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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Flax: Planting, processing and working with it (Read 6648 times)
