Processing Nettles Experiment

Here are the samples of nettles processed three different ways.  The green, thicker fibre was fresh nettles, peeled and scraped with an old butter knife.  By old, I mean , I found an antique butter knife at the thrift store for 50cents and used it, as they have a straight, dull edge.  Modern butter knives, or table knives, have a bit of a taper to them, and often have a bit of a serrated edge at the tip.   That made it much more difficult to scrape the nettles, hence the antique knife use.

The whiter fibre was from the nettles that were dew retted.  I bundled them up and layed them on the ground, flipping them every couple of days.  Depending on what you read, it can take anywhere from two days to a couple of weeks to be fully retted.  I left the bundles for two weeks before I tried to process these.    The fibres didn't easily peel off of the bark, or the centre core, so I thought they may be under retted.  The colour was nice though.  

The darker fibres had been retted for several weeks more.  I'd actually sort of forgotten about them as I was busy with canning.  My sweetie asked me when I was going to use them as he needed the space where they were sitting, to stack wood.  The outer bark had totally disappeared in some places and there were fibres actually showing.   They were quite easy to peel off, however they were breaking at some of the nodes on the stems.  Rather than a creamy colour, they are grey.

I don't have any proper processing equipment, like a flax break or hackles, which would have made this a lot easier and more useful.   I had a mallet, some wool combs and medium carders.

The under retted nettles and I call them under retted because the outer bark was difficult to remove in a lot of places.   I lightly bashed them to break the pieces up, pulled out some by hand and them combed them.   Many pieces still stuck.  I combed the fibres to remove more of the trashy bits and after getting a bit frustrated, just spun them and hoped for the best.  They were fairly long, spun quite nicely, but some of the bits were stuck fairly firmly.  

The over retted nettles were very soft.  The outer bark released quite easily when combed, but there were still some fibres with bits out outer bark stuck to them.  I ended up carding these as the fibres were shorter after combing, maybe 3-6 inches long.   I spun them from the end of the rolag, with a semi-worsted forward draw.

The green fibres should have been spun before they dried out.   I had to twine and ply by hand, which is an acceptable way to make a strong cordage, rather than yarn.  If I had a spray bottle, I think spritzing them with a bit of water, covering them and letting them sit for a couple of hours would have made this much easier.  But the sample I made suggests that this would make a strong rope.  I think it would make a lovely addition to a basket making project.


 

Nettles for Fibre

This is a nettle patch which started growing in one of the gardens.   I've been wanting to try processing nettles for several years.  I got started once, but realized how many nettles it would take to actually make an impactful project, so I've never gotten farther than a bit of research and chopping a few down.  

This past week though, I donned some leather work gloves, jeans and long sleeves even though it was 29C with a humidex of 33C or something like that.    If you try this at home or the edge of some wooded area, please wear long pants and long sleeves.  Nettles have little hairs which are hollow and filled with an irritant.  If you even just gently brush the plant, you will get an intensely sore, red, welted area, which will last for hours.   Cold water and aloe help somewhat.   Apparently so will plantain, but I didn't find any until my welts had faded :)  

There are several different ways to process nettles, and not a lot of information on how this was done historically, although we know that nettles were used as cordage and in textiles for a very long time.   I started off with a method which is considered to be a possible prehistoric method.

I used secateurs and snipped each stalk at the base.   With my leather gloves, I ran my hands up the stalk to removed the leaves and flatten the evil hairs.   I ran my gloved hands up and down a few times to make sure the stalks were safe.  Once the leaves and hairs were gone, then the nettles were safe to handle bare handed.  You could use a piece of leather for this.  I tried that, but it was much easier for me to just use the leather gloves.

The next step is to take a hammer, dowel or a stick and gently tap the nettles to start to break it open.   I found that one could be too gentle and the thick stems required a bit more force than I anticipated.  I used a hammer because I found one that had been forgotten in the barn. It seemed a good thing to rescue it and put it to work.

Once the stalks were cracked, I slit the whole stem open by running my finger or thumb up.  Then it was supposed to be quite simple to crack the inner pith, break it back and peel the bark off.

It wasn't difficult but it did take a little bit of time.  Nettles have a segmented stalk and while the fibres are long, they are attached at each segmented node.   I had to ease the bark off these nodes.   This took the extra time.


After about 4-6 stalks, I had this little pile of fibres.    I was hot, and bored.  If I wanted to prep the fibres for spinning, I would have to then scrape the bark off.  I decided that I didn't need to work the pre-historic method of prepping nettles.

re-using bale twine to bundle the nettle stems

Instead I would try dew retting the nettles. I snipped off all the nettles I could find.  I stripped the leaves.  When each stalk was stripped of it's leaves, I lay it in a pile in the sun.  Once I had enough nettles prepped, I tied them in two places with figure 8 ties, stood them against a fence to dry a bit overnight.  The next day I lay the piles on the ground.  I plan on wetting them down twice a day.  While it rained last night, we've really had a near drought summer, with really warm weather and very little dew.  This way I can try to help mother nature along.  I don't think I will get any more fibres, but I will hopefully end up with some useable tow as well.  If all goes well, the dew retting processing should take 2 - 3 weeks.

There is a lot of conflicting information out there about processing nettles.  The process I'm sort of following at least showed some usable fibres at the end of it.   I realize I'll have a very small amount of actual finished fibres when done.  With all the work I've put into it already, I'm thinking that I can see why flax became a far more attractive fibre.  Even though flax is a lot of work to process, it is still less than flax and not so dangerous either.   Next year maybe I'll remember to order my fibre flax seed and can do a comparison.