In this thread I will post about my experiences with flax and the results. Over the weeks and months while working with it I will continuously add information (in a most probably not very structured manner ;) ). You're welcome to ask questions and contribute your experiences with flax. I'm also happy to hear your comments and ideas concerning the fibers, seeds, products, ... or possible further projects with them!

So here the first entry:
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As announced elsewhere here some pictures of a sling made out of flax fibers. The whole sling was constructed "from the seed", meaning that I planted, harvested and processed it myself. This sling in particular was made out of raw fibers, meaning that I did not ret the flax. The resulting fibers contain a high amount of natural oil, which you can also smell and feel when you work with it.

In the first appended picture you can see the sling in the middle. In the background you can see some dried but not retted flax plants with the seed pods removed. To the right you see a bundle of processed, not retted fibers, and to the left some short fibers, a byproduct of the fiber extraction process. Out of this fibers I plan to make some coarse string. Below the sling you see some flax seeds. I also wanted to include some seed pods, but unfortunately I already threshed and winnowed them all.

To remove the seed pods after the harvest and to extract the fibers I used only simple tools: An improvised comb (some nails through a piece of wood), gloves and a self made round wooden mallet. For the winnowing I was not that "primitive" and constructed a sort of air classifier with a vacuum cleaner and some PVC pipe. I will post later (some weeks) about this two processes in detail.

You see that the sling has two colours: Green at the release cord, fair at the retention cord. The colour depends on how long the fibers (or the plant while drying) was exposed to sunlight. As I dried most of my flax in a barn, protected from sunlight, the fibers are green when they are freshly extracted. If they are exposed to direct sunlight they change their colour within one, maximally two weeks. The explanation of this process seems to be simple: The chlorophyll of the plant is degraded by the sunlight. The fibers from retted plants, of which you can see some at the bottom of the second appended picture, are a bit darker than this "sun-bleached" raw fibers.

The fibers of not retted plants are harder to extract by the way I did it, are also coarser and contain more "plant-glue" and wooden parts as the fibers from retted plants. But they contain a much higher amount of natural oil. As soon as I have made a sling out of fibers from retted plants, I hopefully can determine which are more durable.

The third and fourth pictures are close-ups of the braided sling, respectively the belly of the sling. I worked this sling completely dry, so I did not use water while working with the fibers. I will most probably make a second sling out of fibers from not retted plants and work them slightly damp, to see what is easier to handle and produces the better results.

Upcoming topics:
- winnowing of flax with a home made air classifier
- my current fiber extraction process with primitive tools in more detail.

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Teg, that's not only fascinating but also an amazin sling! What a cool experience that must be to have done it from the ground up hehe

Excellent work!
I'm curious how retted vs non retted fibers behave to use and abrasion.

Truly awesome! very nice sling.

This is how slings are supposed to be made.   

Teg, that is fascinating! My greatest compliments to you!

Making a sling from seeds must be a great experience.

Imma grow hemp  :P
Maybe i can get a permit to grow. Must be funny when i go to get a permit with  dreadlocks,and tellem that i want to grow hemp. And try not to laugh..and my eyes not to be red.

So, my next entry: Fiber extraction from the dried flax stems.
I start with dried flax from which the seed pods were removed previosly. In the following two videos I show you my current process to extract the fibers.

Breaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO59QumasaQ (10 min)
Scutching and Heckling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg6h0i1zcGU (7 min)

Tools used: Wooden mallet, a glove, improvised comb

In the beginning I did the same process without the glove. It is possible but in the end you will pick quite an amount of wood out of your fingers.  ;)

The only dried and not retted plants are much harder to work than the retted ones. You also have a higher yield of fibers with the retted plants. I'm very curios which fibers are more durable and give the better results.

During the process quite an amount of short fibers is produced. Save it! You can easily twist rough strings out of it.

Before you start working make sure that the flax is really dry. It is much easier to work dry flax than slightly damp flax. You even feel the humidity of the air.

great videos. 8-)

sehr schön teg! ;)

I understand that the flax has to almost rot before it's ready for use, otherwise it's too tough. True?
Any plans for flaxseed oil?

:o WoW :o Nice tutorial .... hmmmm ..
Cold press Linseed Oil next ???

Thanks for the replies!


slingbadger wrote on Dec 19^th, 2013 at 6:23am:

I understand that the flax has to almost rot before it's ready for use, otherwise it's too tough. True?

Partly yes, partly no. To rot the flax is called "retting". If you want fine and long fibers, like for spinning, you have to ret it. The extraction of the fibers is much harder from only dried flax like I use in the video. In the first video I show in the beginning a bundle of retted flax.
However it is possible to extract the fibers from not retted flax like I do in the video. The fibers are coarser and the process is less efficient but you can definitely use the fibers to make slings.


