Seeing this just truly makes me appreciate life. I truly am amazed and think the simplicity of life was just beautiful because you appreciated things and new that hard work paid off.
Until the winter months come around, food becomes scares, the house gets ice cold because no insulation, and your brother dies of sickness. Yeah, I'm an ass for saying it and purposefully juxtaposing this point of view, I know, but we can't romanticize the past.
Looks extremely time consuming, but clothes and sheets last for centuries. I have two French linen items that are over 100 years old. They look like they were made yesterday almost
What else is a woman to do in the long months of winter? Besides, if a woman and her daughters, young sons if they don't have daughters, don't spin into thread or yarn, depending on what they were spinning, then string up the loom and weave it into cloth which they then cut and sew into clothing, sheets, etc. And then there is the issue of the husband who wrestled a team of animals to plow a field, plant the seeds, pull the weeds, hand pull the ripe plants, remove the seeds, soak, dry, then beat it into submission using a good deal of exercise, finally leaving the Individual fibers separated and straight for his good wife to turn into new underwear. Do you have any idea how much we men would pout if after all the work we put into getting flax ready to spin, we are wearing holy drawers? Although, pre-WWII women never stopped. I remember my great grandmother had 3 places she would sit and there was sewing/mending and either a knitting, crocheting or embroidery she picked up the instant she sat down, which wasn't often. And her tiny little feet (4', 10") hit the floor at 4:30am 7 days a week when she was in her 70s just like always. She had a house to run. And job one was getting my great grandfather fed and out of the house for the morning, not because he was a jerk, quite the opposite, nicest man that ever lived, but he had a farm to run and she made SURE he did.
@@susangunn885 my comment got deleted for no reason, maybe it’s because I had a link in there. Anyways like I said if you want to look at antique French linen just search eBay or Etsy for “antique french linen” and many will pop up. Some with really good pictures and price. Cheers
no, very different as one might expect from the fibre that goes into the yarn. flax fibre is long, cotton fibre is short. linen is therefore more lustrous, but also stiffer, especially new cloth. it needs to be washed quite a bit to get soft. on the other hand, it lasts much longer, won't pill, and won't sag because it is less elastic than cotton. it is also stronger, especially when wet. it is cooler to wear. but it wrinkles very easily.
I work at a museum and I'm giving a tour featuring PA German textiles. This video was extremely helpful for me. As much as I read about the flax to linen process, it wasn't completely clear until I watched this. Thanks!
Thank you for making this. Very useful. I'm experimenting with growing a small amount of flax in the hopes of making a few yards of linen thread, just to do it. It's good to see what's needed to produce enough cloth to make clothing.
That woman using the cloth weaving machine is incredible! Such rhythm and harmony with that complex contraption. Imagine the scores, like her, who exemplified similar prowess when producing at the height of this industry.
Yeah, sounds a million times worse than literally any office job ever. Like, as a hobby, sure, looks fine. But to do that as a job for hours on end? Days on end? Weeks? Years? A lifetime? Fuck that.
Fair enough-it's at least visceral; the progress is visible and right there in front of you. Plus, pre-industry, I reckon you were making something for your family or commune.
Very true! You can imagine taking a day and exhibiting less care to the processes, would lead directly to an inferior product. All of our ancestors were desperate but, tough people.
At the height of the industry it was kids as young as 6 years old in horrific factory settings doing it, so....perhaps cottage industry-ish times a bit further back would be better?
This just melted me, man. I swear I was born in the wrong generation. I love everything DIY and homesteading. The simplicity of it all. The lower noise levels in the rural areas. *sigh*
Sure it seems like a romantic era, but that's how it looks from a video or when you just think about the pros, like being close to nature etc., but those people had to work really hard every day of their lives to survive, even when they were ill or the women pregnant. My great-grandparents and my grandparents had all kinds of health problems because of the very hard work, especially the women (fyi that was in Greece the early-mid 20th century) . There were no medicines, children were dying even from a common cold. Also, there was no sex equality, women were considered subservient. Though I am not fond of many things in our era, I believe that this is the best era if you consider how much the standard of living and equality has improved, at least in the western world. :) Excuse my English, not a native speaker.
