Minimum Effort Stinging Nettle Fibre

Good morning I'm Sally Poynter it's the 5th of August it's about six o'clock in the morning and I've got a really busy couple of days coming up because this weekend I'm very excited I'm off to Creswell Crags to do Ice Age Living History with the Ancient Craft team but I do need some supplies before I go out and the last time I came to this particular patch of woods was when I was doing my Arda Nettles ready video and actually my specks have steamed up it's quite early in the hiking over here and so I think the ones in these deep woods should be absolutely perfect for me now and taking a big bundle of nettles with me is going to be a very useful addition to both my craft supplies and to also to the things that I can talk to visitors about when we're looking at the types of materials and techniques that we believe were being used in the late Paleolithic into the early Mesolithic. It's been a very odd season here in the UK so far we've had some really wet weather we've had some really hot weather things just aren't happening at the rate that we normally expect but in these shady woodlands these nettles now have had a long fairly steady growing season you can see how well the season's advancing those red speckles down there are the fruiting bodies of wild arum lords and ladies quite poisonous but ever so beautiful nettles like this so nice and straight no side branches perfect for what I need most of my nettles I'm just whipping the leaves off as I go to make them easier to carry but I just have to show you this one look at the height of this now I'm five foot nine and this nettle is oh a good l longer so it's got to be over seven foot I'm really hoping I can get fibers out of the whole leg for that that would be a lot of fun and actually if I use those for the three nettle challenge well who knows what I could come up with the season's turning really fast now the elderberries are fully formed and some of them I think you would have noticed are starting to show the tiniest little bit of color it's not gonna be all that long before the awesome berries are upon us blackberries too I had my very first ripe one of the season on the walk over here this morning these are a long way off yet but it's heading that way so it's definitely peak nettle picking season in the UK if you want to get in there with a good harvest you need to get out there soon some of these are just so tall the other thing that's worth noting is that the seed is ripe on a lot of them and that's worth collecting it's very tasty worth reading up on though because not everybody gets on with it it's got lots of interesting active trace elements but there's a lot going on with the nettles at the moment and I can't get over how tall that one is I think that one must be maybe 10 foot I don't think I'm going heading home now with my bundle of nettles it's a modest bundle but I'm finding the moment that slow and steady is the way to go and going out lots for little bundles gives you a chance to appreciate just how very beautiful this world is so I've got my bundle of nettles home and some of my longest ones broke but I do have two or three really really long ones that come back I'll separate out the three longest and put them by for the three nettle challenge but this video is all about the easiest possible preparation methods after Gareth's death and my cancer surgery earlier this year I haven't had an awful lot of energy so I've really been coming up with ways that work for me give me good end results but take as little effort as possible and what I'm doing at the moment is laying everything out on the kitchen floor and stamping on them so rather than peeling them one at a time I'm doing as much of the crushing I should really have whipped the tops of those off but we'll get to that as much of the crushing as I can in one go and what I'll do is I'll walk over these every time I walk past for half an hour or so so they've had a really good stamping on and then in between other jobs I'm going to peel the bark off probably in groups of three or four just doing a few at a time and in no time I'll have the bark peeled and hung to dry and at that point I can come back to it later those are the three that I'm going to treat separately so that's one stamping I will now put the kettle on and do it again so after stamping on the inner pith is really easy to peel away as always two hands much better than one and the well stamped on nettle is already falling into the four preliminary ribbons I'll split each one of those again in half to make eight ribbons I'll hang them up to dry that's all there is to it work of moments and that's the first nettle stamped on split in half quickly peeled into ribbons hung to dry probably represents about two minutes work doesn't have to be any harder than this other methods work absolutely fine today we're doing the least painful method possible so once everything's peeled it's going to look very much like this lots of green ribbons do your best to pick off any woody bits but sometimes there are little bits that just get left behind and now that just gets hung to dry now this is a bunch from a few days ago I mentioned watching out for the little bits that get left behind you can really clearly see any woody bits I've missed on this they're showing up as white but don't worry too much remember we're trying to keep this really straightforward this time this is bone dry you can hear it rustling and all we're going to do now is roll it you don't have to be over energetic about it there's quite a lot of dust that comes off so if dust is an issue you might want to wear a mask we've all got lots of those at the moment haven't we all work outside and you're just going to keep rolling even after just a few moments you should be able to see see how that's rustling a bit less it's getting a little bit bendier what's happening is