Local Color Dyes

May 15, 2012December 19, 2023

Flax Grids: Evelin at Amethyst Farm

Earlier today I was searching the web for interesting tid-bits about Evelin to share, to spice up all these admittedly monotonous photos. I came across Bast and Other Plant Fibers by Robert R. Franck (CRC Press, 2005). Franck lists Evelin as one of 31 fiber flax cultivars approved for use in Europe as of 2002. I didn’t get far enough to figure out why these 31 were approved in particular, or what the differences were between them. A research task for another day. Among other things, I learned that I’ve been spelling the variety “Marilyn” incorrectly. It is actually spelled Marylin, even though I thought I had read that it’s named after Marilyn Monroe. While it merits being on the list, for whatever reason, Evelin was not among the most popular varieties grown in western Europe in 2002. That honor went to four other varieties: Agatha, Hermes, Marylin, and Diane.

I had to laugh at one comment the author made. In outlining the reasons for low productivity in certain countries, he cites one reason as being “the innate conservatism of peasant agriculture.” I think I must fall into that category.

Here are the photos of Evelin growing at Amethyst Farm in Amherst, MA. As before, each square is a foot square, and the full grid is 4 feet square. The images appear in order, numbered from 1 to 16 across the grid from bottom left corner to top right. See my original post for more info on this set-up.

May 14, 2012December 19, 2023

Flax Grids: “Variety Not Specified” at Small Ones Farm

Here are the photos of the “variety not specified” (v.n.s.) flax at Small Ones Farm in South Amherst on April 29th. They are posted in order from square 1 to square 16 in the grid. For an explanation of the grid numbering system, and what these flax grids are all about, see my last post, “Belated Photos of Flax Grids: Evelin at Small Ones Farm.”

Above is a photo showing the height of the vns seedlings on April 29th at Small Ones Farm.

May 14, 2012December 19, 2023

Belated Photos of Flax Grids: Evelin at Small Ones Farm

Back on Sunday April 29th and Monday April 30th I set up one-foot-square grids in my flax beds. I used sticks to stake out the one-foot increments, and flagging tape to outline the edges. They are not perfectly square, but it’ll do. At each plot (Small Ones Farm, Amethyst Farm, and the community garden at Amethyst Brook) I used a different color flagging tape for each variety, but didn’t plan ahead enough to use the same color for each variety at each place. That would have been handy, but too late now. As you might suspect, it is hard to tell from a photo of little green plants just exactly which variety of seed or section of a plot I am looking at. So, I thought the color coding would help differentiate photos back at home when I’ve downloaded them onto the computer and am figuring out which is which. I also wrote labels on the flagging tape, but it twists around sometimes so they aren’t clear in every photo. Each grid is four feet square (the width of the bed, and four feet in length), divided into 16 sections. I took a photo of each section. I have a total of 7 beds, which multiplied by 16 is a lot of photos of little green plants. One hundred and twelve, to be exact. That is too many for one post. It actually has crossed my mind that perhaps not everyone will be interested in looking at 112 photos of flax. But in the interests of documenting this project, I’ve decided to post them all, divided between several posts.

I set up the grids because I wanted a more quantifiable way to measure the germination rates of the different seed varieties, and to count how many plants were growing in each square foot. Mostly what this exercise taught me is that my sowing technique is terrible. I have clumps and bare patches in an extremely uneven pattern. Sigh. Raking did not help at all, so I will omit that step in future. In fact I think many of the ridges where there is a density of plants were created by the edge of the rake. So, there is a lot more to learn about that step of the process. Honestly, I think this season was my worst broadcasting job ever, but then again I have never scrutinized every step of the process so closely.

This post features the variety Evelin (an untreated variety from Richters in Canada) planted at Small Ones Farm in South Amherst. The photos were taken April 29th, and are labeled with the variety, the location, and a number 1 to 16. The squares in the grid are numbered from left to right, starting in the row on the near side of the bed and moving to the back. That is,1 is in the bottom left hand corner, and 16 is in the top right corner. They are posted in order from 1 to 16.

Above is an overview of the bed of Evelin, and below is a photo showing the height of the plants on April 29th (14 days after planting).

