According to archaeologists, cords have been made by plaiting or twisting plant materials since about 17,000 BC, typically nettles, hemp, cotton, sisal and jute. In traditional Māori culture, cord has been made from New Zealand flax, which is probably at least as strong and durable as any other plant material. Before rope began to be made from plastics in the late twentieth century, its manufacture from flax fibre was one of New Zealand’s major export industries.

Flax can be plaited from its fibre or from strips, and the photo to the right shows a four-plait made from flax fibre, or muka, on the left side of the photo and one from strips on the right side. A plait made from fibre is a good deal stronger than one made from strips, but plaited strips are much quicker to make and look quite attractive, particularly the four-plait, which can be woven in a tubular shape. A disadvantage of the tubular shape is that it can become crushed if used as a handle for a basket carrying heavy weights, but it’s quite suitable for a small basket and it’s particularly suitable for a pendant.

A number of the participants in my workshops have asked me how to weave a tubular four-plait, and I know of only one flax weaving book — Fun with Flax — that includes instructions. Unfortunately, people have not always found written instructions easy to follow, so I’m not sure whether the instructions below will be easy to follow either. If you don’t find them easy, you won’t be alone. It sometimes takes a while to get the hang of four-plaiting even when it’s taught in person.

A four-plait cord made from strips becomes tubular because the shiny side of each strip is kept to the outside of the cord all the time as you plait. Start with four flax strips all the same width. As for any cord, it’s easier to get an even plait if you have one end of the work held by a friend or you tie the end around a solid object such as a chair leg or a nail in a piece of wood. This means you can pull the strands towards you as you plait, so you can keep an even tension on the plaiting. Here I’ve used a nail banged into a piece of wood. Arrange the strips so that the shiny side of each strip is showing uppermost.

I’ve used two strips of dyed green flax and two strips of dyed red flax for these illustrations to show the plaiting sequence more easily. If you are using two different colours, arrange the colours so that one colour is used for the two outside strips and the second colour is used for the two inside strips.

 
To start plaiting, grasp the middle two green strips, and cross the left-hand one over the right-hand one, keeping the shiny side uppermost.
 

 
 Then take the outside left-hand red strip, and bring it under the two green strips to the right of it, turning it so the shiny side of the flax will be showing on the underneath of the cord. This means that the dull side of the strip is showing at the front.

 

 
Bring this strip around and over one green strip next to it on the left. The shiny side of this strip should now be showing.
 

 
Go to the right hand side of the plait and take the outside red strip to the left under the next two strips, (one is red and one is green), keeping the shiny side of the flax on the outside of the cord so that the dull side shows on the front.
 

 
Bring this strip around and over the one red strip to the right of it so that the shiny side of this strip is now showing. Note that the two green strips are now on the outside and the two red strips are in the middle.

 
These four steps, from the fifth illustration from the top of this post to this eighth illustration, are now repeated. Note that the first movement of crossing the centre two strips, shown in the fourth illustration from the top of the post, is a starting movement only, and is not included in the continuing sequence.
 

 
To continue, go back to the left hand side and take the outside green strip under the two red strips and then turn it back over one red strip, making sure you keep the shiny side of the flax on the outside of the cord as you do this.
 

 

 
Now go the the right hand side and take the outside green strip under two strips, (one is green and one is red), and then turn it back over one green strip. Pull the strips out each side and up so that the plaiting tightens up and the tubular shape and pattern of the cord starts showing. Continue plaiting, pulling the plait up tightly and evenly as you go.
 

The nice thing about weaving a four-plait cord with two different colours is that the colours spiral around the cord, giving it a candy-stripe effect, which I find very attractive.

The plait made with flax fibre, or muka, shown on the left in the photo toward the top of this post, is plaited in the same way as the one made with strips but because each set of fibre strands that is being plaited is round rather than flat like a strip, it does have a different look to it.

Modification 25 Jan 2010
I have replaced the original illustrations for this post, where I used four flax strips of the same colour, with illustrations using flax strips of two different colours. This is a result of a participant in one of my recent workshops finding it much easier to remember the plaiting sequence when we used two different colours for the plaiting strips.

What do forty-two kilometres of rope used in Nelson’s sailing ship, HMS Victory, a traditional Māori feather cloak, and the Victorian lace collar in the photo all have in common? They’re all made with strong, thin fibres that have been stripped from the leaves of the New Zealand flax plant. For hundreds of years, Māori used this fibre to make clothes, ropes, fishing nets and bird snares. Later, European immigrants developed large-scale rope manufacturing using a stripping machine that could process up to 250 kilograms of fibre a day.

Thread stripped from the leaf by hand is a much finer thread than thread stripped by machine. In traditional hand-stripping, a mussel shell is scraped along the length of a strip of flax, forcing the green fleshy outer layer of the leaf down through and away from the fibres, and leaving the fibres clean and clearly separated into individual threads. With machine stripping, the whole leaf is put into a revolving metal drum where wooden paddles beat the green pulp off the fibre. The pulped leaves are then put through a scrutching machine which dresses the fibre by removing the short fibres and cleaning off any remaining particles. However this process doesn’t clean or separate the fibres completely, so machine-made flax thread is thicker and rougher.

The difference between fibres produced by hand and those produced by machine became very clear to me while I was preparing a talk on flax weaving for the 2008 conference of the New Zealand Lace Society. I thought lace-makers might find it interesting if the talk included a demonstration of lace-making with flax fibre, even though I hadn’t tried this before. However, I’d had plenty of experience with linen and cotton fibre because I used to be heavily involved in lace-making and the NZ Lace Society. So the talk was a good chance to catch up with old friends — and I also caught up with a participant of my flax-weaving workshops who had used flax fibre she had stripped by hand to make an award-winning entry in this years’ lace competition.

