Flax Processing @museum.de

F: Flax is an annual. Sown early in the year, it produces beautiful blue flowers in spring. The long, thin stalks are harvested by pulling them out of the ground in early summer. They're dried in sheaves, then soaked and processed. Ultimately, fine linen cloth is made from those flax stalks.

M: Processing the flax fibres is a lot of work, and it used to take all of autumn and winter. First, the seed pods had to be removed by pulling the stalks through big, coarse combs. The seeds could then be pressed to obtain linseed oil. Then the stalks had to be broken and the woody parts separated from the fibre. The stalks were heckled, in other words, repeatedly pulled through an iron heckling comb, until all that was left was a bunch of very soft fibres. Next stop, the spinning wheel, which spun the fibres into fine yarn. The yarn could be dyed and was finally woven into fine linen cloth on the loom – work that took months, with everyone having to lend a hand. In Low German it sounds like this:

Zitatorin:

Wenn dat buten regn’t un sneet,

komt de Spinn- und Webertiet.

When it rains and snows outside

You've arrived at spinning and weaving time.

F: In spring, in a final step, the finished cloth which was a dull shade of grey, was spread out on a bleaching green to whiten in the sun. Of course, so much work had gone into producing the cloth that it had to be closely guarded! We actually have a bleaching green with a guard hut here in the museum grounds.