The choice of raw materials to make Safilin linen yarn

The quality of Safilin linen yarn depends on several factors. The first is the choice of raw materials. 

A good choice of raw materials is essential for achieving the “premium” quality linen yarn. At Safilin, it is our president, Olivier Guillaume, who masters this know-how.

 Recognising the best fibre requires connoisseur skills; it is done through the touch, look, feel…

 

Selecting the best fibres for the Safilin yarn takes place in several stages:

safilin linen yarn

Flax growing 

The selection process starts with flax culture monitoring. From March on, Oliver verifies the dates and conditions of sowing and, several weeks later, he meets with scutchers and flax farmers to gather his first impressions.

Scutchers usually say that “juin fait le lin” (June makes the flax), and it’s true – it is in June that we start to see what will the quality of the given year’s harvest be. But, be careful, nothing can be taken for granted yet.

Following flax pulling comes time for retting, which is very important for fibre quality. This stage takes place in August, and then flax is removed from the fields in September. 

First look

Raw materials are bought all year long. Each week, flax is purchased to make up for the fibres used in production.

To buy the best fibres, it is necessary to know both your raw materials stock and your production, as the fibres are selected depending on the planned volumes. And the finesse of the fibre is essential in textile for clothing manufacturing. 

Each week, the scutchers arrive to present the samples of the raw materials. Olivier chooses the batches according to strict criteria.  

Over 500 scutched material batches are examined every year before they supply our stock. 

Then, the samples are sent to our plants where their quality is validated for the second time.

 

 

Final validation

The combing foreman is in charge of the second validation of the received samples.  The same selection criteria apply during this second round. The foreman sorts the received samples based on their length to ensure that they are used in the proper yarn: long fibres for wet spinning. At Safilin, we only use long fibres in wet spinning, which results in regular and very solid, non-pilling yarn. 

 

 

Stock assuring a high-quality linen yarn production

At Safilin, we opted for a constantly supplemented stock of raw materials, sufficient to ensure ten months of production. The said stock is also composed of crops from different years to compensate for potential “lean” years: we can find there fibres from 2017, 2018, 2019… This allows us to deliver exceptional homogenous products of high quality throughout the years.

We are the only spinning factory in the world to have such a large stock of raw materials.