I wonder if our hair is "too clean" - there aren't enough oils in it to enable it to 'bind' as it's spun; we use too much soap and detergent. Mesolithic man would not have had that problem
Does horse tail spin better than human hair?
Man-made vs natural cordage?
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I wonder if our hair is "too clean" - there aren't enough oils in it to enable it to 'bind' as it's spun; we use too much soap and detergent. Mesolithic man would not have had that problem
Does horse tail spin better than human hair?
Quite, it is fairly good at its original application but ... The stuff we are now getting probably is not all upto spec. anyway (I think the original MilSpec has been superseded).
Preparing nettle fibres for spinning is done using a similar process to that of flax (drying, retting, breaking, splitting, combing, spinning — I have no idea what the proper words are for this in English, so just trying to describe the process here!
).From memory: you pull up (ideally, or cut) large nettle plants in late summer or even as late as in late winter. Then you let them ret in water for a couple of weeks. Then you break the wooded parts of the stems and tease apart the fibres from the woody debris. You could use your fingers, but for larger quantities you’d want proper tools. The long fibres are very shallow and you want to keep them as intact as possible, but they come apart quite easily thanks to the retting. The fibres are wonderfully soft and have a nice sheen to them. Spun and woven, it makes for a lovely fabric, but can also be used to reinforce wool socks and even for making fishing netss.
I was 9 or so when I did this last, so might not have remembered all the steps!
It might be that there is too much damage to modern hair, but I’m sure the hair type of the donor plays a huge part too.I wonder if our hair is "too clean" - there aren't enough oils in it to enable it to 'bind' as it's spun; we use too much soap and detergent. Mesolithic man would not have had that problem
Does horse tail spin better than human hair?
You are more likely to find cloth called Ramie advertised as nettle cloth.
It's a beautiful fabric but it's not made from our nettles, it's made from a horrendously jaggy vine type of nettle. Grows in places like Nepal.
Nettle fibres are hard won, and here it's more usual to eke them out with others like flax.
I have some tartan that was woven with nettles and wool to create a lighter fabric. It has the most wonderful 'handle' to the cloth
really lovely stuff, but really expensive.During WW2, the Germans resorted to using nettles because they couldn't get other fibres. It's become like the famine foods. Expensive to produce because it's labour intensive and not enough of it is in production that technology is being actively updated and applied to it's manufacture.
M
This video was really interesting.
Prehistoric Nettle Textiles, scraping and splicing
Cannot work out why the video above seemed to produce better quality thread.
Nettles for Textiles!
Prehistoric Nettle Textiles, scraping and splicing
Cannot work out why the video above seemed to produce better quality thread.
Nettles for Textiles!
If you strip off the fibre rich layers from nettles, hang them to dry, and then bring them slowly up to a boil in a pot with either hardwood ashes or some baking soda, for maybe ten minutes or so, then rinse and hang again to dry.
Twisting those dried out strands will let the unwanted binding stuff around the fibres crumble and fall away. Then the fibres can be carefully combed into bunches for spinning.
Processing it, as one does with flax to make stricks doesn't quite work with nettle; the fibres are shorter.
This is one of the best, and both interesting and relatable, videos I have found on traditional flax production in the British Isles.
Twisting those dried out strands will let the unwanted binding stuff around the fibres crumble and fall away. Then the fibres can be carefully combed into bunches for spinning.
Processing it, as one does with flax to make stricks doesn't quite work with nettle; the fibres are shorter.
This is one of the best, and both interesting and relatable, videos I have found on traditional flax production in the British Isles.
I wonder if our hair is "too clean" - there aren't enough oils in it to enable it to 'bind' as it's spun; we use too much soap and detergent. Mesolithic man would not have had that problem
Does horse tail spin better than human hair?
Horse tail doesn't spin well at all. It's either pleated for fishing lines (been there, done that, trust me on this, it's beautiful, but after 30' I am not doing it again, or woven.
