Dew retted flax from Glen Valley

This year, my second year of experimenting with growing and processing flax for linen, I had four good sized beds of flax growing. I planted the first two early in the season and they finished up nicely. There was enough time in the season for them to sufficiently dry, get rippled and wet retted. They are now tied up into a couple of dozen stricks for use in my "Flax to Linen" workshop that I hope to have at FibresWest 2014.

The other two beds presented different challenges.They were started later in the season and by the time they were ready to be harvested -- had finished their blooming, the rains had come in. The rain makes it difficult for anything to dry, but it also causes the plant to fall over. When it falls over, it bends. I have learned that this "bend" is not a characteristic that you want your drying/retting flax to have.

I haven't been able to sufficiently dry these last two beds of flax, so the rippling didn't happen. In fact, I got busy and lost track of them, so on the ground they went. Not a bad thing as you will see. 

What's below is the flax from the very last bed dew retting on the ground right on the lawn. It's been raining a lot and next week we are rumoured to be hosting some below zero temperatures. Let's see how flax likes that.

You can see why dew retting creates a grayish linen. The molds that melt the pectin covering away stain it.

Below is batch #3. It's a hybrid of dew retting at the beginning and most recently, wet retting. Even though the dew retting was coming along fine and I was starting to see the flax fibres being released, it was slimy and I wanted that gone.

So I tossed it back into the wet retting pool. It's been cold so the retting is going slowly. There is no foaming and swamp smell like I got with the earlier wet retting.

The constant rain keeps the water fresh. My challenge with this is how to dry it?  I'll have to take it out soon and put it onto drying racks that will sit in my greenhouse over the winter. Won't dry much, but at least won't get wetter.

Life in the valley is good. I have space to do these kinds of experiments, not sure how I'd so that if I lived in town. 

Story of a shawl - Part 2

I tried another shawl with the Waterfall yarn I made during Spinzilla week. This is the Spiral Staircase pattern from Ravelry. Easy peasy. While it does do what I was hoping it would so, show off the subtle colour gradations - I should have used larger needles. This shawl is too small for my liking and the fabric that knit up -- on the 4mm needles is too dense. I'm going to try it again with 6mm needles so the fabric will be looser and have a chance to drape.

And I will plan it better, so I use every inch of the yarn, unlike the sample above.

Story of a shawl - Part 1

This incomplete story is the tale of a shawl -- from fibre to yarn to shawl. The shawl itself is not complete as is this blog post. But stay tuned. I'll find my camera and take pictures of the next phase of this art object.

This shawl started out as a lovely roving from the Sweet Georgia Yarns fibre club. The colourway is called Waterfall.  In the notes that accompanied the roving, Felicia suggested we try an Ombre approach. Separating all the colours, spinning them in the single colour sequence and then chain plying. So that's what I did.

This was the first thing I spun  for the Spinzilla contest. And here are all the rolags nicely carded into the colourways and put into some kind of Ombre order.

After an hour of spinning, I was mostly finished with the blue.

After a couple of hours, the green was done too.

[Not sure why this photo is the size of a postage stamp.]

Here is the final yarn, chain plied to preserve the colour ways. You can see the silk shining through.

And here's the first attempt at a shawl. It's the Adhara Rainbow Shawl -- pattern was from Elann.com but I can't find it anymore. It's essentially a feather and fan pattern that grows.

I kept getting lost in the pattern and ended up un-knitting more than I was knitting. So decided that the yarn/pattern were telling me something.

So I tried another one.

Photos of that one tomorrow.