Festival of Nettles, Scottish Crannog Center.

[Shambling Shaman]

Book Monday off so me and the wife can go to the Scottish Crannog Center
for the Festival of Nettles

http://www.crannog.co.uk/docs/crannog_centre/events_diary.html

http://www.crannog.co.uk/index.html

 

[Shambling Shaman]

So went to the Crannog (we go so often were on 1st name terms with the staff

)

Now the main reason for going was to get some hands on with the nettle weaving.

So...

The nice lady in the hat was the teacher.

Some of the things she had made out of nettle

Me bashing some dry nettle stems

what you get after the bashing.

Sorting out the fibers

The pulp thats left over is saved

And if mix with water in to a kind of Paper Mache you can make something like this

Carding the fibers

After carding its like a ball of cotton fluff

Then roll the fibers in to a tube

Then it can be twisted in to a rough yarn

Was my 1st go at making this and I did learn a lot, I did however use some of my nettle cordage knowledge to twist the fibers at I had no luck useing a drop spindle

A photo of the Crannog from the carpark

All in all a nice day out and some knowledge gained.

 

[Shambling Shaman]

Following are visit the wife gathered some nettles and cook a mushroom&nettle sauce on a bed of barley. Very tasty.

 

[Wayland]

Hmm.. The papier-mâché idea is a new one to me.

Is there a separate gluing medium or does it self bind?

 

[Toddy]

It self binds Wayland, but it needs pressure to shape it. Basically the little tow fibres help keep it together.

cheers,
M

 

[Wayland]

Interesting..

 

[Shambling Shaman]

Hmm.. The papier-mâché idea is a new one to me.

Is there a separate gluing medium or does it self bind?

It self binds Wayland, but it needs pressure to shape it. Basically the little tow fibres help keep it together.

cheers,
M

Thanks Toddy that was better explained than what I was typing

 

[Dreadhead]

ooo wish i could have made it that looks like great fun. i see they are doing a craft thing in perth with the museum down the north inch. metalworking and pot making. hoping to get along to that

 

[Toddy]

Birte does her fibre extraction from dried nettle stems. It works, but........well in the past they were retted like flax. It stinks though, then stooked and dried and then they were broken and scutched. Then the bundles are combed to free the fibres from the broken stems. It's hard work but it makes for enough fibres, of good quality, that are fit for spinning to make thread worth weaving.

There is another way, perhaps more appropriate to bushcraft, that I find useful.
The stems are stripped before they get too dry, and then those lengths are simmered in a mild alkali for a couple of hours. Then worked a bit and finally combed.
The result is handfuls of fine white fibres, ready to be spun worsted style (fibres all running the one way, not fluffed as though for knitting wool) into fine thread.
That fine thread makes a beautiful weaving cloth

The first stage of the process, as the stuff comes out of the simmering pot, can be used to make cordage without anymore work, and it's good cordage too. Very supple, handleable, strong and hardwearing.


All of these ways work, but the labour is different in each case, and the results, the final products, are in some ways dependant on the preparation processes.

cheers,
Toddy

 

[JohnC]

Does wood ash in the water make it alkali?

 

[Toddy]

Uhuh or ammonia. Wools are fine in acidic stuff, like vinegar, but the woody fibres like hemp, flax and nettle are better in alkaline ones.

cheers,
M

 

[Shambling Shaman]

Thanks again Toddy, we had talked about striping the fibers out before drying and now we know its possible

 

[Dannytsg]

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Hushwing]

There's used to be - and still might be - a brilliant old nettle shirt in the National Museum in Edinburgh which is obviously made from rhetting the fibres and spinning. rhetting does stink but is also a good fertilising liquid. Didn't see the Crannog Centre thing until too late - looks great - and the nettle mache is an interesting twist.

Dreadhead - when is the Perth museum thing?

 

[Toddy]

There's actually a lot of nettle cloth around, just that it's been mislabelled as hemp or flax

Thing is that flax needs good arable land, it's a crop. So is hemp. Nettles on the other hand will grow quite happily, unsown, at the nitrogen rich end of the byre wall, and thrive. They'll grow in some of the most awkward bits of land too, and they don't mind stoney ground or clay or too wet, or a bit cold either. Their seeds are nutritious food for hens and the like as well.
They are small farm/croft economy, fibres. They'll only give maybe 1 or 2% of the dried weight in fibres though, while flax will give 11 or 12%.
It's really horses for courses, but the nettle cloth is the finer cloth of the three, and it comes out whiter and needs very little bleaching.

It's still a lot of work to make though.

atb,
Mary