Lavender, Linen, and Language

Personally, I blame the weather for this post. Turns out that Colorado has had a wonderfully warm fall and because of this, the onset of cold and threat of snow finally forced me to harvest the lavender, which had been growing happily up until the cold. And by harvest, I mean I picked the lavender that grows just outside the front door, along with the remaining tomatoes and even a few strawberries. I had already dried one batch of lavender, and yesterday picked the rest. Spent time yesterday beheading lavender, yielding a small pile of lavender flower petal bits, to be used in handmade sachets.

Sachets turn the topic to linen. Of course, homegrown lavender should be housed in linen Linen is a natural fiber from the flax plant (which, by the way, grows easily in Colorado--so anybody want to start a linen textile business locally?) Will make some sachets for the upcoming craft fair. Any excuse would do, but right now, the craft fair is my excuse that also includes a soft deadline, more of a suggestion or a goal. (Deadline connotes dead necessity, which this project isn't.)

My research into craft fairs has led to another mini-goal--to make descriptive signs to display at the show -- so i dug around for information on project materials, including the linen used to make the sachets. So, now we are moving from linen to language.

Textiles as an industry employs its own set of odd words. Now I know that linen can be blamed for a bunch of them:
* lea - standard measure of bulk linen, which is the number of yards in a pound of linen, divided by 300. (Of course, 300. why not?)
* retting - loosening the fibers to be used for linen from the rest of the plan
* scutching - removing the non-fibrous parts of the plant by pulverizing it using metal rollers; the remains are used to make linseed, shive, and tow.
* shive - see scutching
* tow - see scutching
* heckling - combing flax fibers to separate out the longest, softest fibers, which are the good ones and are used to make linen yarn
* slubs - knots in the yarn given texture to linen

To summarize: cold weather drove me to harvest the lavender which will be clothed in linen which brings us to retting, scutching, and heckling, along with lea, shive, tow, and slub. Wonderful words resulting from the less-than-wonderful weather. Yay!!!

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