Sounds wonderful! I rarely get nettle fibre surviving our seriously soggy autumn weather here, and am always envious of people in regions that allow for winter harvesting!

More great information!

What do you make of them

@@lcunningham1776 I've made netbags and shoulderstraps for gourd waterbottles. My most ambitious projects so far have been shoulderbags for myself and a few friends. The warp alone for the bags is 540 feet of hand twisted cordage. The more they are used and worn the softer they become.

Sounds like you're an expert. You would garner a lot of interest in your own channel!

Have you ever worked with sunflower stocks? I’m thinking it could be used for cordage/rope.

@@lynneproudfoot3624 I’ve never tried sunflower but I have a good supply to play with right now. They’re dropping seeds and the stalks will be available within a month.

@@lynneproudfoot3624 I've heard the fibers were being looked into for commercial use, but I don't remember much else, it was a few years ago I read it.

I have not worked with sunflower fibers but I have found that day lilly leaves produce an outstanding cordage ... you harvest the dead leaves that have dried naturally , harvesting the green leaves and drying them doesn't work well they become brittle ... the natural dried leaves get retted and seasoned by the weather , also don't wait till they are too dark in color because the natural retting has started weakening the fibers. The cordage that I produced will be used for making a chair seat... I just have to build the chair frame first!!!

@@markbrandli if I remember right they are a GREAT color too. Am I remembering right, or no?

Ah, I think you hit it spot on. I'm always surprised more people haven't discovered it yet, and I figure it's only a matter of time. Maybe that time is now!

Thank you. It's still pretty new, just over a year old, and I'm very much just filming what I'm currently working on, so.it does vary a bit

I eat a lot of nettles, but generally find they are best to eat before the plants flower and the fibre is at its peak.

they are also fill of oxalates, which is NOT good for you, so use with caution. Plants have a lot of ways to defend themselves against being eaten. Oxalates can cause kidneystones. Dont mean to be a killjoy, but facts are facts:)

Thank you so much!

That's such a great story!

@@SallyPointer I guess I can talk to you here. (I might ramble). When I saw a video of you spinning linen-like plant fibers I understood you have used a drop spindle as much or more than I. A few videos later I saw your two drop spindles you use for spinning different weights of wool. They are surprisingly similar to my two main wool spindles. The biggest difference is yours are of clay (been there. Done that. For cotton spinning on a lacquer chopstick. A very handy material.) while mine are washers on the small one and a carborundum grindstone on the larger one. Like me, your shafts seem to be made of sucker shoots on fruit trees. Straight, strong, with a beautiful taper and the shoots produce no fruit. Mine are peach I believe. If you want to torture yourself replace a broken spindle with privet. Never spins straight. What was so similar to my spindles that I wasn't sure for a second if I had actually gotten up to look at mine instead of yours was the tips. I also had just watched a video I think was in a Nordic language where they were trying to time how long it takes to make a garment. {I know, by the way. To make a weft faced heavy blanket 20" wide and 6' long from wool from a black-faced meat breed I was given when the farmer put the lamb in the freezer took about an hour a day for about one college semester. Backstrap loom, weft spun on an as-needed basis. The garment was my car seat to protect me from the burning hot sun for 15 years.} Anyway, the thing about this Nordic scientific research by these very serious looking people was they were using a drop spindle that was one of those toy wooden whorled ones with a dowel for a spindle and a notch at the top. And when the lady was spinning the line was under tension from the rim of the whorl to the half-hitch under the notch. Air resistance is huge and she spun with no power. Sitting cross legged on grass. 4" of new thread per tap on the spindle. When you and I loop thread around the underside of the whorl and come back around the top of the whorl we twist it onto a plain tip that tapers with use and during the spin we usually stand and we dance. I tap the spindle to get it going and will spin 6' of wool, raising my left hand high, then tap the spindle a second time and put my right hand as high as I can reach with the thread riding in the crotch between thumb and forefinger. That twist travels over my right hand well enough I can draw another 6' of fresh yarn by taking the left hand downwards and out, then wrapping it between left elbow and left hand and when I reach the spindle I wrap 12' of fresh thread onto it and then repeat the entire dance sequence. That's a lot of words but the tips of your spindles told me you would understand. WALKING WHEEL: (I promised I would ramble) had a friend who was a nurse in a nursing home in the rural south of the USA in the early 80's. In the lobby of the nursing home they had a typical giant Southern walking wheel. Those have woven grass bearings. This one had none, of course, but someone had put the beautiful iron spindle in the hole in the axle that kept the wheel on. One day I just decided to show up and see what would happen. I had just carded about a half pound of raw washed wool (the meat breed) and had some nylon cord. I braided hinges for the spindle, it still had a pulley of wood in fine shape, drove a small peg in the hole in the axle, made a drive chord out of nylon and just spent the whole day spinning spindle after spindle. Folks were glad to see me. Eventually some of the elderly lady residents came out to talk to me. What they consistently said was that when they were little girls their grandmothers had walking wheels, their farms had a few sheep, and Granny used the wheels to make socks. The little girls didn't know it but you and I do: the land they farmed was really swampy and wet. The socks were probably made of wool with some of the lanolin left in. I think it reasonable to think the grandmother's learned their craft between the 1820's and 1850's. That's very solid cotton country. Hunh. When the grandmothers were born the cotton gin was only as old as the internet is now, about 30 years.

