It all starts with the fabric. It covers our bodies, our beds, our dining tables... Where does it come from? What is its history? How does it get made?
Textile industry history has always interested me. My family was from Massachusetts, from a large shoe-making town. I saw a big loom for the first time while visiting a textile museum in Lowell, MA. We live in New Hampshire, and the Amoskeag textile mills in Manchester are nearby.
As a quilter and lover of textiles, I believe we have a responsibility to not only bring the fabric arts to younger generations, but also to educate them about the history of the textile industry. Today we can walk right into a fabric store and find wools, cottons, linens, knits, rayons and so many other types of fabrics right on the shelf. Who were the people behind all of this?
While on vacation in Northern Ireland (and while my husband was at a conference!) I visited the Green Lane Museum in Limavady.
For a couple of hundred years, ending around the mid 1900’s, Northern Ireland was the perfect combination of climate to grow high quality flax and people to work all stages of the linen-making process. The Roe River provided power and transportation, and as the museum shows, turning flax into white, soft linen was a time-consuming and back-breaking process.
Making linen takes several steps: sowing; harvesting; retting (soaking the flax for two weeks and then peeling off the rotten outer husk, drying and then bundling into stacks; heckling (combing the fibers); breaking (breaking down the dried flax stem); scutching (pounding the flax to remove the rest of the flax stem and start softening the tough linen fibers within); spinning (combing and twisting the wet fibers into thread); weaving; bleaching (brown linen was rinsed and laid out in long strips on a field to bleach in the sun – several times – to turn into white linen); and, beetling (the cloth was beaten by a machine with heavy wooden hammers to tighten the weave and give the linen a smooth sheen).
Mechanization and the low price of cotton ended the need for so many workers, and thus the extensive linen industry in Northern Ireland. High quality, high priced linen products are still offered by small companies in the region.
A woman could have worked in almost all of the stages of the linen-making process, perhaps at home spinning wet linen fibers (her poor hands!), or maybe breaking or scutching, breathing in the dust thrown up in the process. Hundreds of people were needed and employed to create prized linen fabric.
We don’t know how lucky we are to be consumers of cloth in this high technology world. As quilters, let us honor our past fabric-makers, and remember from where the fabric comes. It all starts with the fabric.
The Green Lane Museum is housed in the weaving shed. Some photos:
The horse-drawn lint stone would roll over stems laid down by workers for the breaking process.
A flax breaking machine.
A bleaching field...
...and its watch tower. Theft was punishable by death.
Remains of the beetling shed.