How to Make Nettle String - Spin Nettle Cordage

1. Class Introduction: Nettles were harvested by our ancestors and used to make cloth and string for practical uses like fishing nets. In this class, you will learn how to forage the best nettles, prepare your fiber, and spin your own string. Hello. My name is Laura Lamb. I write and record music, draw and make art, and I love sewing clothes and toys. In my downtime, you'll find me walking and exploring my natural landscape. I find that spending time in nature and crafting with natural materials settles my busy mind, and for me is an active form of meditation. Class is for anyone who would like to practice the art of slow living by learning a wholesome craft. You don't need any fancy equipment to take this class, just nettles, scissors, and something to protect your hands, so you don't get stung. To complete the class project, you will find and forage your own nettles, process the fiber, and spin your very own string. See you in class. Bye. 2. About this Class + What You Will Need: Welcome, and thank you so much for taking this class. The first thing we need to do is to locate some nettles. I live in Kent in the UK, and there is an abundance of nettles here. They're growing everywhere, so it's very, very easy for me to find. Nettles grow throughout the world. So fingers crossed, they grow in your country, but if they don't, there is most likely another plant behave similarly to nettles that your ancestors would have used to make string or cloth. If you go on Google and search plants for textiles and then the name of your country. For example, plants for textiles, India, if you do this, I'm sure you will come across a substitute plant that you can use. Little disclaimer, if you're going to go and hunt in your local region for plants that could be used for textiles, please be very careful and make sure that you are only handling plants that are safe to use and are not poisonous. Forage your nettles, you will need a piece of leather or some leather gloves. You might like to use a rock for cracking the stems of your nettles, though that's not essential. You'll need scissors or some secturs to cut the stems. The most important thing you'll need is patience because this is a long and slow process to make string. Let's get into the next lesson where we will start foraging nettles. 3. Foraging Nettles: This lesson, we are going to go out foraging for nettles. Nettles are covered in stingers, including the leaves and the stems, so please be careful when you handle them. Over time, you'll develop an eye for the kind of nettles that you're looking for that are best for fiber. I found that actually you can use all nettles to make fiber, but the taller the better because the more mature the plant, the more mature the fibers, ideally, you're looking for plants that are taller than you. And plants that the stem, the base of the stem is thicker than a pencil. You want to snip your plant right at the base as close to the ground as possible, but without pulling out the root, so just snip it right at the base. Another little disclaimer here, please be mindful about how much you forage nettles. Nettles grow so abundantly here in the UK. I think it's very unlikely that you could over forage them. But the foragers code is that you never take more than 50% of a plant community, and you only take enough you need for your own use. So bear that in mind when you are foraging your nettles. Lovely way to show respect to the plant before you pick it is to ask the plant if you mind. Hello, nettle, Can I pick you to make some string? Thank you very much. Let me show you how I safely snip and handle nettles in this video. My scissors go out of shots. You can't see, but I'm reaching right down, like I said, to the base of the stem and snipping it as close to the ground as possible. Welcome to the Kentis Countryside. Got my scissors there and my leather. So I snip the plant while pinching the plant with the leather. And then I'm just going to rub all those tiny little needles off with the leather like so. Who don't snap it. Try and keep it straight. Then when I take it home, I often just do one last check because they really can catch you out those pesky little needles. Now we've got some sting free stems. Let's start to prepare our fiber. 4. Preparing Fibres: This lesson, we are going to be separating the fibers from the rest of the plant. The fibers run in lengths on the outside of the stem, and we want to separate those outside fibers from the inside woody bark. You can choose to separate your fibers when they're fresh, straight after you've picked them, or you can also try it when they're dry. I think it's fun to experiment which way works best for yourself. I'm now going to demonstrate for you, first of all, harvesting some very young nettles, you still can get fibers from young nettles, but you just won't get as much, and then after that, we'll demonstrate harvesting some fiber from some more mature nettles. So, when I'm harvesting the fiber from the young nettles, I am going to use a rock. That's just one way to crush the woody bark. I've also seen people use their boots. So they dry out a big bunch of stems and they lay them on the ground, and they stop their boots, and that just helps crunch up the bark. But for the sake of this video, I'm going to use a rock, and then I'm also going to use my bare hands. In more advanced textile making, using nettles, you leave the nettles to t, which is another word for rot. And what you do in that there's many different techniques. You can ret them in w or in a barrel or in a pond, and basically you tie up your nettles and you leave them in water and allow them to decompose slightly so that the fibers break away more easily from the rest of the plant. When you're making string, you don't need to go through any advanced processes like this. You can just peel it off fresh or dried nettles. So let's get into the demonstration. First of all, harvesting fibers from young nettles that I've let dry out. So I've got my needle free stem here. Then what I'm doing here is crushing my stem with a rock. I'm able to open it up. Just applying a bit of pressure. This can be done the same with boots, as I mentioned in the intro of this lesson. But for the sake of this, I'm using a rock, and then you'll see I'll now be able to open it. Then from there, I can just peel the fibers off the edge. You see that's what they look like all the fibers. I just carry on working the full length of the plant in this way. You'll notice you get a lot of fibers at the base of the stem at the woody base and then as it gets close to the top, might be a bit trickier to get the fibers off or you might not have many of them. This is what my fibers look like once they've been peeled off. I can try and get any extra bits as well. Don't want to waste any. I just peel it like this. And then carrying on more breaking up of the stem with the rock and working my way all the way to the very top of the stem. Until I have collected all the fibers from the plant, so we don't waste anything. This is what it will look like at the end. You've got all your woody sticks on the left and your fibers on the right. And now let's harvest some mature nettles. I harvested the fiber