May 7, 2012December 19, 2023

Cat in the Flax

Last week I did a fiber and spinning lesson in my old classroom, as part of their study of Colonial New England. I brought along a wide variety of natural fibers in different stages of processing, including flax. Afterwards, when I went to put away the bundles of retted and broken flax, the cat immediately jumped into the container. She likes to jump into all kinds of baskets and boxes, especially newly opened ones or ones which aren’t usually there, which prompts the phrase, “Pippi in a basket!” Our cat is officially named Smitten, but a long time ago she got the nickname Pippi, which is what we usually call her, or sometimes the Pippi. Even though she’s the only one, Pippi is also a general category, as in “Pippies like meat pie.” We are the monkeys. Our household consists of Pippies and monkeys.

First the Pippi sat in the corner, surveying the scene.

Next she pawed the flax.

Then she noticed the suspicious rope that I use to hold the box closed, which must be attacked.

Matthew obliged by animating the rope.

There was a battle. The Pippi won.

She licked and chewed a few strands of flax, then settled in to rest after her victory.

She was annoyed by monkeys trying to sneak up on her with a camera to get a photo of her while she was asleep.

Just doing my part to spread photos of cats via the internet.

May 4, 2012December 18, 2023

Ahh, Wood Thrushes are Back

Yesterday morning, Thursday May 3rd, I went for a walk around 7:15, as I often do, but little did I know that it would turn out to be an exceptionally inspiring walk (despite the drizzle).

First, as I came out of the little boggy wooded area behind our apartment complex into the parking lot of the JCA, I heard and saw two crows cawing away vigorously. At first I thought, two crows having a debate, or maybe just exchanging insults. Then I heard a third crow, which made me think that something a bit more interesting was going on. What are all those crows yelling about? And then, I saw something slip into the brambles and small trees by the little sunken wetland area in the center of the parking lot. I walked closer slowly, and looked carefully, and it was a fox! A gray fox, I think: very small, delicate, mostly beige, with a black back and not-very-fluffy tail. The instant that I stopped walking, turned my body, and fixed my attention on the fox, the crows stopped cawing. It was an intense moment, since I realized they had probably been shouting about the fox, and had stopped now that I had noticed it, too. I wished I knew what they were thinking. “Fox! Fox! Fox! Fox! Oh, look, a monkey. Let’s be quiet and see what the monkey does.” I watched the fox as it picked its way around the edge of the wetland area, through the bleached masses of dead cattails, and short new green growth. Maybe it was looking for frogs or other little creatures to eat, but it didn’t seem to find anything and kept on going. Then it climbed out the other side of the wetland area, trotted toward the edge of the building, and went around the corner out of sight. We see quite a lot of wildlife around here, but it was still a special treat to get to watch a fox for several minutes. I continued on my walk, and there was more excitement to come.

When I got into the woods at Amherst College, there were lots of interesting maple seeds and fallen tree-flowers on the path, so I picked up a few especially striking ones to photograph when I got home. At the moment I am very interested in the combination of bright yellow-greens and various shades of pink and maroon that are happening all over the place in small emerging leaves, flowering trees, and maple seeds. How do such bright colors blend so harmoniously? Are there optimal ratios? Which combinations do I like the best? Could I weave something with the same colors and achieve anything like the same effect? Here are some photos. The ones in bright sun I took the other day. The yellow inflorescences are from some kind of oak.

At one point I was noisily engaged in my own thoughts, making up a silly song that went like this: Don’t plant your flax in a hayfield/’cuz a hayfield is full of grass/no matter what you do/there are roots through and through/so don’t plant your flax in a hayfield. My songs are notoriously dumb, but I was mightily entertained by myself, and not paying much attention to the woods around me. But then I saw another maple seed bundle with a greater ratio of yellow to pink, and stopped to pick it up. At that moment, the noise in my head stopped, too, and my focus shifted back to the woods. And suddenly I heard a wood thrush! You can listen to lots of different recordings of wood thrush songs at the Macaulay Library archives.

The wood thrush has the most beautiful voice I have ever heard. It evokes intense longing and utter contentment at the same time. Bliss. I love wood thrush season, and am always happy when they come back and sad when they leave.

My wood thrush backstory goes like this. Several years ago I started hearing this beautiful flute-like bird at the garden in the evenings. I began to listen for it while I was there, and look forward to hearing it. It felt affirming, reassuring, companionable…. but I could never see the bird that was singing because the song always came from deep in the woods. There are good resources for birdsong identification on line, but you have to know what a bird looks like to narrow down your search. So, the identity of my bird remained a mystery for several years. I began hearing it other places, too, including right by our apartment complex, especially early in the morning and around sunset.

