Over the past few years Nick has grown small patches of flax in different London locations, with the aim of producing a 100% "London cloth". In this workshop you will learn about all the different stages involved in turning flax into yarn: retting, breaking, scutching, heckling, spinning and weaving. You will get in hands-on and help process the flax, and experience the magic of witnessing the fibres appear from the woody stalk. We will also talk about seed saving, and you can have a go at rippling and winnowing and take home some seeds for growing next year. Nick will also (briefly) demonstrate how flax can be spun on a spinning wheel (although this is not how he intends to make the London cloth) and you can have a try too. All materials will be provided.
This workshop is part of our Textile Gardenseries. The Textile Garden at Mobile Garden has been developed by three local sustainable textile organisations - Yodomo, Indigo Works and Fantasy Fibre Mill - and Our Parklife CIC to build a demonstrator textile garden and participatory workshop programme to showcase the important, but often forgotten, connection between textiles and plants with the community garden: Mobile Garden.
The cost of this workshop is approx. £50 pp but is offered for free to the local community thanks to funding from Places for People. It is important to us to keep activity free in the Garden for those that need it most, so we have also opened donations for those who can, as a way to ‘pay it forward’. This will help us move toward a more sustainable model for running activity at Mobile Garden when funding decreases, safeguarding it as a long-term asset for the community.
In order to ensure that a maximum of local residents benefit from these workshops, we ask that you only register for one of the textile workshops and only if you are sure you can attend. These events often sell out so if you can no longer attend, it is important that you let us know as early as possible so that we can release the tickets for others to join.
This year, over 250 members of the community have already benefited from our free workshops and have provided fantastic feedback. We appreciate any support we can get to continue to impact on our local communities. We hope to see you soon at Mobile Garden.
