PREPARE AND BREAKE NETTLE FIBER; EVERYTHING TURNS INTO TOW!
July 2023
The nettles were harvested, dried, retted, prepared for testing, retted and dried again. It's crazy to spend so much time on a few small meters of thread, not even babies get that much care... Who does something like that??? Now the nettles were going into the boxing ring, - it was time for APPRETERING!
The plants were to be beaten (hit with a mallet), breaken in breakers, (museum copies that husband Tormod and I had made), then they were to be scuched, also with a museum copy, then hacled in hackle made from a drawing from Kristine. THEN it was eventually time to spin the fiber into thread. This was the plan. But it didn't work out that way.
Fire trucks rained down from a gray and sullen sky. Every single day. The sun tickled your neck, but as soon as you turned around, it popped behind steel-grey clouds and curtains of pouring rain.
Outside the “bakery” (the old-fashioned farmhouse with large baking ovens) we set up a tent with a workstation. We laid tarpaulins on the ground so that we could take care of the cellulose. But even though we only worked while the sun was shining, the air never got completely dry, and all we got was toil, tow and nonsense. The little fiber we got looked like straw. It was poor stuff. In addition, many of the nettles were over-dried so that the fiber lay like curly fur on the outside of the stalk.
To make the cellulose dry and brittle so that it could be crushed more easily, we heated the logs in the baking oven at Ryghsetra. You fire until all the wood has turned to embers. Then the ash is swept out of the oven, before it is washed free of embers and dirt with a wet burlap sack attached to a long pole. And then it is ready to put the nettles in so that they are dry and warm. This helped considerably, but we were still left with tow and cellulose and some fiber covered in plant matter. Nettle bundles after nettle bundles were wasted.
We turned off the whole of July and waited for August with the hope of better times. But first I filled the bathroom at home with nettles! Not very environmentally friendly, - but I turned the heating cables on full in July and kept the door closed. Every time you entered the bathroom, it smelled like an outdoor toilet. In addition you had to sweep up the dry earth, leaves an plant parts from the floor. I really must have the most patient husband in the world.
But guess what! August came with angelic song, with a trip to the Czech Republic: Here we met the nettle farmer Pavel Hala and the CETRAT museum in Pribor where Vaclav Michalicka conjured nettle into the world's finest fiber. It was like meeting Nettle Elvis! And Petra Vidomusová spun the fiber into the finest, strongest thread, - she beats the princess who spun nettle shirts for her 11 prince brothers. And then the sun came back to life, and once again I gained faith in a life before death!
I will write about this under "Historical use of nettle"
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