Linen, the fabric made from flax

People choose linen for bed sheets, tea towels and summer clothes. Every piece starts as a field of flax. UK sellers follow labelling rules on when they can call a product linen.

Where linen comes from

The UK's legal list of textile fibre names describes flax, or linen, as fibre from the bast of the flax plant. The plant's botanical name is Linum usitatissimum.

National Museums NI keeps a collection of sound recordings called Living Linen.

Growing flax

In one of those recordings, a family who have grown and scutched flax on their farm in Dromore for over 100 years describe the year's work. Farmers usually sow flax in late March or early April. It is ready to harvest after about 14 weeks, depending on the weather.

A mature plant stands about a metre high. The fibres run almost the full length of the stem, so farmers pull flax out of the ground instead of cutting it.

Growers pick the seed variety for the crop they want. The varieties grown for fibre have long, unbroken stems with only a few seed pods at the top.

From stem to fibre

Farmers once weighed the pulled flax down in dams, called lint holes, until it began to ferment. This step is retting, and it loosens the fibres from the woody parts of the plant.

Once the retted flax had dried, a scutch mill beat it with revolving wooden arms. That stripped away the woody material, known as shoues, and left the silky fibres for the spinning mills.

Families used the whole plant. The shoues fired mill boilers and heated rural homes, and spare seed went into linseed oil or animal feed. Machine harvesting and tank retting have replaced hand-pulling and dam retting, and the family describe the basic processes as unchanged.

What a label must say

Textile products sold in the UK carry a label giving their fibre content. Business Companion, the government-backed trading standards guidance for England, Scotland and Wales, says the manufacturer or importer makes sure the label is there.

The label has to be durable, easily legible, visible and accessible. Sellers choose fibre names from the legal list, and "flax (or linen)" is one of them.

When people can order a product from its description alone, the advertisement must show the fibre content too. That covers catalogues and online listings.

Pure linen and blends

A seller can label a product "100%", "pure" or "all" only when it is made exclusively of one fibre. The regulation allows up to 2% of other fibres by weight where good manufacturing practice cannot avoid them.

A blend lists every fibre by name with its percentage by weight, largest first. A fabric with a pure cotton warp and a pure flax weft, where flax makes up at least 40% of the weight, can be sold as "cotton linen union".

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 also requires goods to be as described. A fibre claim on a label, a package or a listing has to be accurate.

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