The city of Belfast was once known as 'Linenopolis' with the production and spinning of flax becoming a major industry all across Ireland during the 19th century.
There are efforts under way to revive the industry, with designers and engineers from across Northern Ireland working on a scoping project to demonstrate how the flax fibres, traditionally used to make linen cloth and clothing, can now be woven into and added to natural fibre composites.
The project is supported through funding from Invest Northern Ireland.
Flax fibres can be used in furniture, musical instruments, the film industry, sound equipment, skateboards and surf boards and even incorporated into the interiors of cars and airplanes.
They are a more environmentally friendly and biodegradable alternative to fibreglass and carbon fibres.
The Irish-grown flax fibres have also been used in costume and set design, including in the newly released live-action remake of 'How to Train Your Dragon', which was filmed at locations and studios across Northern Ireland.
"Like with our food, we've lost that connectivity to where our food comes from. We've also lost that understanding of our fibres, our fabrics and our clothing."
"The natural fibre content in a car could be inside a door to cut down on vibrations, it could be for parts of the vehicle that aren't the main structure, for dashboards and say in aircraft, you could have the tray tables and the lockers and everything could be natural fibres," explained Professor Jane McCann, a designer who has been working on the study for over five years.
She said people would be surprised at how strong flax fibres are, when woven or used with resin to make a composite. "Natural fibres can [be] found in surfboards, in skateboards, in tennis rackets. So there are uses where they have to be quite robust."
She said work is still being done at industry level to incorporate more environmentally friendly resins into the composites.
"We have the challenge at the moment that you can have wonderful, natural fibres, be it flax or hemp or wool from Ireland but the resins at the moment are not 100% eco. They might be 40%. The main answer to that at the moment is a sugar-based resin, but it's treacle in colour so you can't encapsulate prints and weaves and see the detail."
"I think at one stage, there was about 40% of the population in Northern Ireland actually employed in the linen industry, which is quite mind-blowing."
Composite tiles incorporating flax are being added to the construction of a new roof garden, six storeys up, at The Belfast School of Art at Ulster University.
Professor Alison Gault, a senior lecturer in textile art and design there, said she wants students and the public to be able to reconnect with where their fabric comes from.
"Like with our food, we've lost that connectivity to where our food comes from. We've also lost that understanding of our fibres, our fabrics and our clothing. So, this is a small design, demonstrated to reconnect with fibre and how it's grown. And flax is going to be right in there, because it's a beautiful fibre. And of course, it's central to Belfast history."
The roof garden is still under construction, but Prof Gault has already taken delivery of the tiles that will be laid on the roof.
"They are a combination of fibres, all biofibres, so a combination of wools, flax and hemp. And in a way, you could use any fibre in there. We have 50% bio-resin in with it. Unfortunately, we couldn't use 100% bio-resin because of the coloration, but these are really quite new innovations.
"So we're going to be testing them in this environment. As you can see, we're six floors up, and so they will be exposed to the elements, so that'll be quite interesting to see how they perform."
Belfast School of Art was built on its connection with the linen industry: "I think at one stage, there was about 40% of the population in Northern Ireland actually employed in the linen industry, which is quite mind-blowing, really," explained Professor Gault.
"My own grandmother worked in the linen industry on this street. You know, I often tell my students I chose to be in textiles. I had that choice. My grandmother and her two sisters were made to go to into the mills, like many other people in Belfast and across Northern Ireland and in fact, Ireland. It wasn't glamorous. It was a hard place to work. And I think that we have opportunity now to look at innovative ways, such [as] biofibres into composites in the auto and perhaps the aero industries and even just for geotextiles as well.
"You know, there's a lot of opportunity to use these fibres and to replace the plastics that we are currently using."
Having once operated as a dairy farm, Mallon Linen in Co Tyrone has been growing flax from seed on its land for the last eight years.
It is planted in May and takes around 100 days until it grows to its full height, ready to be harvested in August.
The "wee blue flowers" that made the plant a symbol of Ulster, will bloom next month in July.
