Creative Fibre — once known as the New Zealand Spinning, Weaving & Woolcrafts Society — seems to be evolving from a focus on traditional woven woolcrafts to encompass flax, felt, free-form designs and any and every use of fibre for creative purposes. Last year’s Creative Fibre diary featured a basket of my flax flowers on its cover and this year I was invited to give two demonstrations of flax basket-weaving at the Creative Fibre Festival in Marlborough. It was my first visit to a Creative Fibre Festival, and the whole festival gave off a feeling of creative energy. As I listened to the presenters, I automatically thought of the way the ideas they applied to other fibres could be transferred to the process of flax weaving.

The key guest presenter, Kim Thitichai from the UK, a delightful, energetic speaker, works with heat tools on materials that are heat distressable. Heat stressing doesn’t readily transfer to flax weaving but the key for me in her presentation on design was her discussion about “engaging directly with the materials”.Sometimes, no matter how well we plan things when working creatively, the process doesn’t go according to the plan. The materials themselves can dictate the way the project ends up and — if one goes with the flow — the results can be innovative and dramatic. I find myself regularly using this technique when I’m designing though I generally call it playing. A good example of this is the flaxwork Wave pictured above, which I created for an exhibition in the seaside town of Lyttelton. It’s made from a flat woven square of multi-coloured blue flax strips, and although I wasn’t at all sure how it was going to end up, it does seem to capture a sense of the shape and motion of a wave.

A World of Wearable Arts award winner, Sarah Hornibrooke from Golden Bay, who regularly uses flax in the creations that she enters in the competition, gave some tips for those wishing to enter it. Sarah advises that the garment must be well-made as it is worn in a number of shows and it needs to stay together, as well as being reasonably easy to get on and off. The garment should look good close up and at a distance as the garments are closely scrutinised by the judges, but it also needs to have impact when are worn during the show. Often the winner is a very simple idea. It’s also helpful for the garment to have a catchy name. Deb Price, who often works with Sarah on entries, was the Montana Supreme Award Winner in 1995 with an twined-flax creation, Moko. One of Deb’s twined pots is pictured above.

Flax featured in Heather Baskiville-Robinson’s presentation on making paper. Heather took us through the process of making flax paper, and we watched Canadian paper-maker Helen Heibert’s time-lapse DVD on the way that some materials can be their own creators as they change shape over time, a property that Helen specifically exploits in her creations. This has a parallel in flax weaving where two properties of flax have been exploited to make a skirt, or puipui. Firstly, flax strips curl up into cylinders when they dry, a property which is used in puipui-making to make the long rustling skirt of the puipui. Secondly, the fibres inside the flax take a dye more readily than the leaf itself and this property is exploited to make the geometrical patterns on the garments.

Flax is an ideal material to be creative with, as it is pliable and sculptural while green but hardens to retain shape as it dries. It also has a strong fibre and it dyes well. Traditional weaving techniques can be used to make something a bit out of the ordinary, like this three-cornered Wind-blown kete.

Why not think about using flax creatively to enter the Creative Fibre competitions for next year. The Far North Award, sponsored by Te Wananga O Aotearoa, of $750 and a Whaka Huia for the most creative use of New Zealand design or materials seems like a particulalrly appropriate category for flax weaving. This year’s winner for the Award is Donna Hitchcox of Timaru with her entry Tuatara Wisdom. It would be great to see flax featuring to a greater degree in this competition as well as in the Wearable Arts Awards. If you have used flax in entries for either of these awards, or any other awards, do send me a photo.

Flax leaves are a popular and versatile addition to floral arrangements, irrespective of whether the flowers are picked from the garden or are woven from flax itself. Modern hybrid flaxes come in a variety of different colourings and are often used by florists in commercial floral displays. Flax can be dried into long thin rods and used to give height to a display, it can be netted to give a lacy effect in a display or it can be woven to make a foliage design rather than a flower. It can also be shredded into long strips and used to add a sense of movement to a display.

Shredded flax adds a light and airy dimension. It’s simple, easy, takes very little time to prepare, and can add a variety of interesting shapes and movements to a display. The thin mid-rib piece of flax that is stripped off a leaf before weaving can be used for shredding. It’s ideal for this purpose as one end is the hard base of the leaf, which makes a strong stem. It’s also a way of using up pieces of flax that are usually seen as waste. Shred the flax with a strong dog comb or one of those spikey florist’s bases that is used in the bottom of vases to hold stalks in place.