@@petehoover6616 lovely ramblings! Ramble away 🙂

It varies a lot, always starts off ok but I often can't read it a page later. Depends how far ahead of my hand my brain has got!

Sally Pointer I can completely understand that.😁

That stand are very tall, some others I pick are only waist height, they vary hugely

I think comfortable is probably his middle name. 😄

How has it been going? (I see you posted one year ago). I've been restoring an old flax mill circa late 1700's in New England and collecting old flax processing tools with the idea in mind of attempting some small production for fun.

walking repeatedly into them barefoot seems to help, we have nettles all over the garden and I often walk into them

They're so good for you though. They help to promote blood flow to the area, so start using it in areas where you are in pain. Brush the body part into them or take a branch and brush it on yourself. My German Auntie taught me that. She has arthritis in the hips so she lowers her shorts and rubs her butt into them lol When you shower or bath later, the pires open up and you will get the effect again.

That's great! Hope it comes out well.

You didn't scrape them? How did you clear the outter green off? I suppose I ought to watch this video before commenting lol it's likely mentioned here! 😅

There's so many ways to do it, it's always worth experimenting with a few so you have a range to suit different nettle patches

@@SallyPointer yes I totally agree! I had not considered using a dull blade to split the nettles in two.

I do that in my 'minimum effort' nettle video!

@@SallyPointer Yes, I just saw that video last night and came back here to edit my comment, but you already beat me to it! That video also answered a question I've been curious about: whether fibers are less strong when harvested early in the growing season. The advice for dogbane fiber (in North America) is to wait until the stalk dies and dries out in late fall or winter. I wonder whether it's the same for all bast fibers (hemp, flax, etc.). Also whether retting vs not retting yields stronger fibers.

@@froggydoodle808 retting is controlled rotting, so any time beyond that needed to remove surplus material will potentially weaken fibres, but it's always a trade off between getting to the quality of fibre you want for a project by a method that suits you.

Hahaha, mildly notorious at best I suspect.

I'm not aware of any with traces linked to nettle scraping in the way that we have traces on flint that are consistent with scraping bast fibres, but it's definitely worth considering. I do find a very fine edge, or a microdenticulated one is best, and even a sharp bone edge tends to be a different profile, bit it's always worth trying these things

Thank you very much!

Here they are good right now, the hot weather means the ones in full sun are really mature already

You can also fry the leaves in a bit of oil and sprinkle with salt to make crisps/chips. My kids love them.

I've done some lye experiments too, but not on any huge scale as yet. One of the plans for the finished fabric here is to process some in lye and see if the fibre is altered enough to have any differences at the microscopic level that can be compared to surviving prehistoric samples. That's the key in this experiment, keeping the results parallel to what survives so we can get a better feel for what is actually being done in the Neolithic and bronze age

I've seen some beautiful work done with wood nettles, they do seem very 'friendly' to work with 🙂

Not overlooked at all, deliberately not using as the current evidence suggests it's not in use at this point in prehistory

There are prehistoric hackling boards made with thorns known. I'm hoping to try replicating one soon

@@SallyPointer yeah i heard about that too..that's great..there you see that preppers and weavers back then use the same materials...very interesting .. when i do the gardening i always feel if such a Viber like nettles can be used for making..what i call...robes..