One spring day maybe three years ago, I was sitting outside at the school where I worked, supervising kids playing outdoors. Amazingly, I heard my bird! So I peered over at the edge of the playground, next to the woods at the Larch Hill conservation area. And lo and behold, there was my bird singing away on a branch right at the edge of the woods. I moved closer and got a good look at it. It was a rich reddish-brown, about the size of a robin, with a white-and-black spotted breast and big feet. I found photos, descriptions, and recordings of its song on the Cornell University ornithology website, and at last identified my mystery bird.

A few months ago, as I was trying to think of a name for my new little weaving business, I decided to name it after the wood thrush.

There are a few reasons that wood thrushes appeal to me as a personal symbol of the ethics and aesthetics of fiber. I am very invested in locally grown and harvested fibers and dyes. I work hard to learn as much as possible about growing and using locally available fiber and dye plants, and to incorporate them into my work. I aspire to expand the range of fibers and dyes that are available to folks around here. But only certain materials can be obtained or produced in Massachusetts. One very useful fiber in particular, cotton, needs a much hotter, longer growing season than we can offer. But there are good, sustainable cotton projects going on further south, including an organic cotton industry in Texas, and naturally colored cottons in Peru. These projects need to be supported. The evils of conventionally raised cotton would take a whole other post to enumerate, but a good place to start, if you want to read about it, is Stephen Yafa’s Big Cotton and Cotton.

Despite my fibershed ideal, I decided I would need to include far-away fibers in my fiber-diet. Here’s where the wood thrush comes in. Wood thrushes migrate to Central America in the winter, and only come up to New England in the summertime. So, that span of distance, from Massachusetts to Panama at least (if not as far as Peru), is linked together by my bird. Wood thrushes go where the good stuff is, while it’s in season, and that’s one way to think about fibers, too.

Here are some other wood thrush lessons I have learned. Their song is very beautiful, but it’s pretty quiet and they stick to the woods. To hear it, you have to spend time outdoors and be attentive to the world around you. Understanding where fiber raw materials come from, and how inseparable their growth and processing are from every other element of our environment, requires similar attention and observation. The wood thrush is not a flashy bird. In fact it’s sort of subtle and even conservative, like much of my weaving tends to be. Wood thrush populations are in decline due to a variety of factors including habitat loss and acid rain. Sustainable land management and reducing pollution are crucial to their survival, and to the survival of us all.

So, I was ecstatic to hear that the wood thrushes are back.

May 2, 2012December 18, 2023

New Huck Lace Bookmarks–Still Pink, Still Heart-y

Since my madder-dyed linen heart-motif Huck lace bookmarks have been selling pretty well, and since Mothers Day is coming up soon, I decided to weave some more of them. Also, I thought my loyal readers might like a little break from photos of small flax green plants (as there will be a lot more on the way). So, here’s a photo of a bookmark in progress, showing the edge of the two-inch spacer I use to separate each one.

There are a lot of steps involved in planning and weaving anything. There are more steps involved if you dye your own yarn and, like me, do not necessarily dye it for a specific project. For example, I had dyed three skeins of 40/2 linen with madder a while back, and had used two of them for my previous batch of bookmarks. Luckily, I keep copious records and I always “show my work,” since I was raised in that 1980s math-generation. So, I knew that I had used 2.16 ounces for the warp last time (with a little left over) and 1.56 ounces for the weft (with almost a full bobbin left over). With 3.72 ounces I wound a ten yard warp and wove 23 bookmarks, plus some weft to spare.

My third skein was 1.7 ounces, a very pale but pretty shade of bluish-pink (the others were more on the red/orange/salmon side of pink). That’s about half as much as I used in my last project, and the question was, how many bookmarks could that make? There are a few ways to find out. Here’s my way.

Yarn is usually sold with a certain amount of helpful information provided, e.g., its size and ply. Sometimes the vendor will also give you a measurement called “yards per pound” which tells you just what it sounds like: how many yards of that yarn it takes to weigh a pound (or an ounce, if you divide by 16). If you don’t know the yards per pound, you can figure it out (or get a good approximation) using a nifty tool called a McMorran yarn balance. You could use the yards per pound for the yarn, and the weight of your skein, to figure out how many yards your skein is.