we're breaking down that green bark and we're flaking off all the bits that aren't fibre and you do need to do this for quite a long time so although this is a very low effort method it's still not fast this is slow fibre everything takes a little bit of time but keep rubbing now I do this in several stages I put my bundle where I can see it and while the kettle boils and while I've got a minute or two or even better this weekend while I'm doing the sessions I'll invite members of the public to have a little go many hands make light work and you just keep rubbing now only after a minute or two can you see those fibres already starting to show through you just keep rubbing until it's as free of bits as you need it to be for some purposes if you're doing string for example just a fairly well rubbed bit that lets you take off all those twiggy bits that got left behind is ideal but if you keep going you will eventually get down to the much finer fibres which you can then either just use as they are splice them or you could comb them through or card them that's really all there is to it so there's lots of methods I've used a fair number over the years but this year because my energy levels are low this is the method I'm using I reckon it's possibly the simplest method out there pick your nettle stamp on your nettle peel your nettle dry your nettle rub your nettle and eventually you'll get fibre there's a really nice fluffy bit you'll get fibre as fine as you want it here's a short fragment that illustrates what I'm getting at really clearly so at this end you can see it's very much just the peeled and dried barky bit there's the leaf node this bit's still really stiff and you can see at the other end where I rubbed it look at those beautiful clean fibres I haven't done anything else to this no scraping no retting just rolling between my hands over and over again until all the superfluous bits flake away and you're left just with those fibres so you can get to that point just through rolling this very much is the sort of minimal effort although as I mentioned still not necessarily fast but minimal effort and you still get a really nice result of course whether you get to fully clean fibres is very much a matter of personal preference this is the bundle I was working on a second ago it's only had maybe five minutes rubbing tops probably a bit less than that see if I'm getting nice and close see those fibres freeing up already and the whole lot has started to become supple but there are still plenty of bits of that inner pith stuck to it so for my personal purposes with this batch I'm going to keep rubbing until I can't see any more of those pithy bits so they've dropped away and that's probably going to be fine enough for me so there will still be some green cohesion to it but lots more of the fibres will be free and the other thing that you'll find is that as you make your item whether it's string or whether it's a more robust cordage or whether you're going straight for a spliced or a woven or whatever whatever you're making with it it's going to keep cleaning up as you go and a certain amount will clean up as you finish but just rubbing really does bring those fibres through so I'm probably not going to take this particular bundle to totally clean because the project that I've got in mind for it doesn't need it but before I finish the video I'll aim to do another five or ten minutes and just show you where you can get to with it. Nearly through that final 10 minutes I've swapped into my stone age clothing to sort out a few little things but the skirt of my tunic you can really see the dust that comes off the nettles against it so there's all the little bits have been flaking off just as I've been rubbing away. I've nearly got everything ready for my event this weekend and that bit of fibre has had exactly another 10 minutes actually timed it so I'm just going to give it one last little rub and then I reckon we're on the 15 minute mark and that's as good a place as any to have a look and just see what you can achieve with really 15 minutes of gentle rubbing and well there's about 10 nettles in this bundle so 20 minutes of prep before that this is really very very much about minimum effort for a functional result. Now if you remember how stiff and crinkly this was to start with see how floppy that is and if I put it near the microphone no crinkling noises going on anymore it's not totally clean yet but for my particular purposes today that is absolutely fine and certainly if you're wanting to have a go with nettles but you don't feel inclined to ret and you don't feel inclined to scrape and you don't want to try any of the boiling with lye or more complicated options this is certainly a viable way of getting really nice flexible fibres that you can keep cleaning up without too much difficulty. So we'll probably leave this video about here as you can see I've still got a lot of sorting out to do before the weekend I've got my my sewing kit and my projects in progress and that's line bast and this is the other fibres so here's the nettle we picked this morning starting to dry out here's a bundle dried very much like the ones we started remembering how crinkly they are here's our little bundle that we've now rubbed for 15 minutes and if I compare the two of those for you you can see that we're definitely heading towards a much more flexible fibre and that will be really nice worked up into something I'm thinking possibly a twined project with this I think the fibres would be lovely worked up into a piece of twining and then they'll just continue cleaning up from there on inwards. So there will be more videos about the weekend hopefully you're never quite sure when it's a public event whether you'll get the time to video as well as talking to all the lovely visitors. Until then happy hedge bothering I'll see you when I'm back in the 21st century!