straight after picking these nettles. So here is the field next to me. You can see all these lovely tall nettles growing next to the sheep. And then I spotted down here where the farmer had trimmed last year's nettles. So these lovely, thick, mature stems, and I thought it'd be fun to give them a go. So in this method, I didn't use a rock. I literally just snapped them and they peeled very easily. Like so. You see how these fibers look slightly different because they're fresh. Just checking any extra woody bits, and I get them off like so. Then what I can do is separate the fibers. If I've got a really big or wide piece like that, I want to separate it into thinner fibers, and you can do that with the dry or the wet metal pieces. You've not got really thick fibers to spin. You see I've split that into about four, and now look how much longer the fibers are compared to the fresh stems or about that long. These fibers are so long from these mature stems. Now we have our fibers removed from the plant and separated into finer strands. We now just leave these to dry. I left mine on my window sill and they were dry within 24 to 48 hours. Now our fibers are dry. Let's head into the next lesson, where we will soften and spin them. 5. Spinning Fibres: This lesson, we will soften our fibers to get them ready to spin, and then we will go ahead and start spinning our string. So here we have our dry fibers, and I'm just going to roll them in my hands like so, using a bit of pressure. And that will just remove any extra woody bits of the stem. So it's up to you how long you do this for. You can check when you're finished when the little chips stop falling off. You'll see here I ended up with a big pile of chips like so. Now I've got my softened fiber. I'm just soaking it in some water to rehydrate it. Just take a moment. Just pop it in like that, leave it for a minute or so. You can even rinse it under the tap, and then you need to squeeze the moisture excess moisture out. Look at this lovely color. These nettles. The first batch I got was so purple. Look at this lovely purple color. I wonder if you could plant die with that purple and it would come out. Now I've got some of my wet fibers, we're going to start spinning. So we need to do the first twist, which is where we just do a loop like that. That is your first twist, and then we carry on. I twist away from me, then bring that string over. Twist away from me, bring it over, twist away from me, bring it over. You'll notice that I still have some woody bits on my string. Obviously, I needed to soften and roll it in my hands a bit longer. I don't think it's too much of a problem. It just adds character, but if you want your string really smooth, you might like to roll it in your hands for a bit longer than I did. That is how I added a new fiber. Did you see me just slip in a new piece of fiber in that way, just to keep making it longer. Oh, look at that. So pretty. Let's watch adding a new fiber again. I let my string get thicker, which I thought was quite nice. All I do is I get a new thread, I place it where I'm twisting, and then I just carry on the same and twist it. I started my string thin, and then I realized I wanted it a bit thicker. As I carried on, my string started a bit thin and got thicker. This is something you can experiment with. There's no right or wrong, so you can try out what you like. How thick you'd like your string to be. Then when you get to the end, you can fold the ends over like this so that your string doesn't suddenly get really thin at the end. And that's a way of finishing. That is the way you finish, you just twist it all the way to the end. It's very secure. You don't need to do anything else to finish off your string. Here it is. This is what ended after my first session of spinning, and now I just need to leave it to dry for a bit. Look at that. Lovely. See you in the next lesson where we will discuss uses for our string and say goodbye. 6. Uses for Your String + Goodbye: Lesson I'll show you where my string has got to, my future plans, some ideas for things that you could make, and then we'll say goodbye. So this is where my string has got to right now. I carried on working with it over a few weeks, and I plan to work on it more. So I just leave the tail like this. And then when I want to add more length to my string, I just wet the end that I'm working and then wet my fibers as we did in the video, and then I can carry on adding to the length of my string. It looks really lovely that the first lot of nettles I harvested were very purply brown in color, and then later on, the nettles I found came out on more green color. I've been pondering what I can make with it. I thought it would be really nice to use it for weaving and to weave a bag or similar. I had to go crocheting with it, but it's quite stiff, so unless you're going to crochet a very loose open crochet style. I don't think it's going to quite work. I also thought maybe it could be used for macrome. I don't know how to do macrome, but I know there's plenty of videos on here, and that could be a fun thing to make with your string, maybe something to hang a plant in. I also noticed when I harvested the mature nettles that I started to find some very, very fine fibers and I separated them, and I'm also simultaneously spinning this very beautiful fine string. So I've got to come up with an idea of what I will do with that. If you've got any ideas, please do post them in the discussions tab. Another step for me is to do some more creative and historical investigation. This is quite a new skill for me and I'm finding it so fun exploring and trying out what I can do with it and how I can use these fibers. I've also started to do a bit of research historically into what was made with this. I found this lovely diagram of some textiles that were preserved in Denmark, showing a very loose looped coiled technique that could be fun to have a go at making something like that. Would love to see photos of what you make, and I'd also love to hear your ideas about what could be made with these text stiles. You can post finish photos in the project section, and there's also the discussions tab where you can ask questions and post comments. Now it's time to say goodbye. Thank you so much for taking this class with me. Skillshare is all about community, so let's connect. It would really help me if you leave a review and it helps other students find the class. If you've enjoyed my teaching style and you've enjoyed learning, it doesn't matter if you haven't finished your cordage yet, but it's just lovely for me to get feedback. On this class. As I said before, please do share a photo in the project section, and you can also share on social media, and please do tag me at Laura Lamb, hashtag Wild crafting with Laura. You can go to my teacher page where you can see other classes that I have on offer, and you'll be first to hear about new classes, I load. On my teacher page, there's also links to my YouTube, my Facebook, my Instagram, and also to my e mail list, where I send out e mails a couple of times a month about what I'm making and what I'm learning. May the magical art of Wild crafting bring more patience, peace, intention, and beauty into your life. Thank you. Goodbye.