However, when dealing with limited quantities of naturally dyed yarns (or handspun, naturally dyed yarn, even more so), I have found that the best way to be certain of what I have is to measure. Ideally I would have a niddy noddy that measured skeins by the yard or some other useful increment, but mine doesn’t. So, I often count out the length on a warping board, and that’s what I did this time. OK, done! I had 630 yards of pale pink. Since I had roughly half as much yarn as I used in the last batch, I estimated that I could wind a 5 yard warp and get about 11 bookmarks out of it. But how to be certain? (Certainty is important to me, to a point). Math to the rescue.

To calculate the amount of yarn I’d need for the warp, I first multiplied the width in the reed by the ends per inch (which really just tells you the number of ends in my project, which I actually knew already). My project has 75 ends (a bit more than 2 inches in the reed sett at 36 ends per inch, or epi). Then, I multiplied that by the number of yards in my desired warp, which means I’d need 375 yards for a 5 yard warp. To calculate the number of yards I’d need for the weft, I multiplied the length of each bookmark (12 inches) by the number of bookmarks I thought I could make (11), which meant I would need to weave 132 inches of warp. That’s the length part of the bookmark (two inches of each bookmark is just fringe, which doesn’t use any weft, so I figure this covers the take-up and then some…see below). Now for the width, 75 ends, which means I need a total of 9900 inches (75×132) or 275 yards of weft (divide 9900 by 36). Add that to the warp requirements, and you get 650 yards total. Well, I was 20 yards short, but luckily I had a bobbinful from last time that was definitely more than 20 yards.

My way is sort of a middle way. I could have gone with my initial estimate, which was accurate enough. Or, I could do a lot more fastidious calculations involving additional factors, including draw-in (how much the project pulls in as you weave compared to its width in the reed), take-up (how much it shortens in length due to the fact that the threads are traveling over and under one another; even though the distance taken up by each little bump is minute, it adds up over the length of the warp), and shrinkage (how much it shrinks when you wash it). I have notes about all these things from the last batch of bookmarks (“I have detailed files…“), but I glossed these considerations because eventually you just have to get started on the weaving before it actually IS Mothers Day.

So, I wound a 5 yard warp, dressed the loom, and began weaving away. The first two bookmarks were happy enough (the second was a little squat from beating too hard). Then near the end of the third, I got one broken end, and then immediately another. Grrr. Broken ends are when one, or more, of the yarns in the warp break. Then you have to stop and fix them, and it slows everything down. These bookmarks take me about an hour and a half *each* as it is (including winding the warp, dressing the loom, weaving, washing, ironing, trimming, but not including the dyeing because that labor is infinite and cannot even be quantified). So, I fixed them and then decided I needed to be more strategic about preventing any more broken ends.

A note here. I had problems with broken ends last time, too, and didn’t ever solve the problem. I blamed my yarn, and thought perhaps it was not high-quality. But then I had the good fortune to confer with another weaver who weaves with the same yarn, and he said he has no trouble with it and thinks it’s very good quality. He also hand-dyes his own yarns, but with synthetic dyes, so they are not subjected to the same high-temperature, high-alkaline treatment that mine are. The fault, we decided, was in my comparatively harsh treatment of the fibers in the scouring process (too much soda ash and boiling water is maybe a bad thing). Something to keep in mind as I perfect my cellulose techniques. In sum:

1. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the yarn.

2. I only had myself to blame for its weakness.

3. I will certainly need to continue to use soda ash and may run into this problem again.

Thus, I’d better find a way to solve the problem.

Much of the information I have read about weaving with linen insists that you have to size the warp (or apply “paste”). I have never sized a warp. I admit my total ignorance, and even prejudice, on this matter. Partly, I just can’t believe it actually helps rather than make everything worse, though I don’t want to offend the hundreds of weavers who say it does help. But mostly I cannot imagine having a lot of sticky-when-wet-dusty-when-dry starch smearing all over my lovely loom and getting everything gross. NO!