_there was no sex equality_ It's because there is no sex equality objectively. Men and women are different. Only in our era, it's popular to pretend otherwise.
@@standev1 Being different doesn't mean one should be subservient to the other. In ancient Sparta women were considered equal, so equality isn't a new concept, just one that has been suppressed to the advantage of males.
@@deaddoll1361 I mean yes women were subservient back then but they also understood that they were both part of making the homestead work. Men were leaders made to protect (and die for) what their community along with the mutual farming and repairing of machines and tools of the time and in turn women helped raise children, cook and clean (though cleaning was more of a shared task). Both sexes contributed in their own ways. I mean hell my mom crochets and that's almost like loom work. Tedious and boring but for some reason she does it. Dont get me wrong but i think women might just like tedious "idle" work to have time to sit and think or chat with who ever may stop in while guys just prefer more frustrating intricate work like woodworking or blacksmithing. Not that theres anything wrong with either sex doing either job but it seams like there's something to it that draws both sexes to their more natural abilities.
@@deaddoll1361 also spartans wear buried in unmarked graves unless dying in battle or child birth so it seems they didn't really value anyone unless they contributed to furthering the society in either numbers or battle.
Bizarre! I had no idea. No wonder its textiles are so expensive. I'm always awestruck by the talent and art form involved in making textiles and garments.
In colonial times, if your house was burning down, you did your best to save your textiles. Probate lists would include your clothing and bedding. We are insanely spoiled with our cheap textiles.
corrie bergeron.. if flax is harvested at the green stage then it produces fine/weak fibers.. if it's harvested too late, then the fibers produced are known as "tow" and are strong, but too short for making any clothing/bedding/etc... you have to harvest it when it's at the "yellow" stage... you get about 10% fiber when you harvest the plant.. out of that fiber only around 3% is this kind of fiber.. around 7% becomes "tow"...
Very interesting and informative. The amount of work involved is astounding. And most people don't give a solitary thought to where their clothes come from when they put them on in the morning. Or food they eat for that matter. The worm will turn. You can't have 7 billion people on a planet, most of whom cannot even eat unless someone else grows, processes, and in some cases, cooks and serves it to them. Great vid.
amazing to see the processes required for all the basics of life and to see the hard work of others that many of us have little knowledge of nor appreciation for...no wonder what they used to say about idle hands......
Flax is spun the opposite direction from wool so the left hand is more dominant than usually. That seems to be the origin of the habit in some Eastern European and Baltic countries of the habit of wearing wedding rings on the right hand. The flax would tend to catch on the ring if worn on the left. Of course many were just too poor for rings. It's probably the source of the story about spinning gold from hay. Converting grass(flax) into valuable yarn. Also fine quality flax looks like a long lock of woman's fair hair gives rise to the English description flaxen haired.
This is difficult like crazy, have tried all the stages with flax/linen except spinning. Tried spinning with wool. Get ugly thick, uneven thread. Darn. Need to practise? Of course, in a museum, supervising pedagogical activities :) Nice video!! In Finland we call the stage where you plock the linen with roots 'nyhtäminen', the next is getting it wet, then drying , then 'lonkutus' (here men's work, in Fin 19th C women's), then comes 'lihtaus' (but a tool with two knife-edges is used, not like here), then 'häkilöinti' (almost 'hagging'?). :)
that man must have some really tough arms from doing that all the time! Fantastic stuff, this makes me appreciate Linen much more. :) I'm doing a fashion Design course and am finding out about Linen for a project. This is fantastic. :)
So nice to see, I once watched a Japanese movie and saw the women using and buying flax yarn/thread to weave and I often wondered how did the turn the flax to spin into yarn....😺
looks super difficult... especially the last contraption... who could ever come up with something like this anyway? takes some serious meditation and thought just to be able to achieve something like this... I tried finding flax seed too but there's so much more that goes into this... like all the virtues (machines) this takes just from breaking in the flax to harvesting the seeds for future generations... this was truly a gem...
