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Together with a friend, we've tried the technique with boiling in woodash for 5-10 minutes. Afterward coating the nettles with a thin solution of clay and let it dry. Then when rubbing, the clay assists like an abrasive and the fibres came out clean for spinning. Thank you for sharing this cold bath technique!

Instead of a butter knife you should use a denture brush. It'd be stiff enough to get all the green part out from between the fibers & I don't think you'd lose much if any fiber.

Im not familiar with either but this looks a lot similar to tatting

Can I use woad on my skin?

If you look at the bronze age boat in Dover museum in kent its SEWN together with Honeysuckle rope...its 3,500 years old and still holding together

This is fascinating! Does there seem to be any decrease in strength of he fibers after they are soaked in the lye? I also wonder whether you could use a comb to speed up the scraping process? That would basically allow you to scrape the fibers from multiple sides at once.

Lot of people required...I think that if this was a truly practical technique--it would have survived into historic times and still be in use quite recently, somewhere.

Yes, I would rinse and then I would pack all of my fibers in a jar of straight vinegar and just pull them out as needed. It would be a way of canning them for winter usage.

Do the dry fibres have the same tensile strength as the traditionally prepared fibres? I would worry that the lye weakens them.

takes way too much time n effort to make lye then use to process fiber faster. depending on how advanced the society was and how much fiber they were processing, and whether it would have been worth it to process it with lye. chad zuber has made a lot of cordage with yucca. i cant find the exact vid but i think he did ret the fibers in the river to make it easier to process. youre probably aware of how linen is retted too, with just water. www.youtube.com/@ChadZuberAdventures/featured . u can leave a comment on his most recent video about retting the release fibers without modern crops like linen, he should see it at some point. it just seems like using lye would be something a village of 100 people would be able to manage, but less than that wouldnt be practical to process all the ashes... but maybe it would be worth it. maybe try retting with just water to see how much easier it can make things for u. and then see if using lye can speed up the process that much. i wonder if using rain water/ground water makes any difference. tap water shouldnt be used imo, but maybe it wont matter that much. also if the trough is kept outside i wonder if there's more bacteria in the water breaking down the gum faster, than if its kept inside. of course linen is often retted on the grass, just by turning it over. but they didnt really have scythes back then.

I wonder what would happen if you did the scraping with a bone blade, like a bone folder. The steel blade (even for a butter knife) is very hard and I would think it would weaken the fibers while scraping off the green slime. Or even another, softer metal, rather than tempered steel.

Maybe boiling the fibers along with the lye would release a finer result?

Thanks for the interesting video !!! After watching your first nettle-video years ago, I thought by myself, that the early folks surely also had put nettles in their stew and maybe saved the now softer stems for making cords...just an idea. 🙂

Their might be unsafe to seal a jar with a mixture like that, if you have any gas developments it could explode Also Their is no real difference between regular and woodash lye.

Is such a strong substance as lye necessary? In the olden days people just let the nettle rot a bit in the bog.

Some nice tweeks here. czcams.com/video/epb7h7vmX6g/video.html e.g. rag bung and slow cooker.

thhanks and blessings to you, from South Afrika

Fascinating! these results are really interesting, and I look forward to your further experimentation!

I do wonder if this will affect the longevity of the fibers in the long run...

Wow, some good chemical retting there. I wondering if pickling lime would also do. On a different note: It seems the Southwestern Pueblo people, would process fiber from Yucca plants by boiling and then slowing chewing the leaves. This mastication seems more than just mechanical but also an enzymatic process. However, I've concerns about try this after reading that we should avoid consuming nettles in certain situations (ex. when they're preparing to flower).

I'm so fascinated!!! Thank you!

I am Jack's soap tutorial on youtube

This is super interesting !!! I would love to try something similar with the milkweed that grows here--I collected about 100 stalks but am having difficulty processing them simply due to being disabled. I bet this would help a lot... you've given me ideas ! :)

I've seen videos on traditional processing of Himalayan nettle/Allo. Nepalese and Indian women boil the stripped stalks in water and fresh wood ash, after rinsing the fibre is pounded, resulting in beautiful clean, long white fibres. I wonder if other alkali substances such as ammonia or washing soda would work instead of lye. Time to play!

Silk of the north.

So exciting! I've heard that most Northern European fine linens from the past were really nettle cloth, which needs an electron microscope to be distinguished from flax cloth. And that the finest threads were preferred whenever possible for making the finest cloth. And here is a tidy solution! It makes so much more sense to use a "chemical peel" on the fibers to preserve the desired threads. Thank you, thank you! What a treasure lye is, from cold rinsing laundry to remove grease and sweat before soap was commonly used, to making amazing bast fiber threads!

I wonder can we do a test with nettels that are picked de barked then dried and after they are dry if we can do retting and lye at a different date dose it change anything?