So, instead I cast about in my memory for other ideas I had read about…. Linen fibers are stronger when damp. Weave in the basement? Don’t have one. Run a humidifier by the loom? Our apartment is built on a concrete slab by a stream in the floodplain of the Fort River, more generally located in the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts, on the east coast of the United States of America. I can’t imagine voluntarily adding extra moisture to the air. We have to run a dehumidifier in the summer to keep the mildew at bay. So, NO! Then I recalled someone saying that it used to be her job to spray the warp to keep it damp as her mother worked. So, I acquired a clean spray bottle (ours always get filled up with fish emulsion or borax or vinegar or somesuch thing, don’t ask me why).

I put some water in it, and I sprayed the warp just at and above the fell line (where the beater presses the new rows, or picks, of weft into place). Bad idea. Everything got wobbly, the fibers swelled up, nobody could stay in their correct place and threads were pushing and pulling all over the place. It was a sad sight to see among my orderly little linen threads. So I let it dry. Then I decided to spray up where the beater rests when it’s upright (the white cloth in the photo is to absorb excess water and wipe off droplets from the shuttle race and reed).

Then I pulled the beater forward and sprayed in amongst the heddles.

This was the zone of weakness, where the breakages occurred, where there must have been a bad combination of abrasion and stress. In addition to keeping that region of the warp damp, I also kept the fell line closer to the breast beam and advanced the warp more often so I was always weaving with the widest possible shed. These techniques are good practice anyway, but when I’m feeling pressed for time I try to push it a little. You can’t really push linen. I re-sprayed each time I advanced the warp. And ta da! Success! I wove 5 more bookmarks with narry a broken end!

Last but not least, if you read my earlier post about hemstitching and Chuang Tzu, you may remember my trouble with fraying in the hemstitching process. I tried adding twist as I worked, using a magnifying glass, and other tricks. But the one that really seems to work is wetting the thread. Don’t get it too wet, or it swells up, and then the water absorbs into the woven cloth and it also swells up, and then even with a magnifying glass you can’t see where the holes are or get your needle through…. Enough water to make it damp. Once in a workshop at Long Ridge Farm, when she was describing how wet you want your cloth when you apply soybean-milk as a binder, Michele Wipplinger described it as feeling damp, but only just damp, not wet, and primarily cold. You feel for the temperature. It’s a bit like that with the hemstitching thread (which is a piece of extra weft yarn reserved for the purpose of securing the edges of my bookmarks. Six times the width of the bookmark is optimal. Five times is enough, but it cuts it a little close and is stressful.) You want it cool, damp, but not dripping wet. And bingo.

You can go buy my new batch of bookmarks at the Shelburne Arts Co-op in Shelburne Falls or at Saw Mill River Arts in Montague.

April 25, 2012December 18, 2023

Flax Is Up!

Well, apparently I have to include a lot of exclamation points in this flax growing experiment. I will cut that out. But it’s so exciting!

The flax began emerging on Friday April 20th. The first two to emerge were the Evelin at Amethyst Farm and the Marilyn at our community garden. That’s five days to germinate. By the next day, Saturday April 21st, everything was up everywhere. That’s six days. Not bad.

Here’s the progress as of yesterday, Tuesday April 24th (the 9th day since planting). My sense is that the generic variety did not have a very good germination rate. I will try to figure out an accurate way to estimate or calculate that, but the growth of the v.n.s. seedlings looks much more sparse than the other two. Another possibility is that the golden v.n.s. seeds on average weighed more than the brown seeded varieties, so that I actually planted fewer golden seeds even though the amount weighed the same. Maybe I should have done it by volume rather than weight. I will try to figure this out, also.

Here is an overview of part of the v.n.s. bed at Small Ones Farm, and below that, a close-up of a bald spot. To some extent, of course, bald spots are my fault for not sowing evenly.

However, I think it is also because a lot of seeds just didn’t germinate. Here’s a closeup of v.n.s. seedlings at Small Ones Farm.

Below is an over-view of part of the Evelin bed at Small Ones Farm. Below that, you can see there were also bald spots in the Evelin, but I don’t think they were as big.

And here’s a close-up of the Evelin at Small Ones Farm.

Moving on to Amethyst Farm, here is the v.n.s. at a distance, closer (yeah, not much there), and very close:

Here’s the Evelin at Amethyst Farm, overview, then closer, then a close-up:

And at our community garden, the v.n.s. (the holes are dog prints):

Here’s the Evelin at the community garden:

And here is the Marilyn (the only treated seed I planted) at the community garden:

And that is the flax update. Stay tuned for future flax-growing excitement featuring visual aids such as rulers and a string grid (maybe 6 by 6 square inches) to count plant density. Woo hoo!

