Once the flax bundles dry, the seeds are removed by rippling - combing the seed pods off the stems using a wooden or metal comb with a single row of teeth. Flax was (and, in many ways, still is) a valuable and much-needed commodity. It also provided strong fibers that could be used to weave the sails for fishing vessels and trading ships, as the fibers of flax increase in strength when they are wet. This fiber provided the fiber for clothes for the family, the coverings for the bed at night and the grave-clothes for wrapping the dead. For millennia, growing flax and processing it for spinning and weaving was one of the major tasks in any woman’s life. During medieval times, linen was the most important plant-based cloth available in Western Europe. – Gervase Markham, The English Housewife (1615)įor more than 8,000 years, flax has been cultivated as an important crop for food, medicine and textile production as linen. Whether it be of hemp or flax, for from these two only is the most principal cloth derived,Īnd made both in this, and in other nations” “The next thing to this, which our English housewife must be skilful, is in the making of all sorts of linen cloth, Early Anglo-Saxon Women’s Peplos & Tunics.Introduction to Threads in Tablet Weaving.Table-top Scale Warp-Weighted Loom: Assembly.The Idea: Why Build a Warp-Weighted Loom?.A Short Overview of Loom Types and Their Place in Weaving History.Spinning Straw into Gold: Creating Linen Thread.A Tactile Tour Through the Spinning Fibers.Growing and Preparing Flax for Spinning.