Now I really want to find glass caps for my jars. Didn't even know that was a thing.

Well, I am a complete beginner and I don't have any nettles in my weed patch. But I do have some rather tall "catnip" with a thick main stalk, but many many branch nodes along the way. I also have a few yellow coneflowers, which I could harvest at the end of the season. They also have long stalks and fewer nodes. But I have far fewer of them. Would any of these other weeds work ok? I have a bunch of thistles and velcro pickerbushes, too, but they are nasty to get near! Keep up the experimental archeological investigations!!

Have you ever tried hackling, like they do with linen? You may be able to forgo some of the scraping as the combing would break up the outer coat and refine the fiber.

Has anyone tried using aged urine in this or other bast fiber processing rather than lye?

We have lots of nettles growing in our shelter belt grove (we live out in the open farm land in the upper plains of the USA). I've used your tutorial on net bags to make a couple from cotton twine, and now I need to try making some cordage and do one from actual scratch.

This is fascinating!

Yay! The much-awaited soap follow-up! Thank you, Sally :-)

Soak in water for three weeks, change occasionally if in a vessel (as opposed to a stream) and the pith slips from the fibers. Used for hemp also. You should watch the traditional hemp videos from Italy. They card it or whatever like linen with nail boards. Bending over an edge rapidly for the pith also (you already removed). Or bent over another rope. Same sort of thing for sinew as well, but it needs the fly-aways burned. For hemp too. I was primitive with the sinew. Don't be above pounding fiber with a smooth stone on a log. Here's a tip if you've made it this far,;- a dip in a strong alum solution for the plant fiber, then drying is a method to strengthen them. This is at the end of natural rope making not dyeing textile fiber. Leaving mordants in comes to mind but I cannot contribute about that. I followed recipes more than studied it.

in "the life of mila repa" there is a part where he has made so much nettle soup in the same pot without washing it that a skin made of nettle expressed goo formed so thick he removed it in one piece and was able to boil his soup in that without the pot. you can boil water in a paper cup over a flame so long as there is water to transfer the heat away it never gets over 212 am i giving good ideas?

Could those monster beads be for on spindles? Also, is that shale flammable?

Thanks for another fascinating video❤️🤗🐝

I think the next question is "do you need to process the wood ash to Lye?" We use hard wood ash (as is) to "slip hair" off hides in leather making. Just by wetting the hair on hide, dusting heavily with hard wood ash and then soaking in a hard wood ash & water slurry. Could much the same be done with Nettle Fiber?

So exciting! after one of your previous videos I soaked some nettle cordage with ashes in hot water, and another piece simmered in the same amount of ashes and water. The one that soaked came out with a lot of the gums removed, and I was able to rub off a lot of the skin. The simmered one came out beautifully clean and soft, and a lot smaller!

I'd say (except for the iron one) you got some lovely Tesla colours! 🐈

It's sounds really close to what I've read in the book "Brennessel - Anbau, Sammlung, Verwertung; von Dr. Oswald Richter aus dem Jahr 1917". He write down on page 30 that after the nettle fibers are split out fresh, you can cooking them for 15-30 minutes in soap water. Then you can heakle the fibers and you will get really white fibers in staple length between 3_5 or 10-14 cm long fibers. I really want try out the recipe with ash (30 grams for 1 litre water for 150 gramm fiber material) like I use this recipe to wash my sheep wool in 50-60°C warm water for 7-8 minutes, and clean them out in fresh water for 7-8 minutes (maybe 2 times) and after this, hang them out for dry before I begin to heakle them. Thank you so much to be one step before me, because I'm still in the stadium to seperate out the fibers from my rotted nettles from last year 🤗❤

thanks for this!! excited to try out woodash lye.

Ive been watching all your videos over the years. Why not just do water retting like people do with flax then break it using a flax break. I don’t think Ive seen you do that yet. I think peeling them green then drying them then water retting them would be the best course of action. Seems like an awful lot of work to get a few fibers. I see they are good but dang, thats a lot of work.

Fascinating! Thank you for sharing your process!

Do you think this would also work with lye made from sodium hydroxide which has cooled?

These are great results. I tried boiling my nettles in plain water for 30 minutes, and I found that they were also far easier to scrape and got similar results to your first batch. I'll have to also try your method now!

When soaking in water if you toss some soil (a handful to a barrel of water.. so a sprinkle in your little pot) in the initial rett in water will happen faster. (As another possible experiment to try). Thanks so much for showing this as a video, I love it.

I'm always so delighted when you come out with a new video.

Always love to see ypur newest videos! You have so much knowledge! Thanks so much for sharing and letting us into your world to see all of the amazingly wonderful creations! You have a beautiful gift. ❤❤