Nettles For Textiles

Rediscovering Wild Fibre and the Search for Sustainable Cloth. A Conversation With Allan Brown.

First published in No Serial Number Magazine, Issue 16, Spring 2019.

The European Nettle, Urtica Dioica or as it’s perhaps best known, the Stinging Nettle, is easily recognisable by its tall stem and fine toothed, almost elongated, heart shaped leaves – as children we learnt early that they were to be avoided, their fuzzy leaves covered in tiny stinging hairs.

A perennial rhizomatous plant, the nettle grows happily in damp, disturbed soil, in woodlands, by riverbanks and in gardens across the UK, at the ready to sting any gardener who attempts to remove it without first putting on their gardening gloves!

Yet there is so much more to the humble nettle than its sting. Used as a fodder for animals, as a healing tea, or turned into soup, beer and rennet, as well as being used as a dye plant for shades of yellow and green, the nettle is a truly multi-functional plant. And that’s not even considering it can be used to make textiles. Nettle cloth was still being produced in Scotland until the 19^th century – and was known as “Scotch Cloth” here - and this use for nettles in spinning yarn was commonplace. Recent archaeological investigations note that spinning and splicing nettle fibres for use in textile production was happening in the UK as early as the Bronze Age. Such a widespread plant, I wondered whether perhaps we could be looking at a sustainable alternative to other resource heavy plant based fibres like cotton and linen.

I decided to talk to Allan Brown, who runs the hugely popular Nettles For Textiles Facebook group, to find out more.