April 22, 2012December 17, 2023

Earth Day: Planting, Watering, and Waiting for Emergence

The traditional way to plant flax is by broadcasting, which means you toss it out onto the soil by hand and try to achieve an even distribution. This is what I did. I usually sow about half of the seed as I move down the bed, and then sow the other half walking the other direction from the other side. If there are big piles or bald areas, I spread them out a bit more with my hand. I always grow my flax in beds because I find it impossible to weed anything wider than 4 feet. Usually I rake in the seed then press the soil down by standing on a board. I always assumed that this buried the seeds sufficiently, and I suppose it must have because my flax has always grown just fine. For the first time this year, though, I am growing a golden-seeded variety, which shows up clearly against the darker soil. After raking, I was astonished at how much of the seed was still on the surface. So I spread quite a lot of additional soil on top in order to cover the seeds. Perhaps in the past I just couldn’t see the dark-brown seeds well enough, and assumed they were buried when in fact they weren’t. This year I omitted the step of pressing down with a board.

Here is a closeup of Evelin after I broadcast it. I didn’t take a separate photo of the Marilyn because it is the same color and looks the same. Not much contrast between the seed and the soil, right?

Here’s what the non-specified variety (or v.n.s., variety not specified) looked like.The contrast makes it easy to see.

And here’s a close up:

The idea is to spread the seeds fairly thickly so the plants are crowded together. This prevents them from branching, so that you get the longest possible fibers from the stems.

Because the weather has been so sunny and dry, the soil was very dry when I planted and it continued to be dry all week. So, I had to water, water, and water more. The need for so much water brings into question the sustainability of this crop, I realize, but hopefully future springs will be wetter.

Here’s are all the plots planted and watered–Amethyst Farm (note the clear plastic water containers against the shed), Small Ones Farm, and our community garden (from top to bottom):

It took most of the day to do all three sites. The next day it was about 90 degrees, I kid you not. Not flax’s favorite. I had to water every day from April 15th to April 21st (yesterday). The water situation is a bit different at each place. At Small Ones there is a standpipe with a hose, on town water.

At Amethyst Farm, there’s a big container that was filled with town water, also. Eventually they want to rig up a system for collecting rain run-off from the roof of the shed, which has a big surface area as you can see in the earlier photo of the planted bed.

If you compare the two photos, you can see how much the water level in the tank went down in just a few days. The clear tank offers a good visual reminder of exactly how much water I’m using.

The watering situation at our community garden plot is not as convenient as the set-up which my kind hosts at Small Ones Farm and Amethyst Farm have provided (thanks again!). We haul water from the stream nearby, Amethyst Brook, in 5-gallon buckets. Here are the buckets and watering can, the stream, and the path from the stream to the gardens.

The bright green sunny spot that you see through the woods is the edge of the gardens. It is a bit of a distance, but hauling water makes a person strong, and makes me appreciate the fact that I don’t have to fetch all my water this way. The stream is right behind me in this photo. This time of year it is usually full and rushing, but due to the lack of snow and rain, it is pretty low at the moment.

I eagerly awaited the emergence of the flax. Is this flax? Not sure, probably too early.

This is not flax. It looks like grass (boo).

At last, on Friday the 20th while watering at Amethyst Farm, we noticed that both the Evelin and the v.n.s. were up! Whee! Evelin on the left, v.n.s. on the right (no noticeable difference in my opinion).

That same day, Friday the 20th, while watering at our community garden, I noticed that the Marilyn was just barely up!

Nothing was up yet at Small Ones on Friday. On Saturday the 21st, both the Evelin (left) and v.n.s. (right) were up at the community garden.

And also on the 21st, both the Evelin and v.n.s. were up at Small Ones Farm but I neglected to bring my camera, alas.

Yesterday I rejoiced in the emergence of tiny green plants. Today is Earth Day and it is raining at last. I am very grateful.

April 22, 2012December 17, 2023

Flax Day, Not Tax Day!

