what is going on. All of this celebration of agriculture and food in this particular place! Fantastic!

The Heritage Harvest Festival will expose you to many new and not-so-new projects around the region that promote sustainable agriculture. A word of warning to those like me who carry a pocket knife–this year they will be screening for things like that, so leave your knife in the car. Come for a day on the mountain, make new friends, and be sure to come by and see me!

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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 with the tip.

Just like with flax brakes, flax hackles may be hard to find. I found my first one for $60 in an antique mall in Pennsylvania. The spacing of the tines varies and you will find them in fine, medium, and coarse spacing. Lucky for me, the one I found in that antique mall was a medium. The tines are a half inch apart with offset spacing, meaning they are not lined up like the corners of a square. If you have a medium hackle you can do a good job of processing flax into fiber to spin with just one hackle.

line flax, tow, and medium hackle

The first flax I processed here was some I bought unretted from the Landis Valley Farm and Museum. When you hackle flax you will end up with line fiber that will look like a ponytail and you will have a good quantity of tow. Tow is what is pulled out of the ponytail by the hackle and can amount to quite a bit. You can re-hackle the tow and get usable fiber. Tow fibers longer than 6” can go back through the hackle. If the tow is shorter than 6” you will need to card it. Wool cards can be used for tow, but it is best to have a set just for flax. In this photo you can see line flax, tow, and my antique medium hackle.

homemade coarse hackle

The medium hackle worked well, but I wanted to take it further and make a coarse and a fine hackle. For the coarse hackle, I sharpened 28 16D common nails and set them into a piece of walnut 1″ apart on offset spacing. The nails were 3½” long. I chose to use that many because I was keeping to the size footprint of my medium hackle.—about 4”x5”. I used walnut because we had a walnut board. I used a drill press to make the holes in the board using an ¹¹̷₁₆ drill bit. The nails didn’t fit quite as tight as I wanted, so I set them with epoxy. I made the base from pine. Screws are inserted from the bottom of the pine into the bottom of the walnut to hold the two pieces together. I sharpened the nails by putting each one into a drill press and holding a metal file to it until it was shaped as I wanted it.

That worked well for the coarse hackle, but sharpening all those nails was slow work. For the fine hackle I needed 267 16D finish nails, 3½” long. I decided to use the nails as they were, without sharpening. I put them at ¼” spacing and this time I lined them up as on the corners of a square. I used graph paper with ¼” squares and marked where each line intersected, poking a nail through the paper to mark the wood. I used a ⅛” bit in the drill press for this. The nails fit snug enough that there was no need to use epoxy when I set them. Since there were so many nails in this hackle we added a ½” wide aluminum strip around the sides, screwing it on at two places on each side. It may or may not be necessary to keep it from splitting, but it really looks great!

fine hackles–antique and newly homemade

We used the plans from Woolgatherers as a guide to start, with added inspiration from the medium hackle I already had. Flax hackles can be as distinct as the maker. In days gone by, they would have been made on the farm or by a blacksmith. In her book, The Practical Spinner’s Guide to Cotton, Flax, and Hemp, Stephanie Gaustad says that the tines on hackles for flax should be square in cross section, with each side sharpened, rather than round like the nails I used. However, they are round on the antique medium hackle I have. I was able to purchase a fine hackle at the auction at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in May for $40. The cross section of the tines on that hackle is square. The edges may have been sharp at one time, but they aren’t now.

I thought I would eventually get around to sharpening the ends of some nails for a fine hackle to compare to the one with the plain nails, but I haven’t done that yet. Since I acquired the antique hackle, I don’t know if I will bother making another. I thought I might notice a big difference between the two fine hackles, but I have worked with them side-by-side and nothing stands out so far. Future work with the two hackles might reveal a bigger difference. I do like having fine, medium, and coarse hackles.

This is how people processed flax for linen on their farms until commercial fabric was available. Some people are learning this so they can demonstrate it for historical purposes. I think we need to look at it as, not only something done long ago, but as an activity that we can do on our homesteads and actually make clothes and other textiles for ourselves again. We can go from seed to garment, right at home!