Quote:

Any plans for flaxseed oil?

I have no idea what I will do with the seeds. I have around half a kilo of them. Around 200g  I need again in the spring to plant the new batch. Either I will eat the rest (e.g. for salads and bread) or make oil out of it. However 300 g will not yield much oil. I will see. Maybe a little bit of everything.

Next point will be to process the remaining flax and play around with the fibers, both short and long ones, retted and not. I still have maybe 20 not retted bundles and 50 retted bundles.

How rewarding and fulfilling it must be to make your sling from scratch like that.  Great thread!!! 

Genial Teg
:o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o

Teg,

please bare my children....

Well then, it's time to write a new entry as I have made additional experiences.

I haven't had time to make much different things with the fibers (The sling with the retted flax is still in construction since 4 months...) but I have thoroughly used the sling I made out of the not retted flax, which I described in the first post. First of all, I don't think that the pain to process the not retted flax is worth the result. I had the hope that the fibers are more durable than the not retted ones and to a certain extent also water proof due to a higher natural oil content. Regarding the durability I'm quite satisfied. Until now I didn't have to replace the end of the release cord. But I believe that similar results can be also obtained with the retted fibers I have.

Regarding the water proofness the experiment was a complete failure. And I was stupid enough to test it with the whole sling and not with a tiny sample braid. I took the sling out to a rainy slinging session and the fibers were soaked up more or less instantly with water. The fibers
swelled and after drying, as expected, the braid became quite loose. Too lose for my likings, but the sling can still be used.

In addition this way I detected a construction error: At one point I added too many fibers to one single strand. This beginning now slipped through the braid because the braid became loose due to the soaking. Now I pushed this end back into the braid and will most probably stiffen the area by melting some wax into it, maybe even an additional wrapping or some seewing.

However I discovered another thing: The whole fibers changed their colour during the soaking. The fibers at the release end are now nearly white and also the rest of the sling brightened quite a bit from a blond colour to a very fair blond / sallow ("weissblond" or "fahl" I would say in german). The more it got soaked the fairer it got. Well, at least I know now how to make white strings beside bleaching it in the sun.

Flax projects in the pipeline:
- Finish the sling made out of retted flax.
- Make a sling out of the short fiber waste. I already have about 1 meter of rough rope turned out of it.
- Get experience with spinning.

well, you are probably removing the stuff from the retting that colors the fibers.

squirrelslinger wrote on Apr 30^th, 2014 at 6:37am:

well, you are probably removing the stuff from the retting that colors the fibers.

I soaked the sling made out of the not retted flax ;). But yes, I guess by soaking it I flushed some of the colourant out.

I just finished winnowing my last flax seeds. From ca. 180 gr. sown flax seeds I harvested a bit over 500 gr. of flax seeds.

According to some web sources the yield per hectare of fiber flax shall be around 0.9 t to 1.8 t seeds.
Therefore for my approximately 10 m^2 I should have harvested around 0.9 to 1.8 kg seeds. Accordingly to this numbers I have performed quite bad  ;). I'm still satisfied with the yield being unskilled and having improvised quite a bit during the processing.

Basically, you're doing experimental archeology. We really need more people doing this.

slingbadger wrote on May 5^th, 2014 at 6:25am:

Basically, you're doing experimental archeology. We really need more people doing this.

Mhh... I actually haven't thought about that... Thank you for pointing this out! The next time I think I will write a lab journal, as currently the documentation of my work is, beside this thread and two youtube videos, not existing.

The next piece: This time it's a braided sling from retted flax, as usually with flax from my own production. I have used around 4 of these bundles you see in the background. The extraction of the retted fibers was a lot easier than for the not retted ones.
Usually I cut all the fuzzy fiber remains away. This time I left it longer than I use to. It gives it a bit a prehistoric look.
The braid itself is very smooth and less stiff than a sling braided from raffia fibers but stiffer than when braided with normal strings. The sling has a darker colour than the not retted fibers.


The next tasks in my flax project will either be learning to spin the flax to make strings and threads, using up the short fiber waste or trying to bleach the fibers to get pure white fibers.

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Good job Teg! I'm curious how it holds to repeated use. AKA abrasion resistance,and whip cracking the release.

Until now I used it for about 2 hours with tennis balls and a few stones. The whip cracking at the release took away much less fibers than with raffia (bast fibres) or when you unravel normal hemp or flax package string. It's the same as with the not-retted flax fibers. About the abrasion resistance in the pouch I can not yet give you information as I did not test it enough with stones, which have a much higher abrasion than water filled tennis balls. I will keep you up to date when the sling will show first signs of wear and tear.

It looks like this is the real sling production, to completely grow the future sling from seeds in the ground!