There are hieroglyphics of Egyptians weaving on a loom from thousands of years ago. At the same time, Asians were weaving silk, so weaving has been around for a very long time and was probably developed way before even these cultures for it to be so widespread.
Thanks for the lesson. I'm seriously considering making textiles like this, but not with flax. With a local material native to my area. Agave fiber! The process is actually very very similar.
Linen textiles appear to be some of the oldest in the world: their history goes back many thousands of years. Fragments of straw, seeds, fibers, yarns, and various types of fabrics dating to about 8000 BC have been found in Swiss lake dwellings. Dyed flax fibers found in a prehistoric cave in Georgia suggest the use of woven linen fabrics from wild flax may date back even earlier to 36,000 years ago
Very likely. It was native to the fertile crescent/India area, so the group of humans that all non-African people came from that left Africa around 70,000 years ago likely discovered it in the middle east very early. Those that settled the area and stayed would have had thousands of years to play around with it. They likely started out making ropes with it and learned to weave over time. Early "farming" was just gathering abundant plants that already grew in those areas, and flax was one of them.
From my VERY limited experience, it's possible that retting may be a traditional but perhaps biochemically unecessary step. You can pull up a green plant, mechanically strip away the still-moist pith leaving the fibers, and twist them by hand into a serviceable thread. You don't have to rot away the pith; the linen fibers are aer still there. Perhaps retting simply makes the process more workable on the scale of many acres of flax, where the workers frankly are a season behind Mother Nature.
Where is this? At the end it thanks "Clark County" but are many of those. It's fascinating and love the discussion about left to right or right to left. How as that resolved?
Women were paid a cup or two of seed a day (by men) to spend all day weaving in ancient Sumeria thousands of years ago. They had hundreds of women doing this and traded linen for goods they didn't have, like wood. Doesn't sound like any kind of communal utopia to me. I felt sad for the women when I learned that.
Did he put linen to rot in water or he just puted in front of the sun, if so tell the time for it to rot and thank you i was searshing for traditional methodes. and thank to you i found it.
There are two ways to rett / rot flax. One is to dew rett it by leaving it in a field and turning it. The other way is use water and rett/rot it that way. Sometimes portions of ponds, streams, or lakes were used... it smelled very very bad...rotting plants! ;)
I'm doing a flax demonstration at a cultural festival. Could you please send me the link for this video? I would like to show this video while I am doing a demonstration on spinning flax. The building that the demonstration is being done in does not have wi-fi, so I will have to download the video and play it from an external source. Thank you.
The flax plant has the fibers around the outside and a weak core on the inside. After breaking they are partly separated, but some of the core is still mixed into the fibers. Scutching removes it.
🌾Clark County in end credits & says get more info. Also visit Colonial Williamsburg & look up The Box Factory video. Hard but sweet times, working together for good of all.🕊️
We put flax seed in the bird feeders, and some of them have fallen onto the ground and started growing in the small garden under the feeders. I so want to see if I can make linen with them, but it would have to be on a MUCH smaller scale than this. After seeing this, I may end up making something else like a flax bracelet.
The same thing has happened in my yard - a few flax seeds started growing this year because we have had more rain - not enough to make anything more than a bracelet, but thanks for the tips on how to proceed with the wish to create something with them.
An explanation of what your doing and why would be good for those who don’t know, also what with the text “ man’s work” women have processed flax without men since the start of using the plant and fiber.
fun fact, before the 1700's the spinning and fabric making was the men's job. But once industrialization happened women started doing more kinds of work.
A fun game to play is to take "men's jobs" and "women's jobs" and replace them with "Unskilled labor" and "Skilled labor" and see what falls into what.
Flax was near the fertile crescent when humans arrived there 70,000 years ago. They likely started using it in its reed form to tie things together and developed rope making and weaving over thousands of years. It likely took many happy accidents to develop this process over time.
That's called a countermarch floor loom. It gets its name from the way the peddles work - when you press a peddle down, it lifts one half of the threads while pulling the other half down to create a larger gap for the shuttle of thread to pass through. The rhythm of weaving resembles a "march" as you alternate pressing the peddles.
