Editing Flax (section)

=====Dressing the flax=====
{{Unreferenced section|date=June 2021}}
<gallery class="center">
File:Harfleur - Compagnons duellistes - teillage du lin.jpg|Breaking flax
File:Harfleur - Compagnons duellistes - battage du lin.jpg|Scutching flax
File:Harfleur - Compagnons duellistes - peignage du lin.jpg|Heckling flax
File:Flax fibers.JPG|Flax fiber in different forms, before and after processing 
</gallery>

Dressing the flax is the process of removing the straw from the fibers. Dressing consists of three steps: breaking, scutching, and heckling. The breaking breaks up the straw. Some of the straw is scraped from the fibers in the scutching process, and finally, the fiber is pulled through heckles to remove the last bits of straw.

Breaking breaks up the straw into short segments. <!-- more how-to To do it, take the bundles of flax and untie them. Next, in small handsful, put it between the beater of the breaking machine (a set of wooden blades that mesh together when the upper jaw is lowered, which look like a paper cutter but instead of having a big knife it has a blunt arm), and beat it till the three or four inches that have been beaten appear to be soft. Move the flax a little higher and continue to beat it till all is soft, and the wood is separated from the fiber. When half of the flax is broken, hold the beaten end and beat the rest in the same way as the other end was beaten, till the wood is separated. -->

[[Scutching]] removes some of the [[straw]] from the fiber<!-- , it helps to swing a wooden scutching knife down the fibers while they hang vertically, thus scraping the edge of the knife along the fibers and pulling away pieces of the stalk. Some of the fiber will also be scutched away, this cannot be helped and is a normal part of the process -->.

[[Heckling (flax)|Heckling]] is pulling the fiber through various sizes of [[heckling comb]]s or heckles. A heckle is a bed of "nails"—sharp, long-tapered, tempered, polished steel pins driven into wooden blocks at regular spacing. <!-- A good progression is from four pins per square inch to 12, to 25 to 48 to 80. The first three will remove the straw, and the last two will split and polish the fibers. Some of the finer stuff that comes off in the last hackles is called [[tow]] and can be [[carding|carded]] like wool and [[spinning (textiles)|spun]]. It will produce a coarser yarn than the fibers pulled through the heckles because it will still have some straw in it. -->