Morning "Work Party" with the Elementary CFE Team!
This morning, the Orchard Garden team met up bright and early at 8:30 am to weed the garden!
It is such a relaxing way to start the morning, and so satisfying to see how much progress we have made on the garden in only a few days. The most common weed we have found is the Canadian Thistle, which is easy to identify by its sharp, spiky leaves and purple flowers. There is also a lot of Morning Glory in the garden. Although it has beautiful white flowers, this plant can spread quickly and has taken over much of the garden! We spent the morning clearing the pathways and garden beds before our afternoon workshop on flax processing began.
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| Weeding the garden. |
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| Rebecca teaching us about flax processing. |
Who would have thought playing with plants could be so much fun? Today, expert weaver and artist Rebecca Graham joined us in the Orchard Garden to show us just how much fun we could have with flax. She took us on a magical journey of turning harvested flax into a fibre that could be used to make linen….or in our case flax rope.
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| Flax rope and woven linen. |
According to Rebecca, it takes about 100 days to grow and harvest flax. The flax fibre is actually located on the outside of the stalk, while the inside of the stalk is a coarse and woody material. When the flax is first harvested, it is soaked for a few days in a process called "retting". Microorganisms in the water slowly break down the flax and start separating the woody stem from the flax fibers. Rebecca had finished this step, and showed us the difference between raw flax and retted flax.
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| The raw flax (light in colour), the retted flax (darker in colour) and the woven linen (bottom of photo). |
We had a lot of fun with Rebecca as she demonstrated the next few steps in the process! First, we pounded it out with Rebecca or as she would call it “scutching" flax. This involved us picking up a heavy object and striking the shaft of the flax to loosen unwanted material from the flax fibre. We also scutched our flax by rubbing it back and forth over the hard edge of our picnic table.
Next, Rebecca showed us how to “hackle” the flax, or as I like to call it, combing our flax fibres with a comb or some other interesting sharp pointed object. Our favourite hackling tool was the dog brush!
After we combed our flax fibre our end result was what Rebecca called a “stricke,” or long, light flax fibres ready to be spun!
Susan Gerofsky, our creative CFE leader also left nothing for waste and used the “tow” or short flax fibres combed out of the stricke to make her own artistic braided rope!
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| Susan making a flax rope out of "tow" fibres. |
We really enjoyed making rope out of flax! The whole process was incredibly fascinating, and we had a lot of fun learning from Rebecca!
After teaching us how to make rope out of flax, Rebecca showed us that we could harvest fibers from blackberry bushes as well! First, we used our gloves to break off the blackberry thorns.
Then, we pulled long strips of fibre off of the blackberry stalks. The blackberry fibres can be used for weaving or to make rope as well!
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| Blackberry fibres. |
After we harvested blackberry fibers, Rebecca spent a bit of time showing us how to spin flax fibers into thread.
We learned so much from Rebecca today. It was especially amazing to think about how long humans have been harvesting and relying on flax and other fibres in order to make rope and textiles such as linen. According to Rebecca, flax is one of the oldest known grain crops and was harvested all across Europe and Northern Africa, from Egypt to Scandinavia. Rope making is an even older tradition: Rebecca told us that researchers have found traces of rope at Neanderthal sites dating back over 90,000 years ago! Learning how to process and make rope and other fibres gave us much deeper respect and appreciation for these traditions and skills, which have shaped human civilizations for generations.
Want to learn more about Rebecca and her work on processing fibres out of natural materials? Check out the Earth Hand Gleaners Society webpage!
If you want to know more about flax processing in general, check out their "Linen Grower's Glossary" page located here on their website!
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