(For transparency: This blog post was written on 19/12/2024 as an extended version of an LinkedIn post dated 7/10/2024. It has been backdated to the date of that LinkedIn post so that it appears in the correct order in the blog summary.)

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 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: retting

When last we met, I had harvested (“lifted”) and dried my flax, combed out the seedheads (“rippled”) and left it out to ret, which looked like this (please ignore my negligent weeding):

To be honest, retting is probably the least visually interesting stage in the process, because it’s all happening at the microbiological level. As the stalks sit out in the sun and rain (let’s face it, more rain than sun at the moment…), microorganisms are busily consuming the pectins that hold the spinnable bast fibres to the woody parts of the stalk etc. So whilst it looks like nothing’s happening, hopefully there’s some microbiological magic at work.

There’s two different ways of doing this process. Well, three if you include modern chemical retting, which I obviously don’t have access to. The first, the one I’ve opted for, is called “dew retting”, and as the name suggests, it means leaving the stems out in the elements to be slowly fermented over the course of a few weeks, depending on climate.

The other alternative is to immerse the stalks in water. In the old days, the preferred option was apparently to do this by weighing it down in slow-running water like a pond or gentle stream. Supposedly this produced the finest fibres with the least discolouration. However, it could also contaminate the water downstream because it essentially dumps a load of rotting matter into the water - a useful reminder that “traditional” doesn’t always mean “eco”. (Though this is nothing compared to sorts of things we dump into our rivers these days of course.)

These days, many recommend immersing it in troughs of water. This is quicker, but I’ve not opted for it for a few reasons:

1. Because I’m not allowed standing water on the allotment,

2. Because it’s quicker, you have to keep a much closer eye on it to stop it before the bast fibres themselves start breaking down, and

3. Because by all accounts, it absolutely stinks. And you’re still left with a trough of filthy water that you’ve got to get rid of somehow…

Knowing when it’s finished is the trick. If you forgive the muddy fingers and really squint, you might just be able to see where I tested it yesterday:

Can you see the fine spiderweb-like fibres? Those are the bast fibres, and it’s a question of waiting until they come away from the stem easily but before the fibres themselves start breaking.

What I’m aiming for is the kind of glossy fibres you can see in the bundle of nettle fibre gifted to me by a guild colleague*:

Yes, nettle, because what I hadn’t realised is that you can extract the bast fibres from quite a range of plants. Flax and hemp are probably the most famous, but nettle is also quite common (look up, e.g. The Nettle Dress if you’ve never seen it), along with some more unusual ones like bamboo and pineapple. I’ve even seen videos of people using bramble bast fibres for making a spun fibre you can use for basket making, and experiments into processing waste hop vines into wearable fabric. I have both of these on my allotment, so I’ll be having a go. It’s funny how much room there is for innovation in something we’ve been doing for thousands of years.

*These have gone through an industrial process called “decortication”, not to be confused with the medical procedure of the same name.

(Retting in this way does take longer, but as I later discovered, not as long as I thought it would. In hindsight, when I tested it in the picture above, it was probably actually pretty much perfectly ready. Unfortunately I let it go longer than I should have. More on that to come.)