A history of the underappreciated cloth called linen.
The beautiful cornflower hue of flax flowers. Photo by River Fx / Unsplash
Good morning. Today is septidi, the 17th of Thermidor, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le lin, a flower harvested before fruiting to make linen.
💡
Flaxseed oil is edible, but it's more commonly used as a drying supplement for paints and solvents thanks to its property of becoming a hardened, plastic-like substance once it hits air. More often called linseed oil, it's also the basis of linoleum, which was surprisingly invented way back in LXVIII (1860) by a British inventor who realized that the drying property could serve as a sort of amber, forming a smooth and durable surface with just about anything trapped inside. In the case of early linoleum, that was just a bunch of sawdust and cork leavings, the cheapest dust from the sawmill floor. Over time, people realized that an attractive pattern could be cheaply printed on remainder paper or cardboard then heat sealed in linseed oil to make a floor with a tile-like pattern for much less money. The durability was offset by linoleum's tendency to yellow when sunlight shines on it, and that's why a hundred years after its invention, most "linoleum" began to be made of vinyl. (It's making a comeback as a more environmentally friendly version of that vinyl flooring now.)
Flax flowers have remarkably strong and straight fibers inside their stems, and this fact was used to weave fabric from the dawn of humanity-as-humanity; the oldest scrap of linen that's been found is estimated to be 38,000 years old. Over time, it was the ne plus ultra of natural fabric until the discovery of cotton, which isn't necessarily a cheaper or easier fabric, but one that retains heat and dye more readily and in a single layer. Linen is responsible for such clothing words as lining and lingerie, as it typically had to be layered under wool once it spread from the African regions where its manufacture was perfected.
