Spinning and weaving linen - some samples

Now that the flax seed has been ordered and also a 10kg 'brick' of grade 1 flax shive (partially hackled flax) for Monday night Urban Weavers to try out, I took the time to make some linen samples this week. Here's the results of my experiments using some unbleached flax tops left over from a previous project:

I tried combinations of wet spinning, dry spinning, spindle spinning, wheel spinning, washing, on singles and 2 ply woven samples.

I wanted to get a feel for what the end product of the UW flax project might feel/look like.

As it takes 5 minutes to upload each photo to this blog, and I'm not noted for my patience, I'll write separately about each of the samples with a photo in upcoming posts.

At this point, suffice it to say that you can spin and weave very nice linen, which gets softer with each wash, using only basic equipment like a top whorl spindle and small pocket loom.

Penny