This year's flax crop, all processed and ready to spin.



 

This year I grew about twice the flax that I grew last year. It was a good year and the flax grew well, it seemed a bit taller than last year's crop. After pulling, retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling, I've got about 7.2 ounces of flax to spin. that's a lot better than last year's 1.4 ounces (you can read about last year's experiment in growing flax for fiber here).

 

Here's what I have to show for this year's effort:

 

 

 

The little blue bit is a small amount that I tossed into one of my Japanese indigo dye pots. It was only in there for about 10 minutes. I wanted to get a sense of how the flax would take up the indigo dye.

 

I did a much better job of retting this year, and the flax turned out much nicer and much softer than last year's small crop. There's still room for improvement, but I'm excited about spinning this up over the winter.

 

And I ended up getting about 8 ounces of seeds  for next year's crop. That's what I planted last spring, 8 ounces. I'm happy that I don't have to buy my seeds again. The seeds I had been getting were pre-treated with things to help protect against certain flax diseases. I wasn't too happy about that, but couldn't find any other sources that weren't also pre-treated. But now I have clean seed from this year's crop. Hopefully it'll be enough to keep the flax plot going.