The prompt “Lost Worlds“ brought my thoughts back to my old home country, Germany. Rather than thinking about personal stories and family, I thought about the history of the region where I grew up and its close ties to textile production.

In Rhineland the main source for textiles was flax. The fibre was important from medieval times until the early twentieth century when it got replaced by cotton and later synthetic fibres. It was a long and arduous process to cultivate and harvest flax, to spin it and weave it into linen cloth. Many steps are necessary to prepare the plant material for spinning and weaving. Families and the larger community had to work together to prepare the flax and create linen cloth. 

 From small family manufacturers, the industry grew into a commercially important branch of the local industry. The spinning and weaving were done on a larger factory scale, with machines replacing the weaving on wooden handlooms in the time of industrialization.  A city close by was at times called a Rhenish Manchester, linking it to the industrial textile production in Manchester, England. These mills were an important economic factor around the region I grew up in. The region still has a strong textile connection, there are study programs for textile design and material and there are plans to bring sustainable textile production back to the region after a decline in the industry in the last decades.

My piece is paying homage to this textile past and – hopefully – future of that region. I got permission to use a photo by Kristi Farrier who is a fellow textile artist in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is planting flax to use in her handmade paper production and takes wonderful photos of the plants. I manipulated her photo and incorporated it into my piece.

Using some of my linen fabrics, I pieced some simple squares and hand embroidered them.

I also used text to line out the many steps necessary to get from the flax plant to the linen fibre. The words are German, they can be roughly translated as “pulling, rippling, retting, drying, breaking, scutching, hackling, spinning”. The old font of Fraktur is reminiscent of the heyday of linen production.

To showcase the raw material, I incorporated some real flax fibres. The resulting quilt is somewhat reminiscent of an interpretive centre or museum display, showcasing the process and resulting cloth. I hope it brings to life the – almost – lost world of linen production.

From Flax to Linen
Regina Marzlin
Dimensions: h 40″ x w29″
Material: Cotton, linen, flax fibre, embroidery floss, paint
Technique: photo transfer, mono printing, piecing, hand- and machine stitching