@linenfabricwholesale unfortunately, [b]cotton[/b] is NOT "environmentally friendly" (far too much pesticides used) hemp and flax are, but natural fibers are the way to go here, i've seen some amazingly soft cloth made from bamboo. --Rick
I'm just planting some, my aim is to make a shirt for myself. Assuming all goes well, anyone want to have a guess at the manhours needed from digging over the ground to wearing a shirt. 100 + 100 to make the equipment??? Anyone care to make an educated guess?
I'll never understand why the chores/duties were assigned by gender; women spinning and weaving the yarn while men were breaking, scutching, and hackling the flax. Either gender would have been able to do any of those chores.
It wasn't about gender. It was more about who's where mostly. Men spent more time outside than women for certain duties, so this fell into it. But you would find women at the flax break, too, just as you would find men keeping the fires going, and working on some dishes inside.
It depended on the country how the work got divided. English-speaking countries tended to divide the work as what's in the video. Other countries like Finland or elsewhere did differently.
can you imagine trying to do any of that nowadays without anything extra to pay attention to? like a tv going, or music playing, or anything? just the same tedious, monotonous thing over and over and over for hours and hours and hours. or was this like the equivalent of video games? young men and women would brag to each other about their high scores on the flax hackler or the loom? haa
There would generally be more than one person in the space doing the same thing, so you'd have people to talk to. There was also singing. You know all those folk songs everyone has? They were mostly developed while people were working like this, which is why so many of them are cyclical and can go on for ages if you want. There were many ways of passing the time.
Seeing this just truly makes me appreciate life. I truly am amazed and think the simplicity of life was just beautiful because you appreciated things and new that hard work paid off.
Until the winter months come around, food becomes scares, the house gets ice cold because no insulation, and your brother dies of sickness.
Yeah, I'm an ass for saying it and purposefully juxtaposing this point of view, I know, but we can't romanticize the past.
Am I the only one that noticed that stunning vegetable garden?!
NOPE
Looks extremely time consuming, but clothes and sheets last for centuries. I have two French linen items that are over 100 years old. They look like they were made yesterday almost
WOW. Just WOW.
What else is a woman to do in the long months of winter?
Besides, if a woman and her daughters, young sons if they don't have daughters, don't spin into thread or yarn, depending on what they were spinning, then string up the loom and weave it into cloth which they then cut and sew into clothing, sheets, etc. And then there is the issue of the husband who wrestled a team of animals to plow a field, plant the seeds, pull the weeds, hand pull the ripe plants, remove the seeds, soak, dry, then beat it into submission using a good deal of exercise, finally leaving the Individual fibers separated and straight for his good wife to turn into new underwear.
Do you have any idea how much we men would pout if after all the work we put into getting flax ready to spin, we are wearing holy drawers?
Although, pre-WWII women never stopped. I remember my great grandmother had 3 places she would sit and there was sewing/mending and either a knitting, crocheting or embroidery she picked up the instant she sat down, which wasn't often. And her tiny little feet (4', 10") hit the floor at 4:30am 7 days a week when she was in her 70s just like always. She had a house to run. And job one was getting my great grandfather fed and out of the house for the morning, not because he was a jerk, quite the opposite, nicest man that ever lived, but he had a farm to run and she made SURE he did.
@@paulbeck6841 Christ I couldn’t imagine working that hard everyday. I supposed they were used to it but still they must have been for sure tired.
@@susangunn885 my comment got deleted for no reason, maybe it’s because I had a link in there. Anyways like I said if you want to look at antique French linen just search eBay or Etsy for “antique french linen” and many will pop up. Some with really good pictures and price.
Cheers
no, very different as one might expect from the fibre that goes into the yarn. flax fibre is long, cotton fibre is short. linen is therefore more lustrous, but also stiffer, especially new cloth. it needs to be washed quite a bit to get soft. on the other hand, it lasts much longer, won't pill, and won't sag because it is less elastic than cotton. it is also stronger, especially when wet. it is cooler to wear. but it wrinkles very easily.
I work at a museum and I'm giving a tour featuring PA German textiles. This video was extremely helpful for me. As much as I read about the flax to linen process, it wasn't completely clear until I watched this. Thanks!
