Sources for Flax/Linen Processing Equipment

Hello everyone,

I plan on growing some milkweed this year to attract butterflies, eat the immature cooked seed pods, and make yarn out of the bast fiber. Although milkweed is not the same as flax, because it is also a bast fiber like flax and hemp, a great deal of the same equipment used to process flax could also be used to process milkweed bast as well. I have seen several threads on processing flax on this website, but I cannot find any souces to by a flax brake, scutching knife or flax hackles. None of the major spinning suppliers that I know of sell flax processing equipment. I already have a drop spindle, cotton carders, and spinning wheel, so I can already spin the fiber once it is processed.

I ran around and harvested a link from one of r ranson's posts in this thread.

This site sells plans for building your own tools. I hope this is of use to you.

I would love to see pictures of your process and results when you are processing your fibers!

This is a really great question!

Short answer, there aren't many places to buy this equipment.  

there is increasing demand for this and I suspect now would be the time to start making and selling flax processing equipment.

The full gamut of 'proper' (and I say that with the inverted commas) equipment is quite an investment in money or labour and takes a lot of space to store.  To me, it seems that this is a good investment for a group or for someone who is processing a lot of fibre (more than a couple of towels worth) each year.  I really like the idea of flax to linen groups (that's what got me started on this adventure) as there are so many skills within the group.  A lot of the equipment my local flax to linen group uses were built by members.

Another source of textile tools is to look for vintage and antique sources (Etsy, local auctions, UsedAnywhere).  If well cared for, vintage tools are often better than modern made ones because they were built to last and be used for a few hundred years.  

Many of the fibres can be extracted using things we find around the house.

Breaking - needs something to crush the dry, retted stems (mallet, gloved hands)
Scutching - knocking off the bits of stiff stem from the fibres (a stick and a board, or a butter paddle)
hackling - combing out the fibres and organizing them into lengths (comb, florists frog)

I am more sceptic about rentability of making clothes than food at home...
How much do we need to invest in equipment if we buy it all?
If this does not have use all year long because we are not professional, that is a lot of equipment on earth that serves little....

Xisca Nicolas wrote:I am more sceptic about rentability of making clothes than food at home...
How much do we need to invest in equipment if we buy it all?
If this does not have use all year long because we are not professional, that is a lot of equipment on earth that serves little....

We don't have to buy the equipment as every part can be done at home with things found around the home.  In Ancient Egypt, they used a mallet, a bowl of water, and a stick to make the yarn from linen.  They made some of the finest textiles in human history this way.  The looms were often sticks in the ground.

We can go all out and buy/make the big equipment.  But it's not necessary.  It takes a lot of storage space and one person would be hard-pressed to process enough flax per year to justify the investment.  Of course, if they want to, that's as good a reason as any.

But a group of people - that's much more worthwhile to invest in the big equipment.  We have processing days where we have the equipment out and ready to use.  Maybe five of us get together to use it.  We grab one handful and work our way through the equipment.  We usually choose a public space like a farmers market or festival, so we can educate people about where their clothing comes from.  A few sessions like this a year and we have plenty of fibre for spinning all winter.  

I'm limited on what equipment I can make at home. A good portion of the power tools at my house are burried under twenty years worth of my father's clutter. I also don't have any experience in carpentry to make a flax brake. I guess I could try to hunt down an antique flax brake and flax hackle. It should be comparatively easy to make a scutching knife and board.

Here's photos of my DIY flax processing equipment. It is plain, simple, and made with little knowledge of commercial flax processing equipment. It bolts to a general purpose threshing box. The corn sheller bolts to the same box.

Perhaps more forum members here should share how they made or acquired the flax processing tools they use on this thread. Chances are that some of the specifications might be simple enough to build without expensive power tools. Most of the power tools at my house are buried under junk left in the garage so it's not convenient for me to build anything too complicated.

https://permies.com/t/49871/Alden-Amos-Big-Book-Handspinning
Has some plans for some of the flax equipment in his book.

I've recently come across a YouTube video by Sally Pointer a few months ago (Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBnPuzY1GUQ) where she makes a flax hackle out of slow plum thorns (Prunus spinosa) and a wooden paddle. Although she uses a drill press in her video, it may also be possible to drill the holes with a stone awl. The stone awl might actually give better holes for the thorns since the resulting holes will be sloped inwards from the opening.

Since I didn't have a drill press, I visited a friend's house and used his drill press to bore the holes in the plank of wood that I used. Sloe plums are also not native where I live so I settled with the next best native alternative which is the thorns from wild honey locust trees (Gleditsia triacanthos). Most domestic cultivars of honey locust do not have many thorns, but I was lucky enough to find a thorny plant that had grown back from a root stock and another wild plant with large thorns. Honey locust thorns seems to be far less straight than the sloe plum thorns that Sally Pointer showed in her video so I tried to align the thorns to point in one direction as much as possible.

As with the video example, this homemade hackle tended to drop and break thorns while it was being used regularly so I needed to occasionally stop and either put in new thorns or refit the thorns in the holes. I'm suspicious this may be less likely to happen with holes that are bored out with a stone awl.

My first test with this hackle was done on winter retted dogbane and milkweed fiber. I'm more surprised that I had any leftover line fiber at all than the fact that most of the fiber was short tow since the plant stems were exposed to outdoor moisture and weather far longer than would typically be done for dew or field retting.

Other than back to basics is there some reason for going to thorns?

I would have thought that something like horse shoe nails would have been the modern answer?

C. Letellier wrote:Other than back to basics is there some reason for going to thorns?

I would have thought that something like horse shoe nails would have been the modern answer?

I would've picked carpentry nails had I the money to buy them, but I was trying to go as cheap as possible. I originally wanted to use porcupine quills, but they cost too much to be practical in any way.

Thorns should work for the first passes. A florist frog is nice for the final pass if one wants fine fibre.

r ranson wrote:Thorns should work for the first passes. A florist frog is nice for the final pass if one wants fine fibre.

I will definitely be saving up money for a flower frog since I  expect it to hold up better than the cheap $7.00 USD craft brush that I got from my craft store. After about eight hours of use, the tines on this brush are now permanently bent. I might also try a dog brush, but I don't expect it to perform much better.

Some context on why I was using a cheap brush: I was trying to follow a YouTube tutorial by Marina Skua (Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U1B_SfIG-E) on how to process leftover tow fiber from hackling flax fiber. Not wanting to permanently damage my pair of Ashford cotton carders, I bought a cheap $ 7.00 brush from my local craft store. Although this cheap brush now has permanently bent tines, it at least got the job done and cleaned up the bast fibers further than the thorn hackle. I now have a handful of small hanks of long tow fiber and line fiber. The total amount of fiber is 4.6 ounces of Milkweed bast and 1 ounce of dogbane bast fiber.