Within two to three weeks, depending upon climatic conditions, the fibre can be separated. Dew-retted fibre is generally darker in color and of poorer quality than water-retted fibre.
|
|
The stalks are then bundled and retted by steeping in pools of stagnant water.
|
|
Under old methods, hemp was cut and allowed to lie in the fields for weeks until it retted enough so the fiber could be pulled off by hand.
|
|
Pond retting is the fastest. It consists of placing the flax in a pool of water which will not evaporate. It generally takes place in a shallow pool which will warm up dramatically in the sun; the process may take from a few days to a few weeks. Pond-retted flax is traditionally considered of lower quality, possibly because the product can become dirty, and is easily over-retted, damaging the fiber.
|
|
These seeds and pollen are possible relics of retting (steeping in water) of hemp because pollen of aquatic plants such as water lilies and cattails have been found together with hemp seeds and pollen in the same peat cores, therefore suggesting that these hemp remnants were submerged during this period. Although exact time spans are unknown, cultivation of hemp at Askham was probably intense in the Tudor period when the crop was grown and retted extensively and by royal decree in England for hempen ropes for the British navy. There is some documentary evidence for this at Askham Bog in the Acomb Court Roll of 1594, which restricted where hemp could be retted (steeped) owing to the malodour produced by retted fibres and the potential for the retting water to pollute rivers. However, hemp retting ceased in the 19th century with increased importation of hempen rope from Europe and Russia and the increasing reversion to sisal from America and jute from India.
|
|
Pliny the Elder describes the production of linen from flax and hemp. After harvesting, the plant stems were retted to loosen the outer layers and internal fibres, stripped, pounded and then smoothed. Following this, the materials were woven. Flax, like wool, came in various speciality grades and qualities.
|
|
Jute fabric Coffee sacks made of jute. Jute fiber is extracted from retted stem of jute plants Jute matting is used to prevent flood erosion while natural vegetation becomes established. For this purpose, a natural and biodegradable fiber is essential. Jute is the second most important vegetable fiber after cotton due to its versatility.
|
|
Bristle coir is the longest variety of coir fibre. It is manufactured from retted coconut husks through a process called defibering. The coir fibre thus extracted is then combed using steel combs to make the fibre clean and to remove short fibres. Bristle coir fibre is used as bristles in brushes for domestic and industrial applications.
|
|
Several methods are used for retting flax. It can be retted in a pond, stream, field, or tank. When the retting is complete, the bundles of flax feel soft and slimy, and quite a few fibers are standing out from the stalks. When wrapped around a finger, the inner woody part springs away from the fibers.
|
|
Bousillage in south Louisiana is a mixture of clay earth and retted Spanish moss, but in the Upper Mississippi River Valley and Canada contains straw, grass or hair, used to fill in the panels in poteaux- sur-sol, poteaux-en-terre, and half-timbered framing (called colombage in French).Edwards, Jay Dearborn, and Nicolas Verton. A Creole lexicon architecture, landscape, people. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 32. Print.
|
|
Tufts of retted bamboo fibers for sale at Kottiyoor Temple in Kerala. Some bamboo fibre is made by a mechanical-bacterial process similar to retting flax into linen fibre.Bamboo Retting In this way, the woody part of the bamboo is crushed mechanically before a natural enzyme retting and washing process is used to break down the walls and extract the fibre. This bast fibre is then spun into yarn.
|
|
On Lehmkaut (a street), remnants of a brickworks could still be seen until the 1960s. Made here, right in the village, were field-fired bricks. In Andreas Gottfried's former potter's shop, pottery was made until 1968. The flax that was extensively grown here on the heaths, whose poorer soils were subjected to controlled burns, was retted in a great flax-retting tank, which is believed to have been communally organized.
|
|
The stalk stays submerged in water for 20 days. However, the retting process may require less time if the quality of the jute is better. In most cases, the fiber extraction process of bast fibers in water retting is done by the farmers while standing under water. When the jute stalk is well retted, the stalk is grabbed in bundles and hit with a long wooden hammer to make the fiber loose from the jute hurd or core.
|
|
In the area of Brechkaut and Brechlöcher (laneways?) there were major brick kilns, and at their ends lay the hot-air shaft measuring about 2 × 3 m on which the flax was retted so that it could then be scutched and heckled. The former herdsmen's houses of the herding association have been gone since the 1950s. Listed for a time within Meddersheim's limits were five mills and one pig farm. At the Ilsberg was a quarry.
|
|
Retting removes the pectins that bind the fibers to the stalk and each other, so under-retted flax is harder to separate from the stalk, and often gets damaged in the scutching process. Over-retting the flax causes the fibers to deteriorate and break. These broken fibres are called codilla, which can be used along with heckled tow to make yarn. In the scutching process, some of the fiber is also scutched away along with the stalk, a normal part of the process.
|
|
The plant is pulled up with the roots (not cut), so as to increase the fiber length. After this, the flax is allowed to dry, the seeds are removed, and it is then retted. Dependent upon climatic conditions, characteristics of the sown flax and fields, the flax remains on the ground between two weeks and two months for retting. As a result of alternating rain and the sun, an enzymatic action degrades the pectins which bind fibers to the straw.
|
|
38) At the time of the flax harvest, the Sages have even defined how many stalks of flax that were forgotten in the field by their owner can be esteemed as "forgotten sheaves," enabling their finder to possess them, without him being guilty of theft.Mishnah (Peah 6:5, p. 17) What constitutes a violation of Sabbath-day laws is also discussed with regard to flax, as bundles of freshly retted flaxOn retting, see The Mishnah (ed. Herbert Danby), Oxford University Press: Oxford 1977, s.v.