Thank you for making this. Very useful. I'm experimenting with growing a small amount of flax in the hopes of making a few yards of linen thread, just to do it. It's good to see what's needed to produce enough cloth to make clothing.
how did that go?
did you find out how much space you need to grow enough flax for making clothing?
I know where a guy could get thousands of acres of flax straw every year if we could figure out how to make this cloth on a mass scale
Would love to have this skill and knowledge. Great video!
I have so much more respect for linens now. Thank you for sharing!
Wow what a long process. SO cool. Thanks.
I have a new appreciation for all my linens ! Amazing work here!
Humans can be so brilliant at times, bravo.
My life has changed.... I love this SO much. Thank you for this video!!!!
That woman using the cloth weaving machine is incredible! Such rhythm and harmony with that complex contraption. Imagine the scores, like her, who exemplified similar prowess when producing at the height of this industry.
Yeah, sounds a million times worse than literally any office job ever.
Like, as a hobby, sure, looks fine. But to do that as a job for hours on end? Days on end? Weeks? Years? A lifetime? Fuck that.
IDK. Seeing something like that unfold physically through your effort might be satisfying. There was not a lot of entertainment back then.
Fair enough-it's at least visceral; the progress is visible and right there in front of you. Plus, pre-industry, I reckon you were making something for your family or commune.
Very true! You can imagine taking a day and exhibiting less care to the processes, would lead directly to an inferior product. All of our ancestors were desperate but, tough people.
At the height of the industry it was kids as young as 6 years old in horrific factory settings doing it, so....perhaps cottage industry-ish times a bit further back would be better?
Very good video to understand making of linen from flax.👍👍👍
Now imagine making a square mile of sailcloth for a ship that way...
This just melted me, man.
I swear I was born in the wrong generation. I love everything DIY and homesteading. The simplicity of it all.
The lower noise levels in the rural areas. *sigh*
Sure it seems like a romantic era, but that's how it looks from a video or when you just think about the pros, like being close to nature etc., but those people had to work really hard every day of their lives to survive, even when they were ill or the women pregnant. My great-grandparents and my grandparents had all kinds of health problems because of the very hard work, especially the women (fyi that was in Greece the early-mid 20th century) . There were no medicines, children were dying even from a common cold. Also, there was no sex equality, women were considered subservient. Though I am not fond of many things in our era, I believe that this is the best era if you consider how much the standard of living and equality has improved, at least in the western world.
:)
Excuse my English, not a native speaker.
_there was no sex equality_
It's because there is no sex equality objectively. Men and women are different. Only in our era, it's popular to pretend otherwise.
@@standev1 Being different doesn't mean one should be subservient to the other. In ancient Sparta women were considered equal, so equality isn't a new concept, just one that has been suppressed to the advantage of males.
@@deaddoll1361
I mean yes women were subservient back then but they also understood that they were both part of making the homestead work. Men were leaders made to protect (and die for) what their community along with the mutual farming and repairing of machines and tools of the time and in turn women helped raise children, cook and clean (though cleaning was more of a shared task). Both sexes contributed in their own ways. I mean hell my mom crochets and that's almost like loom work. Tedious and boring but for some reason she does it. Dont get me wrong but i think women might just like tedious "idle" work to have time to sit and think or chat with who ever may stop in while guys just prefer more frustrating intricate work like woodworking or blacksmithing. Not that theres anything wrong with either sex doing either job but it seams like there's something to it that draws both sexes to their more natural abilities.
@@deaddoll1361 also spartans wear buried in unmarked graves unless dying in battle or child birth so it seems they didn't really value anyone unless they contributed to furthering the society in either numbers or battle.
Bizarre! I had no idea. No wonder its textiles are so expensive. I'm always awestruck by the talent and art form involved in making textiles and garments.
