#fail - Flax doesn't like to be frozen

I think the title says it all -- flax fibres don't like to be frozen. Or if it wasn't the freezing that weakened them, it was the amount of time they spent in the water. And the freezing didn't help either.

Here's what properly wet-retted flax fibres look like. They have a lovely colour and they are long, strong and lustrous. The piece on the bottom is nearly a metre long. I have 27 stricks of this wet-retted flax. This was from stuff that I planted early in the year. It had time to grow, bloom, get harvested, dry out, get rippled, wet-retted and then had time to fully dry before all the rains came.

This is the dew-retted and then wet-retted flax experiment. The flax fibres, while released, are weak and short. They've broken up.

I have a small kiddy pool full of this -- and to make matters worse, it smells like a dead swamp rat. Really. I threw it in the water because it was smelly and wanted to urge on the retting process. But then the cold snap came and it was frozen solid for about ten days. It smells so bad I don't want to touch it.

It's tricky to photograph something in the water, but here it is. I have one more mini-field's worth of flax out on the north lawn retting. Like this batch, it didn't get harvested until after the rains came, so it never dried and got rippled. But it has been on the lawn. And while it had indeed rained and snowed, it was never under water for any length of time. I just checked it out and it the flax fibres are releasing.

The rain is supposed to stop sometime today and then I'll scoop it up and put it on a drying wrack on the porch to start the drying process. Fingers crossed I'll have something to play with when it's all done.

LESSONS LEARNED

1. Buy good seeds and buy the linen variety, Linum usitatissiumum "Evelin".
2. Plant your flax as early as you can. You can plant it when you plant your lettuce, peas, spinach and potatoes. You want it to grow and be done during the hot summer so it has time to dry, get rippled, retted and dry again.
3. If your flax falls over due to rain or wind, set it upright as soon as you can. If it stays tilted, it will have bend in it which makes it difficult to work with.

I am sure I will learn more as I go onto the next stage of breaking, scutching and hackling to get the fibres ready for spinning.