Cultivation

Flax is a plant of the Linacae family. Some 80 to 100 sessile leaves alternate on the single stalk of the plant, which is about 80cm high. The flowers are white or blue and yield small globular bolls composed of five lobes, each containing two seeds. The normal sowing period is 15 March to 15 April. It is pulled at the end of june when the flax has reached a certain degree of maturity. Flax-pulling machines are self-propelled and pull 1 to 2 swathes simultaneously. Flax is laid on the soil to permit the retting. This is a hydrolytic process involving the enzymatic action of fungi or bacteria dissolving the pectin surrounding the fibre bundles. It is essential to turn flax regularly to have good retting. It may last from 3 weeks to 3 months - according to pluviometry.

The most common technique to collect flax is pressing it into large bales (250 Kg) by coiling. Flax harvested at the correct humidity (less than 15%) can be stocked for a very long time without degrading.

Scutching

This agricultural transformation extracts flax fibres. First a regular layer of parallel flax stalks is prepared. The layer is progressively accelerated, passing through a series of toothed rollers (often 10 pairs). During this operation, the tow is removed from the fibres. The scutched tow is generally used to make ropes or for home furniture.

The scutched flax, the highest quality part of the crop, is then sorted by hand, collected in bundles of 0,5 to 1 Kg and then pressed into bales of 100 Kg.

Spinning

There are two types of flax spinning :

Scutched flax spinning : the raw material is the long flax fibre,
Tow spinning : the raw material is the short fibre produced during combing or scutching.

Spinning of scutched flax and tow can be either dry or wet.

Spinning of scutched flax
Flax is delivered to the spinning mill in the form of bales of "hands" of line flax. The line flax is stocked until required and then undergoes the following operations : hackling, drafting, spinning.

Hackling : it is the word used to describe the combing of fibres in flax processing. Hackling is carried out on hackling frames to make a continuous sliver ready to be drafted : 'hands' of flax overlap each other of about 1/3, which generates the sliver. The waste (hackled tow) is used for dry spinning.
Drafting : the slivers undergo a series of doubling and drafting operations
Wet spinning : before spinning the yarn, the rove has to be degummed to remove all the waxes, pectin and lignin. The rove can also be bleached with several oxidizing agents.

Depending of degumming or bleaching the yarn is called "natural" or "bleached".

Once the rove has been treated it is placed in the spinning frame. The rove has to be wet in cold water for a good work of the machine. The yarn will be dried before being wound in cones and tested electronically.

Flax tow spinning

Flax tow is produced during both scutching and hackling. Hackled tow is preferred because it is generally longer, cleaner and finer. For spinning, the two types of tows may be mixed in variable proportion before carding, depending on the yarn quality that is required. Spinning can be wet, dry or 1/2 wet.

Linen is a natural product and flax is a renewable crop : nature's wealth of resources are not depleted as it is, for example, the case with synthetic fibres. Flax growing does not require chemical fertilizer. Flax can only take very small quantities of nitrogen as this is a chemical which is a growth-enhancer, and when growth is too fast, fibres are of low quality.

Moreover, the farmers who grow the linen plant on the littoral area of Northern Europe (where safilin gets its supplies), generally don't use pesticides, because it is useless for flax. This makes the difference with cotton cultivation, which uses 25 % of all the pesticides produced in the world ! Actually, cotton is one of the biggest polluting agent on our planet and linen belongs to the only truly ecological fibres.

Retting is a process to separate the bundles of fibres from the plant. This is a totally natural process when dew-retting is used. In dew-retting, micro-organisms (fungi and bacteria), present in flax in its natural state, gradually decompose the incrusting substances.

Practically every part of the linen plant is put to good use and there is almost no waste. Fibre production produces by-products, used in a wide range of applications, especially linseed oil (used to make oil paints, linoleum, as well as soap, printing inks, natural cosmetics), straw or sprit (used to make flax board or fuel), short non-spinnable fibres (for the production of up-market paper)

Fibres of linen produced in Europe are considered as the best in the world.