Spinning straw into gold
to hear the latest news on our machine development, yarn sales and grow-your-own-clothes adventures.
We are currently working hard on our first yarn samples, made from UK grown flax. Keep an eye on our store for our first batch pre-order.
Together with our international collaborators, we are developing a suite of open source machinery for farm-scale textile processing. These machines allow you to process flax fibre from raw straw all the way through to yarn - and they fit in the corner of a barn.
The Breaker is the first step in the process. It breaks up the retted flax straw, preparing it for the next stage...
The Scutcher/Hackler extracts the fibres from the broken flax. It first beats the flax with scutching blades and then hackles it with combs.
The spreader/drafter takes the flax fibres and joins them into a continuous ribbon called sliver. This sliver is then gradually thinned out until ready for spinning.
The spinner takes the sliver and drafts it a final time before spinning it into yarn. Its origins are in Hilo Textiles' spinning machine.
We love talking about flax, textiles, machines, engineering and fairer ways of structuring our economies. If you've got a project and you think we might be able to help - get in touch! We are also open to custom processing orders and textile projects of all kinds.
Fantasy Fibre Mill connects regenerative agriculture to ethical fashion. Our open source machinery enables the bio-regional production of natural fibre yarn. We aim to disrupt the extractive and exploitative fashion supply chain and instead produce textiles which nurture the local environment and community. Together with our collaborators across the country, we are building a soil-to-soil textile economy in the UK.
Rosie Bristow is a seamstress, farmer and flax enthusiast (spinner and weaver), recently graduated from Heriot Watt Uni with an MSc in Fashion and Textile management.
Nick Evans is a fashion designer, maker and software engineer. He is the founder of clothing brand First Principals, who make clothing from natural linens and plant dyes all stitched in London.
If you want to know more, do get in touch through our socials. You can also join our Discord server and meet the open source textile machine community! For machine building details, check out our github