|
|
This form of retting also produces quite an odor. Stream retting is similar to pool retting, but the flax is submerged in bundles in a stream or river. This generally takes two or three weeks longer than pond retting, but the end product is less likely to be dirty, does not smell as bad, and because the water is cooler, is less likely to be over-retted. Both pond and stream retting were traditionally used less because they pollute the waters used for the process.
|
|
This was a technique used in French Louisiana by colonists from the 18th to 19th centuries. In France the framing was typically in-filled between the post with brick (briquette-entre-poteaux), stone and mud (Pierrotage) or bousillage. There was no stone in south Louisiana, and bricks were not being made during early colonial times. The colonist picked up on a technique that the Native Americans were using to build their wattle and daub structures, and that was heavy clay soil and retted Spanish moss as the binder.
|
|
To scutch flax by hand, the scutching knife is scraped down with a sharp strike against the fibers while they hang vertically. The edge of the knife is scraped along the fibers to pull away pieces of the stalk. This is repeated until all of the stalk has been removed and the flax is smooth and silky. When scutching was done by hand, people could scutch up to of flax in one day, depending on the quality of the flax, as coarser flax, harder flax, and poorly retted flax takes longer to scutch.
|
|
The most widely practiced method of retting, water retting, is performed by submerging bundles of stalks in water. The water, penetrating to the central stalk portion, swells the inner cells, bursting the outermost layer, thus increasing absorption of both moisture and decay-producing bacteria. Retting time must be carefully judged; under-retting makes separation difficult, and over-retting weakens the fibre. In double retting, a gentle process producing excellent fibre, the stalks are removed from the water before retting is completed, dried for several months, then retted again.
|
|
A small Creole-style cottage constructed of bousillage (a mixture of retted Spanish moss, animal hair and mud used as infill material in French Creole dwellings) and half-timber still stands on her original 1780s-1816 farmstead, off Cedar Bend Road (Latitude 31.681271/Longitude -93.018800). The house is known as "Maison de Marie Therese" and "Coincoin-Prudhomme House". Buildings (some National Historic Landmarks) associated with the heritage of other historically prominent African Americans, such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, date to the Reconstruction Era. This was o many decades after Coincoin's lifespan.
|
|
Separation of hurd and bast fiber is known as decortication. Traditionally, hemp stalks would be water-retted first before the fibers were beaten off the inner hurd by hand, a process known as scutching. As mechanical technology evolved, separating the fiber from the core was accomplished by crushing rollers and brush rollers, or by hammer-milling, wherein a mechanical hammer mechanism beats the hemp against a screen until hurd, smaller bast fibers, and dust fall through the screen. After the Marijuana Tax Act was implemented in 1938, the technology for separating the fibers from the core remained "frozen in time".
|
|
The retted stalks, called straw, are dried in open air or by mechanical means, and are frequently stored for a short period to allow "curing" to occur, facilitating fibre removal. Final separation of the fibre is accomplished by a breaking process in which the brittle woody portion of the straw is broken, either by hand or by passing through rollers, followed by the scutching operation, which removes the broken woody pieces (shives) by beating or scraping. Some machines combine breaking and scutching operations. Waste material from the first scutching, consisting of shives and short fibres, is usually treated a second time.
|
|
Around one tonne of bast fiber and 2–3 tonnes of core material can be decorticated from 3–4 tonnes of good-quality, dry-retted straw. For an annual yield of this level is it in Ontario recommended to add nitrogen (N):70–110 kg/ha, phosphate (P2O5): up to 80 kg/ha and potash (K2O): 40–90 kg/ha. The average yield of dry hemp stalks in Europe was 6 ton/ha (2.4 ton/ac) in 2001 and 2002. FAO argue that an optimum yield of hemp fiber is more than 2 tonnes per ha, while average yields are around 650 kg/ha.
|
|
This name means a flax-stubble field and in 1843, when the Tithe Assessment map was drawn, it covered the area now occupied by the Library, Blunden Court and Old Rectory Close. Flax was used to make linen but before spinning and weaving the stems were "retted"; soaking in running water, a procedure which could have used the stream which also powered the mills. Cranleigh Waters flows through and drains the village. There were two mills, Bramley Mill and Snowdenham Mill, probably both here at the time of the Domesday survey, and Lane (now a bridleway) led to the second of these mills from the higher land around Wintershall.
|
|
British production is mostly used as bedding for horses; other uses are under development. Companies in Canada, the UK, the United States, and Germany, among many others, process hemp seed into a growing range of food products and cosmetics; many traditional growing countries continue to produce textile- grade fibre. Dried hemp stalks displayed at the International Hemp Fair in Vienna Air-dried stem yields in Ontario have from 1998 and onward ranged from 2.6–14.0 tonnes of dry, retted stalks per hectare (1–5.5 t/ac) at 12% moisture. Yields in Kent County, have averaged 8.75 t/ha (3.5 t/ac). Northern Ontario crops averaged 6.1 t/ha (2.5 t/ac) in 1998. Statistic for the European Union for 2008 to 2010 say that the average yield of hemp straw has varied between 6.3 and 7.3 ton per ha. Only a part of that is bast fiber.
|
|
It was no coincidence that on 24 August 1456 the printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed, perhaps triggering the very first wayzgoose party at Fust–Schöffer shop in Mainz. The holiday, a break in printing, was traditionally also the day that papermakers took a break from making paper for the printers, and used up the last of the pulp to make paper for windows, waxed paper being the traditional window material for the yeoman class before the use of glass became more widespread, and after this was done, the pulp vats would be cleaned out for the new fibre, made from rags collected in the spring, and retted (prepared by rotting) over the summer. The paper windows were fitted on St. Martin's Day (11 November). Just as the saint had supposedly cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, so yeoman farmers would give offcuts of the windows to the poor, to help them keep warm during the coming winter.
|
|