In colonial times, if your house was burning down, you did your best to save your textiles. Probate lists would include your clothing and bedding. We are insanely spoiled with our cheap textiles.
corrie bergeron.. if flax is harvested at the green stage then it produces fine/weak fibers.. if it's harvested too late, then the fibers produced are known as "tow" and are strong, but too short for making any clothing/bedding/etc... you have to harvest it when it's at the "yellow" stage... you get about 10% fiber when you harvest the plant.. out of that fiber only around 3% is this kind of fiber.. around 7% becomes "tow"...
beautiful, wonderful pictures, lovely music, thank you
Very interesting and informative. The amount of work involved is astounding. And most people don't give a solitary thought to where their clothes come from when they put them on in the morning. Or food they eat for that matter. The worm will turn. You can't have 7 billion people on a planet, most of whom cannot even eat unless someone else grows, processes, and in some cases, cooks and serves it to them. Great vid.
I especially like that loom! The top of the beater is really interesting. It looks like a kind of a countermarch setup.
With my open bright eyes I was eating this footage. I have always wanted to know where linen came from and how. Thanks for sharing.
This is very inspiring and would love to experience every aspect of this development. Thanks for your time and effort to post this awesome video.
amazing to see the processes required for all the basics of life and to see the hard work of others that many of us have little knowledge of nor appreciation for...no wonder what they used to say about idle hands......
Flax is spun the opposite direction from wool so the left hand is more dominant than usually. That seems to be the origin of the habit in some Eastern European and Baltic countries of the habit of wearing wedding rings on the right hand. The flax would tend to catch on the ring if worn on the left. Of course many were just too poor for rings. It's probably the source of the story about spinning gold from hay. Converting grass(flax) into valuable yarn. Also fine quality flax looks like a long lock of woman's fair hair gives rise to the English description flaxen haired.
Doing history homework, out of curiosity I find this video. Quite interesting:)
This is difficult like crazy, have tried all the stages with flax/linen except spinning. Tried spinning with wool. Get ugly thick, uneven thread. Darn. Need to practise? Of course, in a museum, supervising pedagogical activities :) Nice video!! In Finland we call the stage where you plock the linen with roots 'nyhtäminen', the next is getting it wet, then drying , then 'lonkutus' (here men's work, in Fin 19th C women's), then comes 'lihtaus' (but a tool with two knife-edges is used, not like here), then 'häkilöinti' (almost 'hagging'?). :)
+Eva Ahl-Waris Mina olen amerikansuomalainen. I didn't know this was a thing our people did! :)
that man must have some really tough arms from doing that all the time! Fantastic stuff, this makes me appreciate Linen much more. :) I'm doing a fashion Design course and am finding out about Linen for a project. This is fantastic. :)
So nice to see, I once watched a Japanese movie and saw the women using and buying flax yarn/thread to weave and I often wondered how did the turn the flax to spin into yarn....😺
Great educational video 🙏🏻
looks super difficult... especially the last contraption... who could ever come up with something like this anyway? takes some serious meditation and thought just to be able to achieve something like this...
I tried finding flax seed too but there's so much more that goes into this... like all the virtues (machines) this takes just from breaking in the flax to harvesting the seeds for future generations... this was truly a gem...
There are hieroglyphics of Egyptians weaving on a loom from thousands of years ago. At the same time, Asians were weaving silk, so weaving has been around for a very long time and was probably developed way before even these cultures for it to be so widespread.
Beautiful work. I want to learn this work. I like to come as a volunteer to help and learn.
By hand...it may be a slow process but it's one of the best.
Thank you for this very informative video, and what a wonderful music!
Thanks for the lesson. I'm seriously considering making textiles like this, but not with flax. With a local material native to my area. Agave fiber! The process is actually very very similar.
outstanding! I got an interest in flax all of a sudden!
This is a great video! I used it in class to show my student how linen is made in colonial times.
This is wonderful. Thank you!
Fascinating, truly fascinating. Inspiring.
