What is a scutching knife?

What is a scutching knife?

This was a scutching knife, a wooden agricultural and domestic tool used for the preparation of flax in the process of linen production. Such tools are necessarily used in the sixth stage of flax harvest and refinement when using the traditional hand methods of production.

What is a flax break?

A flax break is a set of intersecting wooden blades that force the retted flax straw to snap into short sections which then fall away from the fibers.

What is a Scutch mill?

Scutching is the stage in linen manufacturing that spans agriculture and industry. A scutcher received flax stems from the farmer and by holding the stems against a rapidly revolving beech-wood paddle removed the husks to leave the valuable flax fibres. The location of mills closely mirrors the growth of flax.

What does Scutcher mean?

: an implement or machine for scutching flax or cotton.

What are the uses of flax?

They can be used to improve digestive health, lower blood pressure and bad cholesterol, reduce the risk of cancer and may benefit people with diabetes. As a versatile food ingredient, flax seeds or flaxseed oil are easy to add to your diet.

What is the difference between flax and linen?

Flax is a plant while linen is the fabric made from the fibers of the flax plant obtained from its stem. Linen is just one of many by-products of the flax plant as other products are paper, dye, and fishnet, medicines, soap, and hair gels.

How do you eat flaxseed?

Add a tablespoon of ground flaxseed to your hot or cold breakfast cereal. Add a teaspoon of ground flaxseed to mayonnaise or mustard when making a sandwich. Mix a tablespoon of ground flaxseed into an 8-ounce container of yogurt. Bake ground flaxseed into cookies, muffins, breads and other baked goods.

Why is flax linen so expensive?

To put it simply, manufacturing linen is a laborious and timely process, from harvesting in the fields to fabric construction on the factory floor. Add geographical limitations of where the linen producing flax plant will grow and the result is a more costly purchase than the more easily produced cotton fabric.

What kind of machine do you use To scutch flax?

Scutching. Scutching can be done by hand or by a machine known as a scutcher. Hand scutching of flax is done with a wooden scutching knife and a small iron scraper. The end products of scutching flax are the long flax fibers, short coarser fibers called tow, and waste woody matter called shive.

Why was the flax scutching festival so important?

For more than 100 years, people here have preserved the pioneer craft of scutching – the process that turns flax-plant fibers into linen cloth. Because scutching was long and laborious, settlers would gather together to do it and created the first flax-scutching festivals.

Which is the best part of the flax plant?

Fiber flax yarns (linen) are made of the best part of the flax plant. The first processing step in the transformation of flax is cleaning the fibers, what is referred to as scutching. The remit at Calira was to replace an existing long-fiber flax line from the 1970s and to significantly increase performance.

What do you use to remove boon from flax?

Once done, the fiber will be covered with broken-up pieces of the stalks, which is called boon. Removing the boon is called scutching. Traditionally scutching boards and wooden scutching knives were used to remove the boon by scraping the fiber.