From a handful of flax seeds to a hand woven garment, join Kristi Balder as she reveals the intricate process of growing your own shirt right in her own backyard in Goodland, Minnesota.

It's the ultimate lesson in Northwoods self-sufficiency.

Next on 218 Life.

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We know that they were using it in Egypt.

It was well established 7000 years ago.

5000 years ago, in, Swiss lake dwelling places in Europe.

And in Finland, where I'm connected to, the history goes back to the Bronze Age and that's like 500 before common era to 1500 before a common era.

So where it came from, we don't really know.

But, it's had a real connection with spirituality.

That comes back to, to the times of, of Moses and the Jewish people.

Christian churches with Christ being wrapped in a linen shroud, Flax is a wonderful thing for its its beauty and its durability.

It’s not something that traps heat in you and it absorbs water really well.

So it's a nice thing in the summer.

The linen clothes were really nice because you could wear them next to your skin and they weren't itchy.

Easier to wash.

And they get nicer with age.

They tend to become softer and more lustrous with age, especially the stuff for the table, the table linens were beautiful.

My neighbor has sheep, and one year I raised a bottle of lamb for them.

And I thought, oh, I've got to have sheep.

And I thought this would be something fun.

And my husband said, well, if you're going to have sheep, you need to have a reason.

So what's the reason?

And I said that I would start making stuff with wool.

And so I took a felted slippers class with the same neighbor.

And then somebody said, oh, if you're into that, you should get into the Range Fiber Art Guild.

So I joined the guild and then, somebody was selling a loom and I thought, oh, that'd be fun.

I could start weaving towels and give those away as gifts.

And I did buy a spinning wheel right away.

But I was kind of all thumbs, and it took me a while to learn the spinning wheel.

But with the loom, I just took off and I started weaving towels, towels, towels.

I was giving them to everybody for Christmas, and a few years down the road I could kind of iffy spin and the guild brought in Bruce Engebretson to teach a spinning flax into linen class.

And I was kind of iffy because you had the prerequisite was you had to be able to spin.

And I was a questionable spinner, but they let me in the class, and it was so fun, and I was just intrigued by the thought that I could grow my own fiber and make my own towels from something that I grew right out in my garden.

And then I do a lot of demonstrating or a fair amount of demonstrating.

And whenever I'm demo with flax, I always tell people I'm going to grow my own shirt.

And so I took it, you know, from seed to shirt this year.

Usually a good judge would be the first dandelion, but usually it's a couple weeks before you'd plant your garden a couple weeks before the last frost.

It's not real crucial.

You can wait up until early, you know, till Memorial weekend.

Get a head start on the weeds if you can.

You need a a good soft soil bed that will help the plants grow good and tall.

You'll broadcast the seeds.

So just sprinkle it by hand.

And then just tap it in.

You don't have to cover it with soil.

You'll get a more consistent germination if it's all uniformly at the same depth, which is just pressed into the surface.

So it's, pretty, pretty simple process.

It's good to plant a pretty thickly because the plants grow close together.

It kind of pushes them straight up and they don't get as branchy.

So you get the more long, line fibers.

And then also it helps keep the competition, you know, kind of chokes out the weeds.

I would do about 1 pound per 10 by 20 foot square, but that is going to give a lot of flax.

So for the first year person, don't plant a whole pound of seeds.

Start smaller than that.

But as for how much to grow, I think a good rule of thumb, plant a square foot of how much cloth you need.

So if you need a 10 foot by 20 foot piece of soft cloth, then plant that much, square footage of seed.

The first year I ordered Natalie Seed from a source that's no longer in business.

So some years it's been harder than others to find, but it's getting more popular.

So you can get it from some of the, fiber sheds.

A fiber shed is a local group, like a small scale group of like, almost a co-op that are getting together to share equipment and resources and kind of make it easier for a community to do things versus an individual.

You want to make sure that you get a textile variety.

You could go out and buy the, the field seed oil or the, feed flax.

And those plants grow more bushy, and they have more seed balls and all the little branches, they don't grow straight and tall.

So you don't get that good line fiber out of it.

So,look for a textile or a fabric variety.

After the first year, you can start saving the seeds.

After the plants are about six inches tall, I weed them.

And if you just weed them once, if you planted thickly and you had good germination, usually, one weeding after it's about six inches tall, you can pull the weeds out easily at that point.

Then the plant will really take up.

