Ryan M Miller

As of yesterday, I have finished retting, braking, scutching and hackling the nettle fiber. The total fiber yield was 7.9 ounces. Of that, 1.2 ounces was long line fiber; 2.2 ounces was long tow fiber; 2.1 ounces was medium length tow prepared into combed top; and the remaining 2.4 ounces was short tow fiber still yet to be drum carded. The yield of long line and long tow for this wood nettle was significantly smaller by percentage than the yield of long fiber from my adam's needle yucca leaves earlier this year (43% long tow and long line fiber from the nettle as opposed to 67% long line and long tow fiber from the yucca). I'm wondering if this is due to the nettle fibers being weaker than the yucca fibers, the stem nodes creating weak points in the nettle fiber, or just due to me under-retting the fibers.

I may try collecting the nettle after the first frost the next time I find a patch of nettle. I just remember reading that the best time to harvest fiber was right after the flowers fall off the plant and the seed pods begin to form. I will set aside some of the fiber from this year to compare with future harvests picked after the first frost.

I have finished harvesting and drying my wood nettle stalks before preparing to ret them in a tank of water. The large bundle of stalks at the bottom of the photographs has about 268 plant stems. Given how nettles spread, I'm wondering if I harvested from as few as twelve plants. I seem to have been lucky to catch this plant right before the stage when it should be harvested since the period in which it flowers seems very short. As with any wild plant, make sure you don't overharvest a plant. There should be some foraging guidelines available on other parts of the Permies forum.

I will check out the washing soda method since I currently have ready access to baking soda that I can turn into washing soda. Chances are that this method should be cheaper and safer for me than using wood ash lye.

I haven't found any sizeable patch of stinging nettle this year, but I have found a large patch of a related plant called wood nettle (Laportea canadensis) that can be used like stinging nettle. I'm in the process of collecting the plant stalks right now before I ret and scutch them. I plan on sharing some photographs as I continue processing the fibers from the plant stalks.

Jill Dyer wrote:That's impressive - can you give an indication of the softness of the fibre - suitable for clothing,  placemats or pot scrubbers, garden ties?

At the moment, the texture of the yucca fiber is quite coarse. It's somewhere in texture between horse hair and medium grade wool. I plan on using some kind of alkaline treatment on the fibers to soften them. I'm corresponding with someone from my local weavers guild for advice on how to soften plant fibers. The lady I'm corresponding with already has experience working with flax and hemp fiber so she might be able to give some helpful advice.

I also forgot to mention that I got the idea of retting yucca leaves in a tank of water from YouTuber Pete McWade on his YouTube channel called A Bit Twisted. He also tried tank retting yucca fibers but used a much shorter retting period for the leaves. Here's one video of him spinning yucca fibers from a distaff that he retted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXETIrjHbbU

    Over the past two months I have discovered that it's entirely possible to ret yucca leaves in a tank of water like flax. The process takes considerably longer than it would take with flax, but it does in fact work. For this process, I submerged the bundles of yucca leaves in a wheelbarrow filled with water and changed the water daily over a period of three months. Every week, I would test the yucca leaves to see if the outer skin of the leaves would peel off with my bare fingers and then I would gradually remove the leaves that had completely peeled away the outer skin. After about a month and a half to two months into the process, the retting started to slow down and I had to scrape off the remaining skin from the leaves with a mussel shell and a very smooth cutting board. After scraping off the skin from the remaining leaves, I then pounded the leaves with the flat side of a kitchen mallet against the smooth cutting board to separate the fibers. Once these remaining leaves were pounded, I let them dry for a day and a half and bundled them with the other leaves.

   In order to separate the fibers even further, I bought a set of flax hackles from Wingham Woolworks and passed the processed and dried leaves through the hackles to open up the fibers and separate the tow from the line fibers in the leaves. I got a surprisingly high yield of line fiber using this method and most of the fiber was usable for distaff spinning, including the longer tow fibers resulting from as second and third hackling of the leftover tow fiber. The resulting fibers have a coarse texture that's somewhere between hoarse hair and medium grade wool. I'm hoping I can soften any cloth I weave from the fibers by washing it in hot water with borax and washing soda so I can use the yucca fiber to weave outer clothing.

    Because I processed almost an entire fully mature plant, I got a yield of 8.5 ounces of fiber. One of my neighbors was remodeling a house. This remodeling included completely redoing the landscaping so he let me harvest the entire yucca plant.

    Given how long this retting process took, I'm debating on whether or not to use it the next time I prepare yucca fiber for spinning. It's very efficient at separating the leaf pulp and skin from the leaf fibers, but it generates foul smelling gas and tends to attract mosquitos even when the water is changed daily.

r ranson wrote:Thorns should work for the first passes. A florist frog is nice for the final pass if one wants fine fibre.

I will definitely be saving up money for a flower frog since I  expect it to hold up better than the cheap $7.00 USD craft brush that I got from my craft store. After about eight hours of use, the tines on this brush are now permanently bent. I might also try a dog brush, but I don't expect it to perform much better.

Some context on why I was using a cheap brush: I was trying to follow a YouTube tutorial by Marina Skua (Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U1B_SfIG-E) on how to process leftover tow fiber from hackling flax fiber. Not wanting to permanently damage my pair of Ashford cotton carders, I bought a cheap $ 7.00 brush from my local craft store. Although this cheap brush now has permanently bent tines, it at least got the job done and cleaned up the bast fibers further than the thorn hackle. I now have a handful of small hanks of long tow fiber and line fiber. The total amount of fiber is 4.6 ounces of Milkweed bast and 1 ounce of dogbane bast fiber.

C. Letellier wrote:Other than back to basics is there some reason for going to thorns?

I would have thought that something like horse shoe nails would have been the modern answer?

I would've picked carpentry nails had I the money to buy them, but I was trying to go as cheap as possible. I originally wanted to use porcupine quills, but they cost too much to be practical in any way.