Thistle Dryer

the Thistle dryer
In the land of Herve, there are two villages, Olne and Soiron, which still have buildings where thistles were once dried.
The dry heads of the thistles were used to ‘wool’ luxury fabrics. To give those fabrics a silky appearance, it was necessary to ‘wool’ them after carding, weaving, and fulling, endlessly combing them to loosen the thousands of tiny woolly hairs and leave a fluffy felt on the surface, soft, warm, and very dense.
In the textile factories of Pepinster, the thistle heads were attached to a carding machine in drums that spun rapidly and mimicked the swift endless movements of the workers.
The tchèrdôns (thistle heads) were cultivated and dried in a special way before being sold to the textile factories in the region. To dry them, special drying houses were built, a kind of barn with hundreds of holes in the wall for ventilation and beams to which the thistles were hung.
You can also still find specific drying houses in Froidbermont, Gelivaux, and Hansez, sometimes adapted for a new use…

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