It will take off so fast that you don't need to.

They can't compete.

I’ve never used any herbicides or seen any need for that.

It's a vigorous plant.

It grows really well almost anywhere.

I mean it likes fertility and it likes a good soft soil bed, but, you can grow it in some pretty hostile environments and still get a, you know, something that you can work with.

No insects.

You do have to watch out for critters.

So I usually throw a little fence around mine because like, chickens love to get in there.

scratch, deer will walk through.

So I just throw a three foot, four foot tall wire fence around mine.

And then the other thing you might want to is put some windbreak on the west side, because usually when the, you know, the last month of the growing season, that stuff gets tall, that gets the flowers and the seed balls on top and that gets top heavy.

And then we usually get a strong storm.

And what happens is it'll lodge.

So it will lay over and it can’t stand itself back up.

You don't lose your crop, but it doesn't look as pretty and it's not as clean to work with.

You know, it could potentially mold and stuff.

I like to harvest it when I can just look across the top of the plants and see one mature seed ball here and there.

So that's when the seed balls golden.

And when it rattles a little bit, the seeds are loosened there.

A lot of people like to look at the stock color, but there's environmental factors that can influence that, like your drought conditions and cloudy days.

So the seed maturity, I think, is a really good way to judge it.

And you want to do it just when the plants are just starting, some of them are reaching maturity.

If you wait too long your fiber gets coarse.

And if you take it too soon, the fiber’s too thin and fine and weak.

So it's a little bit of a happy medium.

For harvesting you just pull it out of the ground, roots and all.

You do is grab a little handful and it has a shallow root, so it pulls up pretty easily.

And you gather a handful and then you take a couple, extra strands of fiber and wrap it around and tie it into a little bundle, and then stick it somewhere where it can dry.

I've stuck it on my clothesline before.

You can put little, you know, tripods together called Stooks and let it dry.

It's good to harvest it on a dry day.

And when you have a few dry days coming, I think it's kind of like baling hay for anybody that's out there.

You could do it when the sun is shining.

Drying process takes, you know, a few days.

Four days, maybe could variable conditions.

But you want to get it good and dry before you go to the next step When it's really crunchy feeling like if you grab the handful of it and the leaves just kind of scatter off, then it's ready to take to the Ripple.

This has been dried, and now I'm going to Ripple it, to get the seeds and the leaves off.

And, this is a Ripple that my husband built, and it just basically combs the seeds off.

So once it’s clean and I have all the seed balls off, it's ready to be Retted, which is the process that breaks down the stem so that it'll separate from the plant.

Because right now it's it's still connected together.

There's resins that are bonding it.

So there's two methods for Retting.

One is tank retted, where you set it in a tank.

And the water breaks down the fiber.

And that's what this looks like.

And the other is Dew Retting where you lay it out in the lawn.

And it takes a little longer, but it'll do the same thing.

It basically breaks down the plant so that the fiber can come out of the stock freely.

So if you don't Ret it far enough, there's still kind of the plant glue and there's resin and it'll hold those fibers together.

It almost like ribbons.

And it's really hard to do the further steps of the process, especially hard to spin if you still have that resin.

But on the other hand, if you take it too far and you over Ret it you damage the fiber.

And that loses its strength.

If you’re dew Reddit it, you collect it all on in the middle of a dry day.

So that's already kind of dry.

And, and it's ready to go to the next step.

If it's Tank Retted, you've got to lay it out and let it air in the wind and the sun.

And you want to kind of let that smell clear off before you take to the next steps.

The next step after Retting is breaking the flax.

And so my my husband built my break, and it's, it's kind of fun and it's a good workout and it's a good thing to do outside.

So you just use that, break tool to do the chopping.

You grab a handful and you chop mainly on one end of the plant.

You keep your hand in the same spot.

Chaff will just go flying everywhere.

And it'll you'll see that fiber coming free.

Pretty soon it doesn't look like straw anymore.

It's starting to look more like a horse tail.

It comes pretty clean if it's been Retted far enough.

A lot of common mistake in the beginning is people don't get it Retted well enough, so it doesn't come very clean.

But it's freeing the fiber from the stocks of the plant.

So I'm just about ready.

When you're done at the break, when you think you can't get it any cleaner.

Then it's ready to go to the sketching.

This is the sketching board and a wooden sword that I use to soften and smooth and clean the fibers a little bit more.

