Processing stinging nettle fibres by hand
Fresh from winning the 2026 Ashford Award designer Belinda Gredig of Mönchengladbach, Germany, shares her guide to processing on of nature’s most overlooked fibres: stinging nettles. In this fascinating practical guide, Belinda shares the traditional processes and hands-on techniques used to transform wild nettles into beautiful yarn for weaving. From harvesting and preparing the plants to extracting and spinning the fibre, discover the remarkable potential of this sustainable natural resource. I hope you find this article interesting and perhaps you will give stinging nettle a go!
Kate
A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR TRANSFORMING STINGING NETTLES INTO TEXTILE FIBRE
For thousands of years, stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) has been used as a textile plant across Europe and Asia. Long before industrial cotton dominated fibre culture, nettle cloth was valued for its strength, breathability and subtle sheen. During both World Wars, nettle fibre replaced cotton imports in parts of Europe so that, for instance, soldiers wore uniforms made of nettle.
Today, hand-processing stinging nettle reconnects fibre practice with landscape, seasonality, and material intimacy. The process is slow, tactile and deeply ecological.
What you will need:
– Pre-dried nettle stems
– Blunt knife
– Wooden clogs
– Fibre comb
– Drop spindle / Spinning wheel
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- Stinging nettles in September
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- Harvesting nettle stems
Harvest
The best time to harvest stinging nettles is from July-September in Central Europe, when the stems are tall, fibrous and are beginning to toughen, basically after flowering and before heavy decay. You cut the long and straight stems close to the ground.
Retting and Drying
Retting separates fibre from the woody stem material by allowing microorganisms and moisture to dissolve natural plant gums – plant pectins that bind fibre to stem.
Here, around 20 nettle stems were laid on grass for retting, which is most traditional. The leaves need to be removed before retting. You can use them for tea or natural dyeing.
Then you leave them in dew, rain and microorganisms for 2-4 weeks and occasionally turn them around.
Other retting methods are to submerge the stems in water for 5-10 days or use the natural decay and harvest the stem a bit later, during autumn, so that the retting takes less time or
sometimes can be skipped.
To make sure that the stems can be dried now, you can make a quick test: the fibres are to peel easily from the stem.
Otherwise, you might have to continue with the retting for a bit longer.
After retting you can store the loosely packed stems in a dry space or lean them against the wall to dry in the autumn sun before putting them into storage to process them over the winter.
Breaking the Stems
Once fully dried, the stems need to be gently crushed along their length. Here, I stomped on the stems with wooden clogs to loosen the inner wood as preparation for the next step.
Scutching and Cleaning
After breaking, you start to peel the fibre from the stem either by hand or if necessary at the axes of the stem with a blunt knife. You always start at the bottom of the stem and move towards the top.
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- Breaking the stems
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- Peeling the fibre from the stem
The stems crack easily open and the inner wood splits into half.
If the wooden parts don’t fall off by themselves, you need to remove the inner wood gently from the fibre. It helps to break the inner wood into more pieces while it is still connected to the rest of the stem. The best way is to have the fibre side
underneath and break the inner wood towards you.
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- Then the stem half will start to bend more.
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- The inner wood parts can now be peeled off more easily and gently so that the fibre peels off in one go.
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- The inner wood can be used for instance as mulch material or for paper making.
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- After having removed the inner wood, this stage reveals quite long bast fibres.
Hackling (Combing) – from bast to fibre
Next, you start to twirl the whole bast fibre batch to remove the wooden parts from the fibre.
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- From bast to fibre.
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- Here, you can already see that the fibres have become finer after the twirling.
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- To continue with the clean up and removal of the remaining wooden parts, you can use a knife.
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- Here, you can see the effect: the pure fibres become more and more visible.
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- After the cleaning round with the knife, 9.6g of fibres just remained.
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- 1. Here I pulled the fibres through the blending board but carders could also be used.
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- 5. After the first round of carding with the blending board.
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- 6. The procedure can be repeated several times until you are happy with the fibre.
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- Here the fine wooden parts that were removed through the combing on the blending board can be seen.
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- After three rounds combing the fibres with the blending board, 6.1g of fibres remained.
This is the batch of fibres ready for spinning. The fibre length vary a bit, due to the nature of how the fibres grow within the stem. You could sort them into longer and shorter fibres. The longer could go for spinning and the shorter could be used for non-woven.
Spinning
You can use a spindle or any spinning wheel to have a go with it.
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- Here we end up with 1.4g of 1-ply yarn as yield of the harvest.
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- Stinging nettle yarn ready for weaving.