Horsetail for cloth is laid in as the weft and another fibre used as the warps. Usually flax or cotton.
Ply-split braiding is used to make camel harnesses in the Middle East, India, etc., and occasionally they make use of horse tail. Pure black is the preferred colour for many, and horse does grow a good relatively light fast black at times.
M
Thanks for sending me down a Nettle based rabbit hole. It really interesting. The latest research has it as a much more wide spread fabric than previously believed. It also was seen as a low end fabric however they have found it used by all classes. Basically they had been labeling all fabrics linen and it turns out a lot more of them were flax and nettle.
It odd that it not more popular. It got to make more sense than bamboo.Yep, and there is a small growing wave of resurgence - be prepared to defend your nettle patch!
The best of them all, not just for the fibre but for the ease of growing, the lack of intensive watering, etc., is hemp.
Good quality hemp fabric is soft, lovely to wear, long lasting, and has every advantage that linen has too.
It's only because of the hassle created by American political hysteric and the belief that it's all going to give folks a high, that it is not more widely grown.
It does very well indeed in our soils, and superbly well on the continent.
It was very labour intensive in the past to process it, but modern decorticorer technology makes it a very efficient process.
Home Office gave a licence to a farmer in Ayrshire to grow 5 acres of fibre crop hemp, no high possible from it, and his entire crop was poached That's been repeated across the country by numpties who just will not believe the field notices that farmers put up in an attempt to have the crop left in peace.
Good quality hemp fabric is soft, lovely to wear, long lasting, and has every advantage that linen has too.
It's only because of the hassle created by American political hysteric and the belief that it's all going to give folks a high, that it is not more widely grown.
It does very well indeed in our soils, and superbly well on the continent.
It was very labour intensive in the past to process it, but modern decorticorer technology makes it a very efficient process.
Home Office gave a licence to a farmer in Ayrshire to grow 5 acres of fibre crop hemp, no high possible from it, and his entire crop was poached
That's been repeated across the country by numpties who just will not believe the field notices that farmers put up in an attempt to have the crop left in peace.Apparently here in the north too, a graduate thesis just came out were she was looking for identification methods for various plant fibres, found one and applied it to old clothing at the National Museum, if I remember correctly about 25 % that were thought to be linen were nettles.
Apparently hemp is very durable fiber for outdoor clothing and it was used extensively in Europe before the Yankee hysterics. I have seen it grown here too but the problem was that there was no processor so the crop was plowed in and the farmer at the time got his EU money anyway. Might be changing now, When I did a search it came out that fairly nice looking hemp cloth was available from Romania.
Yeah, apparently they just labelled everything linen and now they are back checking and finding about half of it was either flax or nettle.
The US it was mis-information from William Randolph Hearst and others. It can be used to make paper so he wanted it stopped. Its main drug name being with m is actually a rough mexican tobacco which he used to give it a negative spin. I think it was something to do with WW1 that we stopped using it so much. There was also a big problem with machine use and hemp
I really surprised that nettle not much more popular as it starts white so from an environmental point of view it must be a really good fibre to use.
It seems most other plant fibers are environmentally better than cotton, hemp being one of the best.
Cotton's horrendous for the environment. It is attacked by pests, and the damage the pesticides cause is often cumulative, it's a very thirsty crop, and it is really short staple (length).
Flax, hemp, ramie and other bast fibres are much better on all those factors. But, they need to be spun damp, and that didn't do so well with mechanisation, and the industrial revolution took to the cheap, slave produced, cotton.
Now we know better, but things are rather stuck. Even though cotton is still a relatively 'cheap' crop, it's legacy often is anything but.
Flax, hemp, ramie and other bast fibres are much better on all those factors. But, they need to be spun damp, and that didn't do so well with mechanisation, and the industrial revolution took to the cheap, slave produced, cotton.
Now we know better, but things are rather stuck. Even though cotton is still a relatively 'cheap' crop, it's legacy often is anything but.
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