Fibre processing: breaking and scutching

Welcome to the fibre-processing corner of my website.

“Fibre processing? What’s that got to do with translation?” I hear you ask.

Well, I could give you a long and complicated answer about how it ties (no pun intended) into all of my specialist areas. For example, understanding the steps of manufacturing textiles is a key part of working on texts about making those processes more circular. Or take the food systems angle: There is huge scope for adding value to some of the by-products of the food system (like sheep’s fleece), or introducing fibre plants such as flax into rotations as a valuable cover-crop. Or I could even make the case for ‘the big picture’ – a good translator needs to be curious about the texts they work on and about how things work. For me, that is expressed in a genuine love of understanding how the things we interact with on a daily basis (like our clothes) are made.

But the honest truth is, I just really enjoy thinking about it, and I strongly suspect there are a few of you out there who feel the same. And if that’s you, you can find a list of all the previous posts on this topic here.

Today’s topic is: breaking and scutching

So I suppose it’s worth starting with a bit of a confession. This was originally meant to be two separate posts for two separate processes. However – as you’ll know if you’ve joined after seeing previous LinkedIn posts – I have managed to over-rett my flax. How do I know?

Well, instead of looking like this…

…i.e. with the fine, white strands (the bast) coming away nicely from the woody stem (the pulp), it looks like this…

…i.e. the fibres have weakened to such an extent that instead of coming neatly away from the pulp, they just snap into shorter strands when I try to card them. What I should really have done is stop after the first picture, but as this is my first time doing this, I just couldn’t spot the signs.

Is this a disaster?

Not exactly. In fact, this always happens to some extent, because natural systems are not perfectly predictable. Even if a bundle of flax is sown on the same day in the same spot and receives the same amount of nutrients and water during the growing season and then harvested and processed in the same conditions, they never all turn out perfectly the same. And also, when you put something like a delicate flax strand through a mechanical process like carding, it is inevitable that some will snag on the tool and snap. So when you start processing even a perfectly retted bundle of flax, you will end up with two things: the longer strands that come from the main part of the stem, which is called the ‘line’ (or sometimes ‘long line’), and shorter strands called the ‘tow’. The tow is actually perfectly usable, but it doesn’t necessarily produce the same soft supple yarn that makes high-quality linen.

As I mentioned, by over-retting the flax, what I’ve done is weaken the strands so that what I’m left with is lots of bundles of shorter strands, i.e. tow. This is a disappointing in terms of the likely final quality of the flax. However, it is useful to a novice like me in a way, because it means the bundles will be carded and end up in rollags that are not dissimilar to the length of the wool locks that I am used to processing (called the ‘staple’).

But to get there, I first have to get rid of the pulp…

And this is done in a process called ‘breaking’. Of course, it’s not the bast fibres that are being broken in this case, it’s the stems – the idea being not dissimilar to the process of winnowing seed. You break up the bits you don’t want into small, light sections that then fall out of the main bundle as you manipulate it. This is normally done on a piece of kit imaginatively named a ‘breaker’ or a ‘break’ (not to be confused with ‘brake’, of course). If you look it up, you’ll see it’s looks a bit like a paper guillotine, except it’s made of wood, and the blade(s) are blunt. You basically take a bundle of fibre and pass it up and down the brake, bringing the blade down every few inches to break up the woody stems.

Now, I don’t have one of those. And whilst I’m sure my dad would make me one if I asked, I would have nowhere to put it for the 364 days of the year that I wouldn’t be using it, so I have resorted to the equally effective technology of an old chopping board and a wooden spoon…

You see here the results of the first pass of a flax bundle through my sophisticated set up (on reflection, a tenderiser would probably have been more effective than the spoon). I’m afraid I forgot to take a picture of the bundle before starting, but I’m sure you can use your imagination to picture a bundle of dried stems. You can see how as I move the bundle up and down, hitting it with the wooden spoon, the stems break, and the woody bits fly off. It’s a messy process, and I am glad I borrowed my parents’ terrace for this rather than trying to do it indoors. This is just the first pass-through, however.

As the larger bits come off, you start to shake the bundle between whacks to dislodge the smaller stem sections, and – more importantly – you start to see what’s left behind…

You see those long, straight, greyish lines in the middle? Those are the bast fibres - the part that is actually spinnable. And as you work, you start turning the bundle round so that you’re hitting it evenly from every angle…

Now, this is the point where you would normally start ‘scutching’ the bundle. This is done with a long board and a ‘scutching knife’, which looks a bit like a cleaver, except again, it’s made of wood and blunt. That’s because it’s job is not to cut, but to further gently scrape away the pith from the fibres. Again, I don’t have one of these, and because the fibres themselves have been weakened by the retting, I suspect using something like a scutching knife on them would probably have just snapped them.

This is also the point where you would normally transfer the bundle to the hackle – I did actually try this with the homemade hackle my dad made, but it just ripped everything to shreds, as I suspected. So I skipped that step and just went on breaking it up with the wooden spoon/chopping board combo…

And as I went, more and more pieces of stem came out, and the bundle got shorter and shorter., until it basically couldn’t any more:

As you can see, an awful lot of the bulk of the bundle came away, and I was left with a relatively small mass of fibre. (The difference would not be quite so stark if I had not lost some of the bast fibre in the retting.)

So there we go, that’s my broken and scutched fibre ready for spinning.

Well, almost ready anway - you can probably see that the bundle itself is a bit ‘messy’ with the fibres all tangled up, so I decided to card it as well, on the hand carders. This did inevitably again lead to some loss of length, but I think it was worth it to ease the spinning process (and pick out those last little bits of stem). Here’s a before and after…

(Sorry for the lighting change, it got dark at this point and I had to go indoors.)

Can you guess which is the before and which is the after? I imagine so…

One thing I can’t really convey in photos is the difference in texture. The pre-carding bundle felt, I suppose, a bit like a slightly damp bundle of straw. Not entirely unpleasant, but if you were blindfolded you would still be able to tell immediately from the texture that it was basically part of a plant. The post-carding bundle, on the other hand, felt more like the brush part of a paintbrush (a long one). This stage, more clearly than any previous one I would say, felt like a moment of transition – like the material had transformed from plant to fibre, from crop to raw material.

And with that, it’s ready to be spun. I’ll need a bit of time to think about this, as the flax rollag definitely behaves differently to anything I’ve spun before - it shifts and slips, and doesn’t grab onto itself like the wool I’m used to working with. This isn’t surprising, since the fibres are all individual straight strands, rather than the slightly crimped strands of sheep hair that hold it all together. Fortunately I’ve got plenty of advisors on hand to guide me through the process!