Those two greyish-colored pointy tips are the ends of two fiber cells. You can see it in the upper-most edge of the large central bundle, just to the right of the less-in-focus strand that’s crossing diagonally in the left hand corner. This image shows the tips of two flax cells overlapping. The program let us do things like adjust the color and take photographs. Here’s the big monitor, which was awesome because we could all see the slides without having to take turns looking through the microscope. We looked at flax in several different stages including some of my naturally dyed yarn. Because the samples were dry, we could make permanent mounts.įolks brought in a range of flax in various stages of processing: dried but un-retted, retted but unbroken, and retted and broken but not scutched (or hetcheled), and fully processed strick, both old and recent. Scissors and razor blades are for cutting. The pink yarn in back is madder-dyed 40/2 linen. Then we dropped on a small glass cover and used tweezers to press out the air bubbles and get the adhesive to spread evenly between the slide and the cover (small glass covers are in the orange box). We put our samples on a slide (in the square boxes on the right), and added a drop of the mounting adhesive on top (from the little bottle in the blue box). We used tweezers to position our samples and to pull them apart a little to separate the fibers so the light could pass through.

Here are the tools and equipment we used to make slides. On Thursday, May 17th, our flax and linen study group met at the lab of one of our members to look at flax fibers under a microscope (and cotton and wool, for comparison).

Silk microscopic view