There is a Fibershed movement going on that is exploring ways to make local fabric a viable production possibility. For that, you need to go beyond the flax brakes and hackles that I have described to increase production for a community. It just so happens that the Taproot Fibre Lab in Nova Scotia has been working on production scale equipment. Also, the folks at the Chico Flax Project in Northern California have been working on a community Flax to Linen project and there is a Flax to Linen group in Victoria, British Columbia. So, local linen is a possibility for communities in the not so distant future, although it already is a possibility in your backyard.

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Flax to Linen: Breaking and Scutching

Flax Brake and Scutching Board

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 be readily available until you make it yourself. You will need a flax brake and a scutching board.

The fiber you are after is located between the skin and the inner core of the flax stems. A brake is the tool that you will use to break up those outer and inner layers, freeing the flax fiber. I have seen the tool name spelled as both “brake” and “break”. In The Big Book of Flax, Christian and Johannes Zinzendorf mention that the noun and verb are spelled differently for some reason unbeknownst to them. Flax brake is also the term used in Linda Heinrich’s book Linen, so that is the spelling that I will go with.

Flax Brakes

If you just want to see if you can do it, probably any method of pounding the flax will break up those layers and result in releasing the fiber. However, if you are going to produce enough fiber to work with, you will want to be as efficient as possible. When I was learning about flax I was fortunate that my friend Becky loaned me her brake. Now I have my own and you can see them both in this photo. Becky’s is obviously smaller. She has used it in demonstrations with children and says she puts it on bricks to raise it to use herself. You see mine here when it was brand new—before I applied an oil finish. My talented husband made it from plans we purchased from Woolgatherers. Those plans were made from the design of an antique brake. The only change we made was to make ours several inches taller. It is put together with pegs and can come apart into four pieces—the top, two legs, and the bar between them.

My brake is made of oak left from a previous building project. It was rough-cut and my husband used his planer to smooth the pieces. To make the holes precise so the dowels fit well, he used a Forstner bit in his drill press. The wooden knives were formed on the table saw. This brake is a terrific tool to use. Becky’s brake is lighter and easier to tote around in a car when she takes it places for demonstrations. The legs on hers are screwed on and, as far as I know, she doesn’t take them off.

Tabletop Flax Brake

For portability, you can’t beat the brakes we used at the Flax to Linen class with Cassie Dickson at the John C. Campbell Folk School. They are easier to build, lightweight, and take up little space. Cassie brought this tabletop brake to the workshop at my place.

Notice the rounded edges on the bottom of the tabletop brake.

It works well and is great to take for demos, but I would like it to have a way to clamp it to the table for serious work. It is certainly easier to make than the larger ones. In order for it to work, you need to be sure and round the bottom ends on the inside pieces, as you can see in the photo.

Simple Tabletop Brake

Another simple brake that was available at the Folk School class is this one. You could use clamps on the pieces that stick out on the sides. Not all brakes have two wooden knives that go into slots to break the flax.

Antique Flax Brake

Some brakes are singles, like the antique brake in the photo. The wooden knives that come together to do the breaking are beveled on the larger free-standing brakes, but not on the tabletop models. The brake you make will depend on the tools you have available and your expertise in using them. Decide what features you want and go from there.

Scutching Board and Knife

The next step is scutching. The broken inner and outer pieces clinging to your flax fiber after breaking is called boon. The process of separating it from the flax fiber is called scutching. Boon can be whisked away by rubbing it off against a hard surface, often using a scutching board and wooden knife. My scutching board was made from a wide pine board that still had bark on the edges. Our source of such wood is our daughter and son-in-law’s sawmill. The scutching knife was cut from a 2×4. Both pieces were based on plans from Woolgatherers. We changed the top of the scutching board to make it easier to build and I am quite happy with it. I like the fact that my scutching knife can be stored by hanging it from the scutching board.

Tabletop Scutching Boards

At the Folk School we used the tabletop scutching boards that you see here. They are easy to take for demos. You don’t have to go to elaborate means to make a scutching board. When I first processed flax at home I used a scrap piece of plywood for the board and a piece of wood trim for a scutching knife. Actually, you could probably just whack it against a tree to release the boon.

Not all the boon will come off with scutching. Further cleaning will be done with hackles, but that is a story for another day. My next post in two weeks will be about hackles.

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