Chewing works quite well, but it's very very slow, you can only chew about two nettles worth at once at most, and it takes about ten minutes a nettle to chew the fibre clean.

Personally I don't ret nettle, but a lot of people do. Have you seen Allan Brown's work for example over on the Nettles for Textiles group

The whole point is that the archaeological evidence suggests no or minimal retting in prehistory, it's something we see more of later on

At this point of maturity they aren't good nutrition, much better when they are younger, I eat a lot then, some recipes in my nettle playlist

It's stinging nettle, Urtica dioica. It stings lots, but it's not a problem if approached sensibly

It's a hank of horsehair

We do have strong archaeological evidence for the use of microdenticulated flint scrapers on bast fibres at this date though.

I can’t understand the YT link to Russian video. Have you another way of linking?

@@cvan1075 If you simply cut and past the whole line including quote marks into YT ’s search box, the video will come up top and saying in English: 305K views . 8 years ago. It is very informative.

Most crafts can be hard on the hands, the trick is to work as efficiently as possible so you aren't wasting movements. I'm still working on that myself!

improper retting may damage the fibers, but with practice and procedure, retting actually increases the tinsel strength of the finished product by removing the unwanted materials. All the hemp fiber produced by the U.S. in WW2 was dew retted. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of tons of the stuff. And they used it for everything. uniforms, parachutes, ropes of every possible size and utility. Look up the video 'Hemp for Victory'.

@@maxdecphoenix yes, retting works perfect with hemp and flax.

Have you seen my video on nettle pudding? One of my favourite ways to use them.

What an intriguing idea. The idea of pets rather than animals managed for specific productivity goals is probably relatively late, and it is possible to trace the deliberate development of sheep to have wooly, rather than hairy coats, but I think it would be hard to infer that those flocks were pets. Saying that though, I can believe that people interacted with animals in many ways over the millennia

@@SallyPointer We know that ancient egypt people loved cats, too. And in northern hemisphere they moulting or change their fur every 6 months, like dogs or other animals. So even if they lived in the open range, it is likely to find a ball of fur laying around, like we see it at the trees when animals chafe their body and the fur will stick to it.

There weren't too many pets just for pleasure -- animals had to contribute to the household to earn their upkeep, such as cats' protecting the stored food by killing vermin. Dog hair was spun into yarn by American colonists and pioneers and used to make sweaters especially, as dog fur naturally sheds water. I don't know, but it's very possible they brought that knowledge with them from Europe. Even now there are spinners who spin shorter hairs from cats, dogs, humans, etc. with any of a variety of longer-staple animal wools to make yarn. To the best of my recollection, I read once about an archeological discovery of a bit of woven cloth that was plant cord one direction and animal wool yarn the other. EVERY kind of hair, fur, and feather was used and used up until very recently in human history, so I'd think somebody would have tried what you suggest as a way to get an additional use from, say, cat hairs that were too short to be spun into yarn by themselves.

@@LynxSouth Really? Cool. This is exactly what meant. And sometimes you can find fur of wild animals in the forrest, too, but its easier to get it from animals in the backyard and bunnys are quite easy to keep. and have long fur as well. and they change fur twice a year by themselves, so you don't need to shave tem in any way, a comb alone will help. I also just published a video where I tried to carve knitting needles out of wood and they work perfectly fine, so I'd guess this is also possible technique for making fabric back then.