Linen textiles appear to be some of the oldest in the world: their history goes back many thousands of years. Fragments of straw, seeds, fibers, yarns, and various types of fabrics dating to about 8000 BC have been found in Swiss lake dwellings. Dyed flax fibers found in a prehistoric cave in Georgia suggest the use of woven linen fabrics from wild flax may date back even earlier to 36,000 years ago
Very likely. It was native to the fertile crescent/India area, so the group of humans that all non-African people came from that left Africa around 70,000 years ago likely discovered it in the middle east very early. Those that settled the area and stayed would have had thousands of years to play around with it. They likely started out making ropes with it and learned to weave over time. Early "farming" was just gathering abundant plants that already grew in those areas, and flax was one of them.
the good culture of man must spread by all meadia,.the work is soooooooper 🥀🥀💜💜
Very Interesting and informing... I liked the video
Dang that's a lot of hard work
Well this was excellent!
From my VERY limited experience, it's possible that retting may be a traditional but perhaps biochemically unecessary step.
You can pull up a green plant, mechanically strip away the still-moist pith leaving the fibers, and twist them by hand into a serviceable thread. You don't have to rot away the pith; the linen fibers are aer still there.
Perhaps retting simply makes the process more workable on the scale of many acres of flax, where the workers frankly are a season behind Mother Nature.
Those women look so peaceful working.
The loom was mesmerizing. @-@
Thank you so much for sharing.
Good video
Where is this? At the end it thanks "Clark County" but are many of those. It's fascinating and love the discussion about left to right or right to left. How as that resolved?
Clark County Indiana. The processing, spinning and weaving were filmed at Conner Prairie, a living history museum just north of Indianapolis, Indiana.
Amazing! How much do you sell you handspun, homegown, handwoven linen fabric for!?!
I need to scutch & hackle the grass out of my terriers coat. Linen is fabulous
Thank god we have machines to do most of these work....imagine the monotonous boredom when you try to do it yourself
Women were paid a cup or two of seed a day (by men) to spend all day weaving in ancient Sumeria thousands of years ago. They had hundreds of women doing this and traded linen for goods they didn't have, like wood. Doesn't sound like any kind of communal utopia to me. I felt sad for the women when I learned that.
Talk about spinning straw into gold, eh?
Thank you. I had not thought. Smart words. Rumpelstiltskin would've been proud
Did he put linen to rot in water or he just puted in front of the sun, if so tell the time for it to rot and thank you i was searshing for traditional methodes. and thank to you i found it.
There are two ways to rett / rot flax. One is to dew rett it by leaving it in a field and turning it. The other way is use water and rett/rot it that way. Sometimes portions of ponds, streams, or lakes were used... it smelled very very bad...rotting plants! ;)
I'm doing a flax demonstration at a cultural festival. Could you please send me the link for this video?
I would like to show this video while I am doing a demonstration on spinning flax.
The building that the demonstration is being done in does not have wi-fi, so I will have to download the video and play it from an external source. Thank you.
I don't suppose the Clark County Historical Society would happen to be Clark County, WA - would it?
Thank you so much:-)
Maybe I missed it, but was that flax retted? It didn't look like it... I think that would may it look a lot nicer and easier to work with.
Hi @Michael Duvall, what does the scutching do? Is it like peeling off an outer shell from the flax?
The flax plant has the fibers around the outside and a weak core on the inside. After breaking they are partly separated, but some of the core is still mixed into the fibers. Scutching removes it.
Where is this living history museum? Who are these people? Thank you.
🌾Clark County in end credits & says get more info. Also visit Colonial Williamsburg & look up The Box Factory video. Hard but sweet times, working together for good of all.🕊️
Conner Prairie, a living history museum just north of Indianapolis, IN
can flax be turned into rope instead?
We put flax seed in the bird feeders, and some of them have fallen onto the ground and started growing in the small garden under the feeders. I so want to see if I can make linen with them, but it would have to be on a MUCH smaller scale than this. After seeing this, I may end up making something else like a flax bracelet.
Oh cool! Thanks for the advice! Sorry I didn't see it until now. XD
The same thing has happened in my yard - a few flax seeds started growing this year because we have had more rain - not enough to make anything more than a bracelet, but thanks for the tips on how to proceed with the wish to create something with them.
@fridgeways so how did your shirt making go ? id love to have a go at growing flax and weaving from scratch but i imagine it would take 4ever lol
What weaving loom was this flax weaved on? It looks beautiful
barn frame loom.
This goes better to Enter Sandman by Metallica. The change in music would be beneficial.
