A hank of hackled flax looks like blond hair: long, parallel, glossy fibres, combed clean of their woody core. It is not yet anything that can be woven. Between that hank and the cloth of a shirt lies spinning, the stage that turns loose fibre into continuous yarn. How linen is spun decides how fine the yarn can be, how smooth or irregular its surface, how strong it is and, in the end, how the finished garment feels against the skin.

Where spinning begins

Spinning starts where hackling ends. Hackling, set out in what linen hackling is, combs the scutched flax through ever finer pins and separates it into two grades: the long fibres, called line, and the short, tangled fibres, called tow. The two are spun in different ways and become different yarns. Line flax, with fibres that can run to several tens of centimetres, makes the fine, even yarns used for shirting. Tow makes coarser, heavier yarns for other uses.

Drawing and the sliver

The line flax is first laid onto a spreading board, where overlapping handfuls are fed into a machine that draws them out into a continuous ribbon, the sliver. The sliver then passes through a series of drawing frames. At each pass several slivers are combined and drawn out again, so that irregularities are averaged out and the fibres lie ever more parallel. By the end, the sliver is even along its length, but it still has no twist and no strength.

Roving

The next machine, the roving frame, draws the sliver finer and gives it a light twist, just enough to hold it together. This is the roving, a soft strand wound onto bobbins. In linen, the roving is often treated before spinning, scoured or boiled to soften the natural gums that still bind the fibres together. That preparation matters for the stage that follows.

Wet spinning

The fine yarns of a linen shirt are wet-spun. The roving passes through a trough of hot water on its way to the spindle. The heat softens the pectins that cement the elementary flax fibres into their bundles, so that as the roving is drawn out, the bundles can slide and split into finer strands. The result is a yarn that is finer, smoother and more regular than one spun dry, with a characteristic quiet lustre. Its history, from the first heated troughs onward, belongs to the story of wet-spun linen.

Dry spinning

Dry spinning, without the water bath, is used for tow and for heavier yarns. The fibres cannot be drawn as fine, and the yarn is thicker, rougher and more irregular. It has its own uses, in heavier cloths and rustic weaves, and the irregular thickness gives the slubs that some linens show on purpose. Those slubs, and what they say about quality, are taken up in linen slubs.

Measuring the yarn

Linen yarn is traditionally measured by the lea: the number of 300-yard lengths in one pound of yarn. A higher lea number means a finer yarn. Shirting yarns sit at the finer end of the scale; upholstery and heavy household yarns at the coarser end. The fineness of the yarn, together with how densely it is woven, governs the weight and hand of the finished cloth, and it explains why two linens of the same weight can feel quite different.

Drying, winding, weaving

Wet-spun yarn leaves the spinning frame damp. It is dried carefully, then wound onto cones or bobbins ready for the loom, sometimes after bleaching or dyeing at the yarn stage. Only then does weaving begin.

Why it matters in a shirt

Spinning is where the length of the fibre pays off. Long line fibres, carefully prepared and wet-spun, give a yarn that is strong without being thick, and a cloth that is light, breathable and smooth. Spinning sits inside the chain that a Belgian Linen® certificate of origin follows, between the field and the finished fabric, and 100% Belgian linen traces that chain step by step. Those who want to understand the fibre itself will find more in long-staple linen fibre.

The next time a linen shirt feels cool and fluid rather than stiff, the reason is as much in the spinning frame and its trough of hot water as in the field or the atelier.

Read more: How Is Flax Harvested?  ·  Linen Weave Types