Day 25... More About Flax and Linen Weave

I am now firing my special pot today! I took special care in drying it and now it is ready for its' first firing.

Yesterday, I went to a sheep and wool festival in Rhode Island.  Coggeshall farm, http://www.coggeshallfarm.org/ is a historic farm site/museum in Bristol RI.  The house there was built in 1790. Sheep, chickens, turkeys wandered around the lawns. The farm cats are friendly. Horses donkeys were there too. Outbuildings and sheds are accurate of the time period.

There was also a great reenactor/demonstrator there who was an accurate and funny guy that made learning about flax production so interesting. I watched it 3 times. 

Flax was grown all over New England till cotton was easier to process, (mass production in the early days). Mills and faster machinery, the demand for fabric and the cheap cotton from the south, eventually put flax production here out of business.  Most communities had someone who liked and was good at weaving.  Farmers grew acres of flax. Broadcasting the small seeds, weeding once they sprouted and the the plants grew think and dense, blocking out further weeds as the flax grew. Then there would be beautiful blue flowers. In the fall, flax was cut, soaked, dried, beaten, scutched and haked into 2-3 foot fibers that are then spun into an incredibly strong and durable fiber. Cotton-jean is a fabric woven of cotton weft and linen warp threads... (blue jeans c. 1700s). Wool and linen was turned into a strong and warm fabric called Linsey-woolsey. I just did a Google search and can find very few places that make Linsey-woolsey today and our modern bluejeans are cotton and sometimes hemp-cotton. These hemp based bluejeans come from the cannabis family of plants, but you can't go smoking your blue jeans... industrial hemp has very little THC levels.

The Birge family of farmers that owned my house grew, spun and wove linen into fabric. They wore linen clothes every day. One family in Maine had acquired a loom in 1786. Between 1787 and 1792, two girls of the family wove check, diaper, huckabak, worsted, dimity, woolen "shurting," towles, blankets, "rag coverlids," and lawn hankerchiefs as well as "plain cloth".  Simeon Birge (the guy who I think built my house), well, his mother lived across the street. During the Revolutionary War, she wove tent fabric along with all the other fabric the family needed for clothes. I just heard that most people had two sets of clothes. One for every day and one for Sunday go-to-meeting. I supposed they didn't wash their clothes too often... maybe while they slept they could hang them near the fireplace to dry?


"For the comfort of the militia, when they should go into the service, the assembly directed that each town whould provide one tent for every 1,000 pounds on the list, and Torrington standing 5,816 pound and.15 shillings, was required to provide five, if not six tents. Hence, Dea. John Cook, then town treasureer, paid one order to the widow Mary Birge, by the hand of her son John Birge,(Simeons brother who went off to war and fought at the battle of Cowpens), for tent cloth, amounting to five pounds and siz shillings, and also, paid Cart. John Storng, one of the selectmen, seven pounds and sixteen shillings lawful money, for tent cloth.".. History of Torrington CT by Samuel Orcutt.

"She, (Mary), is remembered as tall and slight in form with blue or gray eyes. She was totally blind for several years before her death".... Kelloggs in the Old World and the New, Volume 1, Timothy Hopkins. If she wove for years and the lighting was bad... night by candle, overcast days, dark winters, I suppose it would have been a strain on her eyes.




Not my reed, but this is what one looks like.

 I found two reeds in my attic. So yesterday at the fiber fest in Rhode Island, I asked a new acquaintance about the reeds in my attic. They are about 40" long, made of tiny reed strips with fiber cords holding the reeds together. There are scratched marks on the ends, maybe Roman numerals. I have not found out any more about these yet. I especially want to know how old they are. Having just spent three hours trying to find out about old looms with no success on the Internet, I am going to close out for today.

Tomorrow, if all went well in the world of the kiln, I should be ready to make a plaster cast of the special pot.


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