Take the mid-rib piece and shred the flax from where the flax joins together down to the tip of the flax. Run the comb along the flax piece several times until it is evenly and reasonably finely shredded. This can be added to an arrangement as it is, or it can be dyed to give some colour and movement to an arrangement, as illustrated in the flax flower arrangement here.

Another way of using shredded flax is as a tight circlet or as softer flowing curls, as illustrated in the bouquet at the top of this post. To make the tight circlet, smooth the shreds together so they become a smooth rope and then wrap them around your fingers so they make a ring. Keep wrapping until all of the flax rope is wrapped into the ring. Tie the ring of flax in place around the stem with a fine piece of flax to make a circlet or circlets for a display, or hold the wrapped circle in place with the tie or a peg until it dries and then it tease it out until it falls in soft ringlets or waves.

Florists often use the coloured variegated flax for foliage but green flax can be just as decorative. If it is featured as a straight leaf, it can give a strong structural quality to a display. By contrast, if it is curled around, it can give a soft, voluptuous quality. Flax foliage is particularly popular in Ikebana arrangements but it suits all kinds of displays. There are many ways flax can be used in floral arrangements, and some additional ideas on using flax as foliage can be found in my book. If you have any other ideas for using flax as foliage, do send me images of them to share on this blog post.

© Alison Marion Brown 2012.

I recently took part in my second paper-making workshop with Mark Lander, a well-known Canterbury artist, who constructs sculptural artworks with paper made from New Zealand flax. Mark often paints his sculptures with naturally-coloured clays that he has collected from the local hills. Pictured here is a sculptural installation he made with very long sheets of flax paper.

As flax weavers know, flax has tough fibres and a very high fibre content. Indeed, some of the traditional forms of Māori weaving involve stripping flax right down to the pure fibre. For paper making, it is the high fibre content that makes flax a particularly suitable raw material.

For the technically-minded, when paper is made with any sort of plant fibre, the fibres lock together in a process called hydrogen bonding. Plants rely on cellulose for the strength in their branches and leaves, and paper is essentially a network of cellulose fibres held together by these hydrogen bonds.

Making paper with flax follows the same basic process as hand-making any sort of paper, and there are plenty of instructions for paper-making on the internet, most of which use scrap commercial paper as the raw material for hand-made paper. If one uses plant leaves for all or part of the raw materials, they can generally be softened enough for the first step in making paper by cutting them into small pieces and boiling them in water for a couple of hours, but flax is so tough it needs an extra step.

To reduce the flax into small pieces, Mark bashes the flax leaves with a piece of wood to begin to split them apart and soften them (which is quicker than stripping them right down to the fibre). He then cuts the leaves crosswise with a Stanley knife, leaving pieces about 5 mm long. Another option can be found in Making paper in New Zealand, a book by May Davis, which contains clear, easy-to-follow instructions for making flax paper. May does not bash the flax and suggests removing the hard midrib of the flax leaf and cutting the leaves into 1 cm pieces with scissors. The extra step in making paper with flax involves using a solution of caustic soda in a stainless steel pot. (If the pot is aluminium, it will be eaten away by the caustic soda and will give off flammable hydrogen gas.) You can buy solid caustic soda from a hardware store or supermarket. Handle it carefully and make it up into a solution, using about half a cup of caustic soda for a large potful of water.

Place the flax pieces in an empty stainless steel pot, and then add enough caustic soda solution to cover them. Boil the pieces about 40 minutes to an hour until they change colour. Alternatively, you can soak the pieces for a few days without boiling. Rinse the caustic soda from the pulp in a sieve under cold running water. From here on, you can follow standard paper-making instructions. If you want your paper to have an even texture you will need to run the blender for several minutes for each blender load. If you want a rough look with visible pieces of flax, you can miss out the blending operation for a small proportion of the pulp, and/or include a few longer pieces when you initially cut the flax pieces.

For those who want to make paper in bulk, Mark has developed and manufactures the Hollander beater shown here, which he sells and exports at a fraction of the cost of other manufacturers of Hollanders. The Hollander takes the place of a blender and pulps the fibres rather than slicing them, which results in a higher quality paper-making pulp.

In the workshop, we made large sheets of flax paper and left them in the sun to dry completely before peeling them off the frame. The other workshop participants were artists making paper to paint on. For my part, I’m not sure what I’ll use the paper for and am still awaiting inspiration. Mainly, I participated in the workshops to learn more about another use for flax, and found Mark’s workshops enjoyable as well as informative.
 

© Alison Marion Brown 2011.