Last Sunday, April 15th, I planted my flax at last! Usually, mid-April is the right time to plant here in the lower-lying lands of the Connecticut River valley, and I wouldn’t feel like I was getting it in late. Some years, the snow has barely melted by mid-April. However, this has not been a usual April any more than this winter was a usual winter. We have had no spring snow, not much rain, and with the very warm, very dry weather, I probably could have put in the flax a month ago. Nevertheless, April 15th was planting day, and a glorious day it was.

Planning out this flax project has been a multi-step process. In fact, the reason for my delay in posting about it (yes, sorry, it’s been a month since my last post) is that I kept waiting until certain steps had been completed, and of course then there’s the next step, and the next… And a month goes by.

I should probably start by explaining why I am growing flax and what my goals are. I have a vision of locally made cloth using locally grown fiber, naturally dyed with locally grown or gathered plant materials, and hand-woven. There is plenty of wool, alpaca, mohair, and other animal fiber around, but currently we have no locally grown plant fiber. I don’t mean there are no local plant sources of fiber; several plants around here are great for fiber, including milkweed, nettles, and even oriental bittersweet. But no one is growing or processing them in quantity. Flax is a beautiful, versatile fiber with 30,000 years of human use. It grows in my climate, unlike cotton, and is legal to grow, unlike hemp. So, it is my goal to contribute to the cause of local cloth by becoming very good at growing and processing flax, and ultimately to grow it in large quantities. Some day I even fantasize about being the “Flax Mother” of Massachusetts (minus the prison labor).

While I’m writing in the first person singular, I am not alone in this endeavor and rely on many people for help and support. I’ve been growing and learning how to process flax for several years, with a lot of trial and error. Initially I planted some at my mother’s place up in New Hampshire. Lacking advice and experience, I over-retted it and it was all gone. Next came advice, information, and comradeship from folks in the flax and linen study group at the Hill Institute in Florence, where I was working on my Master Weaver certificate. Since completing that program in 2010, I have been eager to increase my skills and knowledge at a quicker pace, to gain a certain level of expertise or mastery. Over the winter I was lucky enough to meet two wonderful women who are also interested in all aspects of growing, processing, spinning, and weaving flax and linen, both in terms of understanding how the crop was processed in the past, and how we might accomplish it today. Our meetings over the past few months have been incredibly helpful and inspiring. I have also appreciated email advice about flax seed and bee-pollination from Upinngil Farm in Gill.

The first step was figuring out where to plant. I wanted to plant in a variety of places so that I could compare the performance of each variety in more than one location. Many thanks to the generous farmers at Small Ones Farm in South Amherst and Amethyst Farm in East Amherst for letting me use a plot for this experiment and helping me with a water set-up! I also planted at our community garden at Amethyst Brook.

The second step was sourcing seeds, and deciding which varieties to plant. My plan is to gather some data to compare different varieties: How tall do they grow? How prolific are they? Do they tend to branch or lodge (fall over)? Do they grow and mature at different rates? Is one variety better suited to conditions around here? Does one produce finer fiber or fiber in more quantity?

In the past I have grown Marilyn from Landis Valley in Pennsylvania, and have been happy with it. However, it comes treated with a fungicide, and I wanted to try some other, preferably untreated types and other sources. From Richters in Canada I ordered a non-specified fiber variety with golden seeds, and Evelin, which has brown seeds. We also ordered Marilyn from the Brothers Zinzendorf at the Hermitage in PA, which was also treated, as it turns out. (I’m speculating that both Landis Valley and the Hermitage import their seed from the same place in Holland, but I’m not positive, so don’t quote me on this.) I was only able to acquire a small quantity of Regina from Sand Mountain Herbs so I decided to hold off on that one for now.

I decided to plant Evelin and the non-specified variety at Small Ones Farm and Amethyst Farm, and those two plus Marilyn from the Brothers Z. at the community garden. Not quite the multitude of varieties I had initially hoped to compare, but it’s a good start.

The next decision was how much to plant, which would determine the size of the beds I needed to dig. I decided to plant the same quantity (4 ounces) at each place, in beds of the same dimensions (4 by 14 feet). In theory, this will make it easier to compare the productivity and yield of the different varieties. Different sources recommend planting at different rates. I have typically planted at a rate of one pound of seed per 225 square feet, and have been pretty satisfied. But recommendations range from one pound per 100 square feet to one pound per 400 square feet. I planted at approximately one pound per 224 square feet this year.

