Fabrics
How Linen Is Made: From Flax Plant to Finished Fabric
Linen is made from the stem of the flax plant through roughly eight stages: growing, pulling, retting, scutching, hackling, spinning, weaving and finishing. Each stage decides something a buyer can feel in the finished cloth, from how long the fibre is to how smooth the yarn runs and how the fabric drapes. Knowing the sequence lets you read a quotation properly and ask a sharper question when two linens that look alike are priced apart.
Most of this happens before a weaver ever touches the material. The flax is grown, retted and spun into yarn by specialists, often in different countries. A vertically integrated manufacturer like H & J Exim begins at the yarn and carries it through to the finished, packed product, so the stages below split naturally into the ones that set the raw fibre and the ones that turn yarn into the cloth you order.
The eight stages and what each changes
| Stage | What happens | What it changes in your cloth |
|---|---|---|
| Growing | Flax grown for fibre, pulled young | Fibre fineness and length |
| Pulling | Plant pulled whole, not cut | Preserves full fibre length |
| Retting | Stem rotted to loosen fibre | Fibre strength, colour, cleanliness |
| Scutching | Woody core broken away | Fibre yield and waste |
| Hackling | Fibre combed and sorted | Long line fibre against short tow |
| Spinning | Fibre twisted into yarn | Yarn fineness, smoothness, strength |
| Weaving | Yarn woven into fabric | Width, weight, structure, hand |
| Finishing | Cloth washed, dyed, softened | Colour, softness, shrinkage, final look |
Growing and pulling the flax
Flax grown for fibre is sown densely so the plants grow tall and straight with few branches, which gives longer, finer fibres than flax grown for seed. It is ready in around 100 days. The crop is pulled rather than cut, roots and all, because cutting would sever the fibre at the base and lose length. Fibre length is the quiet driver behind everything downstream: longer fibres spin into smoother, stronger yarn with fewer joins.
Where the flax is grown matters to the result, which is why origin gets its own discussion in where linen yarn comes from. The cool, damp maritime belt of western Europe suits fibre flax particularly well, and European flax is the raw material behind a large share of apparel and furnishing linen.
Retting: where the fibre is freed
Retting is controlled rotting. The pulled stems are left so that moisture and microbes break down the pectins gluing the fibre bundles to the woody core. It is the stage with the most influence on the finished fibre, and the hardest to get right.
- Dew retting leaves the flax in the field for several weeks, turned to ret evenly. It is cheaper and more common, and tends to give a greyer, more varied fibre.
- Water retting steeps the flax in tanks or rivers and is faster and more uniform, giving a paler, cleaner fibre, at higher cost and with more effluent to manage.
Under-ret and the fibre will not separate cleanly; over-ret and the fibre itself weakens. A buyer does not specify retting directly, but it shows up as fibre colour and strength, and therefore in how consistent the yarn can be.
Scutching and hackling
After retting the stems are dried and scutched: crushed between rollers and scraped so the brittle woody core, the shive, falls away from the fibre. What remains is a tangle of fibre still mixed with short bits.
Hackling then combs the fibre through beds of pins, from coarse to fine. This does two jobs. It aligns the fibres so they lie parallel, and it separates the long, combed fibres, called line, from the short, tangled ones, called tow. Line fibre spins into the fine, smooth yarns used for sheeting and fine shirting. Tow spins into coarser, more textured yarns suited to heavier furnishing cloth, rustic weaves and twines. The same flax crop yields both, and which you are buying is one of the first things to pin down when comparing two linens.
Spinning
Spinning twists the combed fibre into continuous yarn. The hackled line is first drawn into a loose rope called a sliver, then drafted finer and twisted. Linen yarn is spun one of two ways:
- Wet spinning passes the fibre through a hot water bath before twisting, which lets the fibres slide and bind closely. The result is a fine, smooth, strong yarn used for the better sheeting and fine linens.
- Dry spinning twists the fibre dry, giving a hairier, more textured, usually coarser yarn, often from tow.
Linen yarn thickness is measured in lea rather than the cotton count, and the number tells you how fine the yarn is and what it suits. That measurement and its conversions are set out in lea count explained. Finer counts cost more and weave slower, which feeds directly into price.
Weaving the cloth
This is where a manufacturer like H & J Exim takes over, on its own looms. The warp yarns are dressed onto the loom under tension and the weft is interlaced across them. Linen warp is strong but low in stretch and unforgiving of tension faults, so it is slower and more demanding to weave than cotton, a point covered in why linen costs more to weave than cotton.
Three decisions at the loom shape the cloth you receive:
- Width. Loom width caps how wide a piece can be woven without a seam, which decides whether a wide duvet cover or tablecloth can be made in one piece.
- Weight and sett. How many ends and picks pack into the cloth, which sets the weight, the density and the hand.
- Structure. Plain weave, or a jacquard, dobby, twill or herringbone, which gives pattern and texture.
The raw fabric that comes off the loom, called greige, is stiff and dull. It is not yet the linen a customer handles.
Finishing
Finishing turns greige cloth into the product. It is washed to clean out spinning and weaving residues and to relax the yarn, which is where most of linen's shrinkage happens, so it is better it happens here than in the buyer's home. Colour enters at this stage through piece dyeing, or earlier if the yarn was dyed before weaving. Softening, calendering or a stone or enzyme wash then sets the final hand, from crisp to lived-in.
Finishing also decides the numbers a buyer writes into a specification: the finished weight, the shrinkage tolerance and the colour, matched to a reference and confirmed on a lab dip before bulk. Two cloths woven identically can leave finishing looking and feeling very different, which is why the finish belongs in the spec and the approved sample, not left to assumption.
Seeing the whole chain explains why linen rewards a clear specification at each step, and the finished bed linen that comes out of it is set out on the bed linen range.
Common questions
How long does it take to turn flax into fabric?
The agricultural stages run across a season: roughly 100 days to grow, then weeks of retting and drying before scutching. Spinning, weaving and finishing are industrial and much faster. The yarn a weaver buys has already been through the field-to-fibre stages.
Is all linen made from flax?
Yes. True linen is made only from the flax plant. Fabrics sold as having a "linen look" in other fibres are not linen, and the fibre content on the label should say so.
What is the difference between line and tow linen?
Line is the long, combed fibre that spins into fine, smooth yarn for better sheeting and fine linens. Tow is the short fibre left after combing, spun into coarser, more textured yarn for heavier and rustic cloth. Both come from the same crop.
Does how linen is made affect how much it shrinks?
Yes. Most shrinkage is relaxed out during finishing when the cloth is washed. A cloth sold pre-washed or stone washed has had more of that movement taken out already, so it moves less in use. Agree a shrinkage tolerance and confirm it on the approved sample.