We are looking forward to hosting the upcoming Community Flax Demo in the Guild Garden this September, supporting the work of the Rust Belt Fibershed’s Rust Belt Linen Project. The Rust Belt Fibershed consists of a 250 mile radius outside of Cleveland, Ohio, including part of Michigan, Western Pennsylvania, Western New York, and Southern Ohio, including Cincinnati. The goal of the Fibershed is to build a community that collaboratively supports locally grown textiles in a way that decreases consumption of fast fashion and works to restore soil health—a truly circular fashion system that creates textiles from the soil that return to the soil. The Rust Belt Linen Project was born out of this goal, working with farmers, artisans and community members to experiment with growing and processing the flax plant in order to make local linen.

The Rust Belt Linen Project has been going strong for four years, with the 2022 cohort consisting of 33 community flax plots throughout the Rust Belt Fibershed region. Through the stewardship of these flax plots, participants are creating conversations around where our clothes come from and collecting data to support a bioregional linen economy, noting that over the last few decades 100% of flax-to-linen production has gone overseas and there is currently no flax or hemp textile production available in the United States.

The Weavers Guild of Greater Cincinnati is helping to support these efforts by hosting the Community Flax Demo on September 17, 2022 from 1:30pm-4pm. This free offering is open to anyone who is interested in lending a hand in processing the local flax grown in this project. Sew Valley, a local organization working to bring textile production back to the States, and a participant in the Rust Belt Linen Project who has been growing a plot of flax in the West End Community Garden in Cincinnati will be bringing their retted harvest for processing. Other flax growers are welcome to bring their own retted harvest to take through the necessary steps for processing into spinnable fiber, which include breaking, scutching, and hackling.

Breaking flax is the process of literally breaking up the woody part of the retted and dried flax plant, so that the chaff falls away from the fiber. This is done with a flax brake, a large wooden tool that crunches the flax plant through “w” shaped channels for maximum efficiency. To further remove the chaff from the fiber, the process of scutching, or scraping the flax is the next step. This is done by using a wooden tool, often called a scutching blade, sword, or knife against the flax and another piece of stabilized wood and shaking the flax intermittently so that the chaff falls away. Finally, the scutched flax is pulled through a hackle or hetchel, an instrument that looks like a bed of nails, which splits the flax into long, fine fibers (which are called strick) from the shorter fibers (called tow). Both strick and tow are spinnable, though they spin different qualities of yarn. Once spun, the flax officially becomes “linen” though it will need to be scoured and finished before use in weaving, knitting, crocheting and such.

To register or learn more about this event, check out Eventbrite. We hope to see you there!