So as I go, the more debris will fall away, and more of that chaff, and it'll soften the fibers and take some of the weak ends off.

When you’re done with sketching, you take it to the hackles.

These are the hackles, and they're going to comb and smooth it out a little bit more, and they'll take off any of the weak ends.

So I'll end up with two products.

The stuff that's caught on the hackle is called Tow, and the stuff that's left in my hand is called the Line.

The Line is the more, like the primo or the more desirable product, makes the higher quality linen.

But they're both usable, and I'll use them both in my weaving projects.

And I'll do it through a series, of corse, medium and and fine hackles to really get it smooth.

And it's just a, a comb, smoothing and cleaning the fiber.

You kind of treat it gently.

You want to have the wind at your back because, it can spread your fibers out and kind of make more of a mess of it.

And you can end up breaking off more than you wanted.

So you just are gently pulling it through, combing it through, So, now I have the beautiful long line fiber that's ready to get loaded onto a distaff to spin.

And I also have all this Tow which I can also fluff in.

Put it in another distaff and I can spin this too.

So I'm ready to go to the spinning wheel.

When I’m spinning flax, I keep a little, cup of water near and I will just dip my finger in there and I'll wet the thread as I'm spinning.

I'll set the wheel in motion, and then my foot keeps the treadle going, so the wheel keeps spinning.

And then my hands are turning, controlling the thickness of the thread and how much twist gets put on it.

It changes from flax to linen right there between my two hands.

Linen refers to the thread or the cloth.

And so that's happening like a little bit of magic right there.

And I have to increase my speed on the spinning to add more twist.

So you also can, you know, get too thin or too thick if you're not careful.

So you just take some practice to spin.

It's a lot different than spinning wool.

I don't know if it's this way for everybody, but I've been able to get thinner and thinner spinning over time.

In the beginning, I was pretty much making twine.

So my, my fiber quality and my thread has gotten a lot better with practice.

So I think it's one of those things that really gets better with practice.

They say that it takes seven spinners to keep one weaver busy.

So the spinning is really the bottleneck in the process.

It takes a lot of time.

The most time was spent on spinning.

After the spinning wheel, I take the bobbin and I measure it off onto something called a Knitty Knotty.

So I'll measure it out.

And it makes kind of a, like a one yard loop of 300 or 500 threads.

And then I usually scour it right away, which basically for linen, you scour it by boiling it in, lye.

So you really want to strip any of that plant resin that's still on there.

So, I boil it to scour it.

It takes about half an hour and it really does.

You'll be amazed what comes out of the water.

Once it's scoured, you can keep it in that natural color or you can dye it.

And you can also weave into cloth and dye it after that.

But I did mine, I did Black Walnut and Indigo.

And the Black Walnut is really easy.

It’s probably, in everything I've dyed with, one of the easiest things to work with.

It was my sister's tree.

We just collected the Black Walnuts.

It's the little, husk that turns black and squishy.

You just take that off, throw it in a bucket and leave it for a few days until it starts getting a little bubbly, and then you strain off the the debris from the liquid, and it's really dark brown then.

Wear gloves!

I actually had my fingers permanently stained for about three weeks from brown Black Walnut stain.

But once you have that liquid, you can bring it up to like about 180 and throw your fiber in there, and it does a beautiful brown.

I grew Indigo as well.

And Indigo is a lot more complicated than Black Walnut.

But you'll pick the leaves and you'll seep them in water for 3 or 4 hours, and that'll start drawing the the pigment out of the leaf into the water.

And then after 3 or 4 hours, you can ring the water out of those plants and get rid of the the leftover leaf.

And you should have kind of a sherry brown color of liquid.

It doesn't look like Indigo Blue at all.

Since I strained off the leaves, I added a little bit of baking soda to turn it alkaline.

And then I added one more, it's called Color Run Remover.

It's a laundry product, and it takes the oxygen out.

And I have this, this skein, which is just like the dry one over there, right here.

It's been scoured and I'm going to wring the water out.

And then I'm going to dip it in there.

And I'm have to leave it set in about ten minutes.

You don’t want to put a unscoured thread in there because it's not ready to accept the dye.

And so you put your threads in or your cloth into the dye vat, and you can do five, twenty minutes, somewhere in there.

And when you pull it out that's the magic of Indigo.

It actually turns color when the oxidization happens.

So your oxygen's hitting the dye molecules and it'll change right in front of your eyes.

