After dabbling with flax for a few years now,  growing and processing summer flax, winter flax and doing flax seed giveaways, this year is where I add flax properly to my bast fibre textile skills. 

                            

I am very excited to receive DYCP funding to support my practice and develop my skills in working with flax. It could not have come at a better time, as I had already embarked on an ambitious project to create the UK’s first community-grown flax garment, Let’s Grow Flax . I knew this would be a challenging target, and that I would need access to expert technical support in a few areas: spinning the long line fibre of linen is a vanishing skill in England. Also I wanted to know more about the potential of industrial linen garment production, and last not least establish a collaboration between flax growers textile makers and small scale processing facilities like the Fantasy Fibre mill in Scotland.

With 30+ enthusiastic community members involved in the project, and a big story to tell, I am grateful that DYCP is also funding the development of my marketing and networking skills.

In the first phase of the LGF project we sought to produce 15 kilos of retted flax, which we processed into 2KG kilos of fibre. The plan was to do some of the breaking, hackling and scutching in group workshops involving community members, and to send some of the flax sent north to our project partner Fantasy Fibre Mill to process. We yielded a little less than I hoped, but I believed we still had enough to make the jeans or a similar garment, which was the challenge we had set ourselves.

I am so looking forward to this journey and to add new skills to my repertoire as textile designer maker.

BTW in my workshops and out demos we have shown many visitors already how to create string or cordage from flax line fibre, Many bush craft artists like a 16 ply plant bast fibre string for their bows, So could not resist the pun in the title of the blog :)