I grew my own cloth! 🧶 the entire flax to linen process

Now fully realizing how labour intensive making fabrics and thread is, I also realized how much of a jerk Aurora’s dad was in Sleeping Beauty. Burning all the spinning wheels in the land so the Princess won’t accidentally prick her finger? That is such an out-of-touch billionaire move. All those poor women having their tools destroyed.

Fun fact: the companies that used to make hackles went into the pet brush industry when hackles were no longer profitable!

You need to store your saved seeds in paper not plastic bags. Plastic will cause the seeds to sweat and then rot. They need to be kept cool and dry. Also paper envelopes are good for storage too. Then you can write on the envelope what type of seeds they are. Good luck .

This is one of those insanely complex processes where I just marvel at how (and why!) ancient people managed to invent linen.

I love the ethic of "launch yourself into doing something to bypass perfectionist anxiety" This is such a cool project!

Probably wasn’t your intent with this video, but I did shed a tear seeing the weaving come together into a textile. This is the first video of your’s I’ve watched. I’ve crocheted for 10 years, knit for 4, and I just love watching others do advanced fiber techniques. I aspire to have more space to try weaving someday. I think it was your care and dedication (from a fellow perfectionist) to this endeavor that moved me! Beautiful work, thank you!

Not sure if someone else has mentioned this yet, but something I learned about anything that flowers: The presence of flowers is highly likely attached to the amount of daylight hours the plants receive during the growing process. By planting so late, you gave the plants shorter and shorter hours, and it wasn't until the number of daylight hours started to increase that you were able to get flowers to form. Hope that helps you going forward. This (delay in blooming) will also happen if there are too many hours of daylight, FYI.

Funny, I was at the fabric store today, just browsing. I was particularly drawn to the linens, and was researching what project I might want to tackle. Came across this video, and thought, "yeah, how the heck DO they turn the worlds most useful weed into fabric." So I clicked on this video, thinking no way was I going to spend an hour watching. Just wow, what an effort. This was so enlightening, and you were an absolute trooper. Also, I will never complain about spending $20 for a yard of linen fabric, now that I know what all the steps involved are. Freaking amazing.

There was an Area in Germany was called "das blaue Ländchen" (the blue little country in English), because the people there where growing flax and when the flax bloomed, all of this area had a blue hue or shimmer of all the blue Flowers. Just a random fact, but in my opinion it represents how important Flax was.

Growing your own flax - okay. Making fiber from it - okay. Spinning yarn - okay. Not that I would be able to do any of this myself, it seemed complicated as hell, but it did not seem magical. But when you set down to WEAVING. . . Oh my God! My grandmother had a big carpet loom and made rugs and carpets. I always thought it was some kind of sorcery. And you just take out a loom. . . "I've got a loom somewhere." Boom! One loom, coming up. "Oh, and I've learned how to weave the other day," you said matter-of-factly. "This is how you make your pattern," you said like it was nothing at all. And you proceeded to actually weaving. I'm like: "WHA'? . ." I don't know how to express my admiration of your dedication, skill and perseverance. Hats off. Long live perfectionists!

Since you speak a little german, I think you might enjoy the series "Bäuerliche Flachskultur" on the channel "Alltagskulturen im Rheinland". It was shot in the 1970's and shows the whole process of growing and processing flax very authenticly to how the people of the region have done it for centuries. I learned a lot from it and it is a super interesting watch! Since it's fairly visual, it could probably still be interesting to someone who speaks very little or even no german at all.

I am a spinner and pretty good at it. When I went from short staples like cotton and merino wool to flax, it was a challenge for me. That staple length gets me every time, it takes me a bit to warm up to it and you are exactly right keeping that distance to draft the flax properly. I use a damp towel and lay over my flax a bit before spinning and keep a wet cloth in a bowl to wipe my fingers on. A bowl of water didn’t work out so well with the fur kids 🤣 The roving splits because of how the machines process it, strip it down, it won’t hurt it at all. I spin across the top but not when I first started. Eventually you will be able to spin across the top too, your thumb is what controls where the fiber drafts from. Practice turning your thumb with a light grip and watch the draft move across. Look up drafting from across the top. I have flax seeds to plant, wish me luck. Great video, I really enjoyed it.

This showed up on my feed randomly. I was looking for something calming to help me sleep, but I’m so invested that I will be watching until the end, or coming back in the morning if I fall asleep! Totally fascinating.

Pineapple fiber has also historically been spliced and used for weaving, just like linen! :D

"You might be asking why I'm jumping ahead..." as someone with sudden hyperfixations, ADHD, and paralyzing perfectionism, I was not wondering that at all because I do the exact same thing lol even if you failed at every step, this is incredibly commendable and encouraging. Like you are badass for this fr.

I’m watching this as I handbind a book😂😂 I love when people have oddly specific hobbies lol

Just fantastic. Can you imagine how much more we’d care for and conserve our clothing and other textiles if this was the process we undertook to have them?! Well … you likely CAN imagine now lol. No wonder every last bit of fabrics were repurposed as much and as often as possible. Also …. My goodness I am really curious now about how much skill and what all was entailed in producing the fine and delicate fabrics …. Very inspiring. ❤

I'm mere minutes into the video and I just needed to say how much I admire your content and this project specifically! This hits such a niche of long form content that I absolutely adore and adds fiber arts, so all around 10/10! 🎉🎉🎉

Watching how complex this process is it makes you wonder how human beings ever came to the conclusion that this grass could be made into fabric.

I worked for a number of years for a rural working museum and learned about this process. After the flax was properly dried out we would go thru the process of getting to making the flax. I then learned how to spin it to make the strand so we could dress out a loom and weave our own linen. I can attest, it is quite a process!. I weave, spin, hook rugs, do punch needle, sew. It seems anything textile interests me very much. Thank you for your video.