69) My First Flax

I mentioned back in this post that I'd dressed my Traveller with a strick of flax for the Tudor demo.  With the costume taking right up to the last minute to finish, I didn't get time to practise much on the flax spinning before the demo, though I had made sure I could basically make it 'go', just so I wouldn't embarass myself too badly.  Here's what my newly-dressed distaff looked like, in case you've forgotten:

  (Geodyne is right, by the way.  It looks huge because it is huge.  Actually, the cone for holding the flax could have done with being a bit bigger still; it was a bit short for the lovely, long, line flax I had.)

The day after the demo I sat down to have a proper play with the flax, and within half an hour I had improved so much that I could spin it from the distaff one-handed, with either hand.  This isn't *quite* such a difficult feat as it sounds, because the fibre is held and, to a certain extent, controlled by the distaff and the binding, and all your other hand has to do is draw fibre down at the appropriate rate and thickness.  I wish I'd figured this out before the demo, because it looks very impressive!  I'm not sure I could manage the trick of spinning on a 'gossip wheel', though.  A gossip wheel (or double-flyer wheel), has two flyers, which allows you to spin two threads at once, one hand each.  Very cool:

Anyway, flax is traditionally spun wet.  That is, you dampen your fingers (rather than the fibre) as you spin, which allows you to smooth down the fibre and produce a better thread.  I had decided to spin at least some of this first strick dry, because of the logistical difficulties of adding a water-pot into the demo, and also because I didn't want to have to keep wetting and drying my hands as I demonstrated various other things.

About halfway through spinning the strick, my first bobbin was full.  It was also very, very hairy looking:

…which was the point at which I started to add some water into the equation.

I never really got the hang of spinning one-handed with wet fingers, though I think a better-prepared distaff would have helped.  I needed one hand to draft (dry), and another to do the smoothing.  It seems that flax is sort of sticky when damp, and trying to draft with wet fingers was mostly messy.

The second bobbin, spun damp, was much less hairy looking:

Hardly perfect, but a definite improvement.

I rewound each bobbin into two sections, and plied them against themselves (i.e. wet with wet; dry with dry).  Interestingly, the flax spun dry seemed much more brittle; I lost count of the number of breakages I had when rewinding and plying.  I don't think I had a single one with the wet-spun.  That alone is probably more than enough to make up for the inconvenience of spinning with wet fingers!

After plying, I compared the two methods:

(The dry spun yarn is in the top part of the photo; the wet spun yarn is below)

Both yarns seemed much less hairy than I'd expected when looking at the singles, and they were remarkably similar.  There is a definite difference though; more evident in person, but reasonably clear when looking at separate strands against a dark background (my jeans).  First, the dry spun:

Next, the wet spun:

So, what's next?  Well, the yarns should be scoured before they're really considered 'done', to remove the waxes and other stuff still left in the fibre.  I'll probably weave these samples into a cloth of some sort; teatowels or breadcloths, perhaps.  Given the way the yarns behaved in plying, and the fact that it's so much hairier and will catch on the reed, I'll probably use the dry-spun as weft.

I could also knit the wet-spun into a top similar to Gretel, from cocoknits.  The texture of the yarn would be perfect for this sort of semi-sculptural cloth.  But then, I have several more stricks, so there's no need to fret; I can always spin more.

Yes, this has been my first flax, but I don't think it will be my last.