I did have to do a lot of calculating to know if I had enough yardage.

I had to keep spinning until I had enough to go to the loom.

And for this I had a little over 6000 yards spun.

So it was 12 skeins.

And it had taken me quite a while to get that much spun.

I did, actually three muslins to get my pattern worked out, I wanted to make something that I'd like.

I didn't want to do something that was going to sit in a closet for the next 40 years.

So I did three mocks until I got it just how I wanted it.

And then I knew that if I wanted to do that pattern, I'd need, a 19.5in width cloth, and I'd need seven and a half yards.

And then I figured out my set, which is how many threads per inch that I would have.

And then I could from there do the math to figure out how many yards total I need for the project.

And so once I finally had enough, then it was time to measure out the warp I took a skein right like this.

Opened it up, put it on the swift.

And then I tighten it up and put tension on it.

And then I'm going to measure it off here on the warping board.

I'll just do a little loop on the end.

And up here and I'll measure it off like this.

So, I measured this leader thread to the exact inches that I needed.

And then I just found the positioning on here that worked.

And I'm making something called the Cross right here.

So it keeps the threads, see it goes over and under and it’s what keeps my threads organized and orderly from when I go back to the loom so they don't get tangled.

So, I did this, 504 threads here.

I measured it out this way.

I did it in five separate bouts, so that they weren't, if you kind of come all the way to the edge of the pegs, sometimes they, the pegs start pulling in, and your measurement isn't quite exact on those last threads.

Then I took the warp off the warping board and took it to the loom.

That's called dressing the loom, where I I threaded the Warp.

Each thread goes through the reed, which is kind of on the Beater Bar, and then each thread goes through a Heddle The way you thread it sets the pattern of the fabric.

So I did Twill.

Twill is the pattern of the cloth.

And that means it goes, over to under two.

And then the next thread moves over one and goes over the next two and under the next two.

And so most denim is twill.

And if you look at it you can kind of see that diagonal across the warp Makes a little bit, more durable fabric.

With any project, when you first set up the loom, you got to work out a little bit of kinks.

You got to get your tension right and you've got to get everything just how you want it.

My experience with hand spun linen is that it'll get frizzy.

So there's a lot of abrasion happening with the beater and with the friction of the threads rubbing next to each other as you're raising and lowering different threads.

Somebody suggested gelatin as a sizing, but my preferred sizing is starch like, like actual laundry starch.

So I wipe my threads down, my warp threads down with starch.

And that, actually, I kept it wet too.

So I used the threads when they were wet and when they were starched.

And so it took me a few, inches, maybe six inches to really find the zone that the cloth wanted to be woven And then it just, went really fast from there.

So I made a hoodie and it was actually a pattern for weavers to keep in mind that I didn't waste a lot of the cloth.

So it's careful cuts and careful measurements to maximize use of the cloth.

And you do have to be careful with, hand-woven cloth.

It wants to unravel a little bit more than stuff from a factory.

So you could do some things like stay stitching or, zigzagging along the edge of your cuts and you can actually use some interfacing, some fusible interfacing products on the really like sleeve shoulder edges and necklines that are going to really be prone to being pulled on and manipulated more during the process.

My great grandma kept diaries from 1928 to 1976 to the year I was born.

And in reading her diaries, she talks about shearing her sheep.

She talks about, growing flax.

I actually, can read through that and the gardening and the farming.

And so there was a like a lot of connection to that.

And, I've got a picture of my great great grandmother who immigrated.

She came from Finland in, I believe, 1895.

I've got a picture of her spinning on a spinning wheel.

And then her daughter, my great grandma, was next to her carding.

And then one of my great, great aunts is on the other side, knitting.

So one thing about reading those diaries is how much has changed in the last 100 years.

They didn't have running water, they didn't have electricity, they didn't have cars in the beginning.

And so I saw all those changes coming through in those years of reading the diaries.

And I guess we take it for granted.

We can go buy a shirt now.

And there was a time where you did have to grow your shirt or raise it on your sheep.

Production funding of 218 life is made possible in part by, First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Hug hydroponics, committed to making in floor heating simple providing and floor heating solutions for both commercial and residential.

More info at Hug hydroponics.com.

Closed captioning of 218 Life is provide in part by, Renaissance Hearing Center.

Committed to enchancing your hearing, allowing you to enjoy life’s most moments.

Production costs for this program have been made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and the members of Lakeland PBS.