Clothes from wood bark

I am interested in pursuing clothing self-sufficiency in my totally perennial vegan food forest vision. My first thought was using nettles, as i have a nice patch of them. However i noticed yesterday that deer eat them (i do too), stems and all. So i don't want to take away their food. I was looking into making clothes from bark. Apparently many cultures including the Ainu in Japan, traditional Hawaiians and Ugandans also have used bark to make clothes. For some trees, the bark even grows back, so it is a renewable resource!

Has anyone ever done this? I wonder if any trees could work in my mesic hardwood forest, which has tuliptree, maple, oak, sassafras, hickory, beech, mainly?

I have been thinking exactly the same, and experimenting with these sorts of things.

Of those trees, hickory and tulip tree may be the best, since I have heard of both used for cordage, but never tried with those species specifically. Here, white ash and elm seem most promising for fiber—the bark is quite strong and flexible. Basswood and willow also seem somewhat promising, although I have had mixed results. But most of the time I don’t want to wound a white ash tree because who knows how many there will be ten years from now?

It sounds as if the bark is typically retted in water for a period of time in order to soften and separate the fibers.

In some pictures I have seen Ainu yarns that appeared corded—probably rolled on the leg to twist two fibers together, and in others it looks like an ancient technique wherein fibers are twisted together and then twisted back again onto one of the fibers, or at least it appears that way.

Another possibility is one that I have just possibly discovered, if you have cattails around. I have searched around and found nothing else regarding it—it is using cattail leaf fibers. They have to be from the right plants—ones that are stiff and sturdy, with leaves that don’t tear easily. I boil them for fifteen minutes or so, then scrape them against a cutting board with the back of a knife, working from the tip to the base on each side; this releases the white fibers within, which can be hackled and spun, or corded.

Please keep us updated on this if you continue with it!

It's not on the OP's species list, but the Indigenous people in my region used strips of cedar, and were careful to harvest small enough quantities from a single tree at any one time so that it would rehabilitate itself.  I believe that in this area, the cedar fiber was more for outer wear.

They also harvested nettle fibers for many uses.

I am interested in this discussion and would be open to trying the use of clothing items from bark. I have seen the use of nettle discussed earlier in this forum: nettle stems can be processed like flax to make fiber, and it is warm enough to be traditionally used in the Himalayas: https://nwyarns.com/blogs/northwest-yarns/know-your-fiber-himalayan-nettle "Himalayan Nettle fiber has a hollow core, which results in interesting thermal properties. Fibers spun a little loose will create a yarn and fabric that will retain heat extremely well, due to the capture of warm air in that hollow core. Spinning the fibers more tightly will compress the core, creating a fabric that is cooling rather than warming." I would look for the availability of such nettle to see if it can be grown in local areas.

There is evidence of mesolithic clothing made from twined lime bast. These would at least be good for outerwear

Historical clothing examples


How to twine


Harvesting + prep

At some point I am planning on doing some experiments with making barkcloth or tapa, which is made by pounding and stretching the inner bark of certain trees. It is more like a felted material rather than woven. Nowadays it is very associated with Polynesian art but formerly was used for simple clothing. I do not really know what the texture, insulative, or other pertinent qualities are like for this material but it seems an exciting thing to explore. The paper mulberry seems to be the most traditional species used for this (at least in Polynesia/SE Asia) and it now a generally disliked "invasive" in my area of the Southeast, not sure how widespread in North America it is. Other members of morus genus would be worth trialing but I intend to start with what is known to work while I get familiarized with the process. There is actually useful info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_mulberry