Yes! Stinging nettles are quite closely related to hemp and mulberry, and like them they contain incredibly strong, long and high quality fibres.
During the Germanic Iron Age and the early middle ages, nettle fibre was commonly used, because while flax has to be cultivated, nettles grow by themselves, thus didn’t take up farmland and valuable time during the summer. The trade-off is that nettle is a bit stiffer and takes a bit more time to process, but that could be done in the winter, when the farmers had a lot of time.
The exact processes of making the yarn aren’t well known. There are a few people on the internet who tried to replicate it, there also is a company selling nettle yarn produced in the Himalaya with a different species of nettles.
Steps and tricks for processing nettles that I discovered through my trial:
1. The first step is always cutting the stems and then firmly runing up and down the stem with a thick garden glove to get rid of all the leaves and the stinging hairs. From then on you can touch it without hurting yourself. You can also ferment the leaves in water to make “Brennesseljauche”, a smelly but very effective manure and fungicide for your garden plants.
2. For flax, the second step is rhetting. This means laying the stems out in a meadow for about 2 weeks, where they get wet from the dew in the night and dry in the day, thus rotting a bit. This is supposed to break down the pectin that holds the fibres and wooden bits together. From my experiments however, I found no difference in difficulty between processing new or rhetted stems.
3. Next step is splitting the stem open with a knife or your thumb nail and carefully pulling off the fibre from the wooden core. When you get to one of the knots in the stem, break the wooden part in front of it and ease the fibre over the knot from both sides. This step is a lot easier for nettles than for flax, because flas has very thin stems, which means you have to beat the wooden parts from the fibre with force (and thats probably why you need to rhett them)
4. Now comes carding. This is the hardest part that I’m not yet happy with. The fibre at this point is still very much sticking to the outermost bark, which is very thin, but hard and scratchy. The cards contain bent wires, which help seperating the fibres and getting rid of the bark. While carding wool is only done to get the hair in the same direction, carding out the bark from the nettles is very time consuming, exhausting and inefficient, with big losses of material and length of fibres. I will have to make more experiments to find a better way to get rid of the bark. Rhetting didn’t help with this either, but I heard that some people cook the fibres to get rid of the pectin. I’ll let you know when I tried some things.
5. Spinning! That’s the most fun bit. You just give the spindle a turn, then pull out some of the nettle wool to the desired thickness and let the twist propagate, then wrap it around the spindle and repeat. After that’s done you probably should twist two single yarns together, to counteract the inaccuracies and instability in thickness and strength of the yarn. And there you go!
(6. When weaving with nettles, you cant use a traditional loom, because nettle has no elasticity. You will have to use a warp weighted loom, like they did historically. )
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