Making my own bowstring

I'm not sure how much time you have for VIEWING Youtube, but Torbjorn Ahman has a neat blacksmithing channel. He did a little project where he grew a square meter of flax and then built traditional/traditional-appearing machinery to process it (I have no ability to evaluate the historical accuracy beyond 'the stuff looked like it was functional and old tech'). Watching your efforts after seeing the machines that he made to automate those processes was fascinating because actions/steps were essentially identical and the logical progression for the tools made more sense to someone who has never used either.

My grandmother made clothes, curtains, washcloths and tablecloths out of flax; sturdy they were. She had the tool you described to break the strands, it's a flax brake. Then she would comb the fibers through nails sticking up a board and make them into treads with a spinning wheel, same as with wool. Finally, she made the fabric with a weaving machine. It was a lot of work by our standards, but she didn't have money, as didn't her neighbor friends, and flax was aplenty and free as she grew it in her garden. It was too cold here in Canada to grow coton, so flax and wool were the common fibers for fabric. I don't suppose she ever made bow strings, but she sure would have been up to the challenge.

Great video subject. Although I understand the need to fast forward through some of the video to keep the video from being too long, I can't help but feel that I would've loved to hear some of those conversations, like the one about that awesome roleplaying group.

Well done guys.