As well as giving a demonstration, I wanted to give the participants the opportunity to have a go at making bobbin lace with flax fibre themselves. I already had some machine-made flax fibre that I’d purchased from the Templeton Flaxmill Museum near Riverton, but this proved to be just too irregular and thick to wind easily on lace bobbins, so I prepared the flax fibre by hand. Although fibre can be stripped from many different varieties of Phormium tenax, I wanted to use the very best varieties, so I approached the National New Zealand Flax Collection at Landcare in Lincoln and received permission to gather leaves from two of the traditional weaving flaxes, Arawa and Makewero, that are both known for their long, clean fibres. I stripped the leaves in the traditional Māori way — with a mussel shell — for the first time, and have just updated my Preparing flax page with a some tips on the difference between stripping flax with a mussel shell and a blunt knife.

Before setting up the lace pillows for lace-making with the flax fibre, I examined the lace collar shown at the beginning of this post. This formed the subject of a talk at the conference by Jennifer Quérée, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts at the Canterbury Museum. The collar was made by a Mrs Williams, and it received a special mention at the 1906 New Zealand International Exhibition. I noticed that it was woven with four strands of flax fibre per thread, and that the fibres hadn’t been twisted to make the thread.

When making rope or a traditional Maori feather cloak, or in the the threads traditionally used for lace-making, the strands of fibre are invariably twisted together to make a thread. This makes the thread stronger and allows new fibres to be twisted in, so that the thread can be much longer than the original fibres. However, after examining Mrs Williams’ work, and experimenting with flax fibre myself, it became clear that Mrs Williams knew what she was doing. Twisted flax fibre is just too thick for lace-making in the traditional method, so her four-strand fibres were limited to the length of the leaves from a flax plant.

For the demonstration, I set up one lace pillow with the bobbins wound with four strands per thread, and another pillow with bobbins wound with a single strand per thread. Participants who tried weaving lace with the four-strand bobbins found it quite difficult. The single-strand bobbins were easier to work with, but — compared with the threads traditionally used for lace-making — flax fibre is quite stiff and isn’t as slippery, so this makes it harder to tension the weaving. Also, each single fibre is made up of even finer strands which tends to make the thread quite fluffy.

All in all, it it became clear to all of us that Mrs Williams’ collar must have been a very challenging piece of work, and — like a traditional Māori feather cloak — it would also have taken rather a long time to weave.

Errata 3 Jun 2008
Since I first wrote this post I’ve made two corrections in it in light of Jennifer Quérée’s comment below — the lace collar was made by a Mrs Williams, and I originally referred to her as Mrs Williamson. Also, the collar received a special mention at the Exhibition but didn’t win an award. Jennifer’s comment provides additional information on the collar.

Have you ever noticed that dyed flax often loses some of the natural sheen that can be seen on freshly harvested flax, leaving the colour flat and dull? It seems that the sheen comes from a layer of wax on the surface of the flax leaf. Apparently, all plant leaves have at least some wax on the surface of their leaves — mainly to waterproof them but also to provide a degree of protection from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, and from disease and grazing by insects.

I recently did a series of experiments with 15 different flax varieties, to see if I could identify the factors responsible for this loss of sheen in more detail, and I’ve just posted the results in a new Minimising the loss of sheen on dyed flax section on my Dyeing page. Personally, I’ve never liked the loss of sheen on dyed flax. I don’t mind the gradual loss of colour and sheen that occurs as natural flax dries, but coloured flax without a sheen often seems to make the flax look a bit too artificial for my taste, especially if the flax is dyed in an intense colour, which just seems to accentuate the relative absence of sheen. In fact, up until a couple of years ago, I hardly ever wove with dyed flax, and found myself in agreement with Dorothy Ramae Mackinnon, in the book Every Kete has a Story, when she wrote:

I’ve spoken of [Auntie Stut] at times to others and they’ve said, “Oh yes she was a very plain weaver”. We now focus so much on kete whakairo (ketes decorated with coloured geometric patterns), we think that shows us as prestigious weavers! Lately, I’ve not touched dyed work. I’ve done that one. Got that out of my system! I’ve gone back to the plant itself and keep looking at its subtleties. I feel that some of that subtlety has been lost because of the amazing intensity of our dyes.

However, I’ve begun to change my mind over the last couple of years, and now feel that dyed flax — even flax dyed in intense colours — has its place. Part of the reason for my change of mind has been working on a booklet of instructions for woven flax flowers in different designs. Flax flowers don’t need the strength that most flaxworks need, so they can be woven from Phormium cookianum, or wharariki, which comes in a lot of different varieties with such bright, beautiful, natural colours, such as the leaf and flower illustrated at the beginning of this blog post. Most of the flower instructions in the booklet have been woven from coloured, variegated Phormium cookianum.

For the long list of people who have asked to be notified as soon as the booklet comes out, and have been waiting patiently, in many cases for several months, I must apologise once again. There are several reasons for the delay. Firstly, I’ve been including more and more weaving designs for flowers, and improving the photography and layout as I’ve gone along. Secondly, I recently moved from my well-established lifestyle block in the country to the city, and the move has taken up quite some time. Thirdly, having finished working on the instructions, it seemed silly to release the booklet without showing at least some examples of what can be done with the flax flowers once they’ve been woven.

Unfortunately the beautiful colours of variegated Phormium cookianum fade all too quickly, and flax flowers really suit bright colours, so I’ve been getting into dyeing more than ever before. Being in something of a hurry to finish the booklet, and not knowing anywhere near as much as I wanted to know about retaining the sheen on dyed flax, some of my first efforts were far too dull. Hence my current experiments. At some point, I’ll do more experiments with dyeing, but I’ve done enough to be able to get back to the booklet without the dyeing being quite such a hit-and-miss affair.