"In July it will flower. The whole field will be a sea of blue," said farmer Charlie Mallon, who runs Mallon Linen along with his partner Helen.
"The last spinning mills shut at the end of the 1980s so there hasn't been any spinning of flax into linen yarns since then."
The crop is hand-pulled up to maintain the pectin levels in the root and the Mallons use an upcycled cheese vat to wet the flax, in a process called retting, which can take a couple of weeks.
Once it has dried out, the flax is then broken and 'scutched' in a vintage machine from the 1940s that Charlie has managed to get working again.
There is currently demand for the flax fibre from multiple markets including in the film industry where flax from the Mallon farm was used in props, banners, costumes and wigs in 'How to Train Your Dragon'.
"We've got people that have used it in composite materials and designers using it for fake fur on coats," he said.
There currently is nowhere to spin and weave the flax in Ireland or in the UK, but work is under way to change this too.
With the help of crowd-funding, money is being raised to repair and revamp five vintage machines found in Co Down, that are currently being stored at a workshop at Mourne Textiles.
The project was featured as part of this year's Future Observatory: Tomorrow's Wardrobe exhibition at the Design Museum in London.
Mario Sierra, the owner and creative director of Mourne Textiles, wants the machines to bring small-scale production back:
"The last spinning mills shut at the end of the 1980s so there hasn't been any spinning of flax into linen yarns since then. What we're trying to do is renovate these machines and bring them back into production.
"We need to replicate some parts, which we have been doing and previously there were very different motors connected to these machines as well, so we're having to update that gap between the machines and the current technology."
Another important part has also been connecting with the workers who used to operate these machines and finding out from them, how they worked. "They're still around. The skills are still there and there's still people alive today who used to use these to spin flax in Northern Ireland," said Mr Sierra.
He is now trying to get in touch with people who might have space to house these machines and make them accessible to flax farmers, once they are working again.
"I don't want it to be a museum that is just to look at. I want it to be a museum that is a functioning flax mill. The perfect situation would be that they stay on the island and that farmers can grow flax and have somewhere to process it."
Mr Sierra said the reaction to their restoration project has already been overwhelming: "The emotional support as well as the amount of people who connected with the project on a very personal level...I think culturally, it's incredibly important that we keep this alive and bring it back. For the farming community to be able to grow a crop and then turn it into a material that can be used locally."
Flax is also now being grown on a smaller scale for demonstration and tourism purposes in other counties around Ireland including Cork, Wicklow, Galway, Cavan and Antrim.
Fibreshed Ireland is a social enterprise which has been tracking the regrowth of the industry on an interactive map.
Co-founder Malú Colorín, a natural dyer, said: "The majority of the people who are working on restoring a full fibre-to-textile linen value chain in Ireland, know we can't go back to the old centralised systems of production, which relied on massive scaling and exploitation.
"They were also not stable in the financial sense, because they completely scaled up, depending on demand. For example, during the First World War, Ireland ramped up production for uniforms and planes, etc, but as soon as the demand dropped, the industry collapsed and so many people in the mills lost their jobs.
"We see the future of the flax industry more as a network of interconnected small and mid-scale farmers, processors and designers collaborating together to prioritise quality and regenerative practices over quantity and profit," she said.
Mr Mallon used to be a metal worker and blacksmith and his journey to growing flax started when he wanted to make linen bags in which to store his bronze castings of Irish mythological creatures.
"We used to grow flax here. I said, let's throw in an acre, it can't be that hard. And then we discovered there was no one in Ireland or England processing from that point on."
Both Mallon Linen and Mourne Textiles along with those working in the composite and design industries in Northern Ireland are keen to revive the whole flax to fibre industry, but they also agree that if it does make a return, it will be very different from how it was in the past.
"There's a couple of people trying to work on small-scale machinery so it won't be too largely industrialised, so that money will stay on the farm, for the farmers" said Mr Mallon. "We're basically trying to revive the whole industry again, to a reasonable-sized scale."