An explanation of what your doing and why would be good for those who don’t know, also what with the text “ man’s work” women have processed flax without men since the start of using the plant and fiber.
fun fact, before the 1700's the spinning and fabric making was the men's job. But once industrialization happened women started doing more kinds of work.
A fun game to play is to take "men's jobs" and "women's jobs" and replace them with "Unskilled labor" and "Skilled labor" and see what falls into what.
Women were the weavers in ancient Sumeria and Egypt. They were paid in grain in Sumeria.
Did they eat flax seeds back then, or were the seeds just used to make more flax for linen?
it is for next harvest And fore extakting oil for paint. the linen oil is toxik not food.
Wow, who came about this?
I found them Michael, forgive my laziness.
Thanks!
Wow lovely
Sorry for the question. Just watched the end of the video.
Wow no wonder Linen costs so much. How did they ever figure all this out?
Flax was near the fertile crescent when humans arrived there 70,000 years ago. They likely started using it in its reed form to tie things together and developed rope making and weaving over thousands of years. It likely took many happy accidents to develop this process over time.
@@grandmaday9575 Thanks, I find this stuff fascinating!
What type of loom is being used to make the linen fabric?
That's called a countermarch floor loom. It gets its name from the way the peddles work - when you press a peddle down, it lifts one half of the threads while pulling the other half down to create a larger gap for the shuttle of thread to pass through. The rhythm of weaving resembles a "march" as you alternate pressing the peddles.
Wow, interesting....
Thanks
Awesome !! A great mystery solved today !!! :) :)
What is the tune?
This is SOOOOOOOOOO interesting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AWSOME!:D:D:D:D:D:D I would want to do the boys part.
that textile mill tho!
Cotton isn't very elastic ether; and yarn is made from wool, not cotton. I've been spinning since I was a little girl.
There's cotton yarn.
I want to do that on a day
@linenfabricwholesale
unfortunately, [b]cotton[/b] is NOT "environmentally friendly" (far too much pesticides used)
hemp and flax are, but natural fibers are the way to go here, i've seen some amazingly soft cloth made from bamboo.
--Rick
Natural fibers FTW
amazing :D
:38 -- When you break the flax what are you really trying to do?
Break the casing of the outside of the stalk. The fibres we want are outside the pith inside, but inside the hard stalk case.
I'm waching this because I have exam tomorrow about what is flax plant and how linen is made. UHH 😒
flax is supposed to be spun counter clockwise
I'm just planting some, my aim is to make a shirt for myself.
Assuming all goes well, anyone want to have a guess at the manhours needed from digging over the ground to wearing a shirt. 100 + 100 to make the equipment???
Anyone care to make an educated guess?
Proverbs 31:10-31
for those of us who don't know what is going on a commentary would be nice
can spin either way--just ply the other way
I'll never understand why the chores/duties were assigned by gender; women spinning and weaving the yarn while men were breaking, scutching, and hackling the flax. Either gender would have been able to do any of those chores.
It wasn't about gender. It was more about who's where mostly. Men spent more time outside than women for certain duties, so this fell into it. But you would find women at the flax break, too, just as you would find men keeping the fires going, and working on some dishes inside.
It depended on the country how the work got divided. English-speaking countries tended to divide the work as what's in the video. Other countries like Finland or elsewhere did differently.
Bei Zwangswerbung automatisch Daumen unten. video dadurch uninteressant.
can you imagine trying to do any of that nowadays without anything extra to pay attention to? like a tv going, or music playing, or anything? just the same tedious, monotonous thing over and over and over for hours and hours and hours.
or was this like the equivalent of video games? young men and women would brag to each other about their high scores on the flax hackler or the loom? haa
There would generally be more than one person in the space doing the same thing, so you'd have people to talk to. There was also singing. You know all those folk songs everyone has? They were mostly developed while people were working like this, which is why so many of them are cyclical and can go on for ages if you want. There were many ways of passing the time.
shes spinning the flax the wrong way
Men's work? Women's work? It looks like plain old work to me, for anyone who can take the time for repetitive motion tasks.
KKonaW