Processing in wood ash lye is one of the comparison finishing methods I'll be doing on the finished woven fabric to see how it affects the surface of the fibre. I've done some samples like that directly from the peeled bast, but am not sure myself if it currently fits what we're seeing archaeologically. Plenty still to do before we either rule it out or add it back into the list of likely processing options for this time period. The archaology of soapmaking is one if my other research interests so no shortage of woodash lye here!

the lye retting seems to be a technique that originated or was common in the East. I have seen japanese process wisteria in this manner as well. I am unaware if this process was popular in the Western regions or most of europe, just haven't really heard of it done. Most of the retting done was dew or 'water retting' (where the organic material is submerged for a period of time). I have experimented myself with water retting several species of plants, primarily yucca filamentosa and wisteria. And the quality and quantity of fiber produced by water retting stands head and shoulders above the other methods. I can see why it became as popular as it did in europe. I have just been trying to nail down the best harvest time for the best retting time for these different types, and the duration they should be submerged. The lye retting i think is fine, but the effort and resources required to produce stuff in quantity vs the ease of water retting is something i don't particularly care for. It's much easier to harvest a bunch of fibrous plants and dump them in a tank for a few weeks (depending on seasonal conditions) than mess with all the tedium of trying to chemically separate the fibers. I'm going to assume the europeans came to the same conclusion.

@@maxdecphoenix it may be that you feel that way because you're not trying to find a use for the ashes you remove from your fireplace and cooking area (sometimes the same, sometimes not) every single day.

Yes, look at my nettle playlist and there are some recipes. You want young leaves though, ones from plants picked for fibre aren't good eating

I do still get stung a bit, but practice avoids most of it

Practice minimises the stings, I still get a few though

It's Urtica dioica here too

@@SallyPointer how do you not get stung all over? Ever since i was a wee little lad I've learned to stay away from them because they sting soooo badly... I would love to get into nettle handling tho, it seems very gratifying

@@uribove practice avoids most of them, and accepting there will be some stings

Keep learning. Depending on where you live, there are nicer kinds of nettles and all sorts of other plants and grasses to work with.

This is urtica dioica, stinging nettle. What part of the world are you in? They can be wildly different heights, sometimes branched, but they don't have a vining habit. The sting is the classic test! There are other nettles in some countries.

If cutting I completely agree, but here it's about scraping a fibre layer, too sharp and a metal knife doesn't work well

@@SallyPointer I understand that I'm talking about the knife you were using to split the stems with. You referred to it as a "blunt kitchen knife" about 3:00 in.

@@G_Robb yep, a bendy thin butter knife essentially, so not for cutting really, the stems split easily with it as a wedge action but I mostly use it for scraping

Retting is a later method on nettles, dew works better than immersion on this plant too, a river for two weeks would be much too long based on lots of recent experiments by colleagues

@@SallyPointer Time would depend on temperature and the plant being used I guess.

@@MegaDavyk yes, nettles don't need much retting if at all, it's why these methods work well

It's certainly a possibility. We haven't found any prehistoric ones as yet though, so I'm trying to stick with tools we can document for now, but there is plenty of room for expanding the project as I go along if evidence supports trying something.

@@SallyPointer Thanks!! I hope you can watch the pineapple video I sent you in one of the comments!

Sorry, Gareth's death and my cancer surgery last year really messed up a lot of things I was planning on doing further installments on

@@SallyPointer ; well, I guess I'll give you a pass on this one then :) The first two videos were very nice to watch. When I was younger I would try to get the fibers from my mother's yucca plants and twist them onto cordage with varying degrees of success. My condolences on the death - it has been about 30 years and i still find myself waking up in tears after a silly dream ... And as far as the cancer goes, I have no idea what an appropriate response would be; I am glad that you made it thru and I wish you well in that regards.

There are overlaps, but it's not exactly the same

Practice

Earlier in the year yes, but at this stage the leaves are too old. You can pick seed from nettles at this stage though.

@@SallyPointer Ok awesome! what do you use the seeds for other than planting?

@@kellydolan9717 they are delicious and very nutritious

@@SallyPointer Ok awesome. We do sell stinging nettle at the garden shop I work at.

Thanks for the update! Will be interesting to hear your final verdict on them 🙂

I'm interested in working with legume plant fibers. Please, what else did you find out?

They do sting when fresh, but practice means you can avoid most of it

AFAIK, they did in most places, for multiple uses. The trick is, how big do you think your wardrobe would be if you depended on your own hair to supply all of the material? What about towels, bags, nets, blankets, pillows, and rugs?