Next was turning over the beds and pulling out grass roots, which took a while. I started back in March. You may wonder why flax needs to be planted so early in the spring. The primary reason is that the best quality fiber is produced in cool, moist conditions, and that the heat of summer causes the fibers to become coarse. Two other reasons are that if the soil is still wet from the winter (and if the spring is a normal, rainy spring) you don’t have to water much, and also it gives the flax an advantage against weeds, many of which are not up yet that early in the spring.

I have found that grass is the main competitor to flax in terms of weeds (these guys have the same problem). Last year at our community garden plot we had it rototilled instead of turning it all over by hand as I’ve done in the past. The advantage of digging it over with a pitchfork is that you can pull out a lot of the long grass roots. Rototilling just chops them up and spreads them evenly around. You may as well plant grass. Despite repeated weeding, the grass was so difficult to pull out (pulling it up also pulled out a lot of the flax plants) that it over-ran the beds, and I ended up not harvesting all of the crop.

Many thanks to Farmer Bob for pointing out to me that early planting only gives flax an advantage over weeds that germinate from seed. If the roots are already in the soil, even densely crowded flax seedlings can’t do much to stop the grass from growing. I had experienced this grassy problem for myself, but hadn’t put two and two together about how plants propagate themselves and what that means in terms of weed control strategies. So, despite the fact that it was time-consuming, I dug over the beds with a pitchfork and pulled out as many grass roots as possible. Here’s the bed I dug on March 25th at Small Ones Farm:

Here is the first bed at our community garden dug April 6th:

Here is the whole thing at the community garden, completed April 13th, and below that, the completed bed at Amethyst Farm from the same day:

Then I wanted to get the soil tested, which involved collecting samples, drying them, and dropping off the labeled bags at the UMass soil testing lab. I patiently waited for results, was excited when they came, then was a bit confused by them, and then had a series of queries back and forth to get help interpreting them. In subsequent years I will do this part of the process differently. Ideally I would like to know three different pieces of information: first, what the soil might need for additional nutrients; second, whether the amendments have addressed these deficiencies; third, after the flax is harvested, which nutrients were depleted by the flax (that is, which nutrients in particular flax uses up). In order to get all this info, however, I would have had to start earlier in the season. Live and learn.

So, I added some compost and manure to the soils that seemed to need it the most, and at last I was ready to plant! See the next post for more about planting, watering, and the exciting germination of my seeds!

March 22, 2012December 17, 2023

Exhausted Madder and Exhausted with my Warp

I have exhausted the madder bath I’ve been working on.

These are the 10/2 bleached cotton skeins which were double-mordanted with aluminum acetate and heated in the calcium carbonate fixing solution. Actually, I could probably run one more bath for an extremely pale pink, but I’m ready to move on with other projects.

Now that I have a pretty decent stash of naturally dyed cotton, linen, and cottolin, I have been using only naturally dyed pattern weft yarns for my current batch of book cloth (the warp and tabby yarns are commercial). Thus far, I have really enjoyed using yarns that I dyed myself. However, on Monday I was having a mightily difficult time choosing color combinations. I couldn’t figure out what my problem was, but I was dissatisfied with everything I tried. Colors that I had been perfectly happy with before–my screaming yellow weld, for example–looked ugly and annoying.

After a while I realized that I was just tired of weaving the same pattern over and over again (Young Lovers Knot). I put on enough warp for about 20 pieces, with the idea that I was being efficient. But instead I was bored. I am never, ever bored. There is so much to do all the time, and so many interesting things in the world, how could I ever be bored? It took me a while to recognize the feeling, and I felt better when I figured it out.

So, I decided to mix things up a little. I bought some new spring-like colors of 20/2 cotton (the sadly discontinued line from UKI) and decided to use commercially dyed 10/2 for the pattern weft for a while. I also switched from weaving the Young Lovers Knot pattern “Star Fashion” (which gives it those nice diagonal lines) to weaving it “Rose Fashion” (which makes all the motifs more rounded). It was a nice change of pace, and the new colors got me motivated again. In fact, with the new tabby colors, my naturally dyed yarns have taken on all sorts of new possibilities. Here is a 20/2 linen madder-dyed skein from the recent dyebath woven with a rich purple commercially dyed 20/2 cotton tabby weft. It’s sort of easter-eggy but considering that crocuses, daffodils, and all the other bulbs are blooming now, it feels OK to me.