How Is Linen Made Into a Yarn?
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Flax Cultivation
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The long fibers used to make linen yarn come from the stalk of the flax plant. Growing flax plants takes about 100 days from seed to harvest. The plant produces blue or white flowers on slender stalks that grow 2 feet to 4 feet high. Flax plants with blue flowers produce the finest fiber.
Flax Harvest
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As soon as the stalk turns yellow and the leaves wither, the harvest begins. Any delay in harvesting means the flax will produce a less lustrous fiber. To preserve the sap in the stalk, machines or workers pull the whole plant from the ground, then they tie the harvested plants into bundles called beets.
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Rippling and Retting
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The bundled plants go to a manufacturing facility, where they undergo "rippling," a process in which machines with coarse combs remove seeds and leaves, then the fibers are removed from the stalks. The stalks are soaked in water, acids or other chemicals to dissolve the woody bark that surrounds the fibers. This step, called retting, must be done properly or the quality of the linen yarn will be affected. Incomplete retting means the fibers cannot be separated intact from the stalk, and excess retting leads to rotted or weakened fibers. Water retting takes one to two weeks, while chemical retting requires about 48 hours.
Removing the Fiber
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The retted flax plants are squeezed and dried, then passed through the rollers of a breaking machine, which crushes the stalks and snaps them into small pieces called shives. The shives travel to a scutching machine that uses paddles to extract the fibers. Another machine then combs and straightens the fibers and separates long fibers from short fibers, the final step before spinning.
Spinning
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The long fibers, called line or dressed flax, can measure 12 inches to 20 inches long. They yield the finest yarn. The short fibers, known as tow, make a coarser yarn. The fibers go through spreader machines, which arrange fibers that are the same length into parallel lengths called slivers. Rollers press the slivers into rovings that resemble long hanks of hair. The rovings go to the spinning frame, which draws out a few fibers at a time and twists them to make them into a strong, inelastic yarn. The spun yarn is wound around bobbins or spools.
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References
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- Photo Credit hans s: flickr.com
