Local clothes - made of stinging nettles

We all know about local food, but what about local clothing? Virtually all the same arguments apply: if the goods are sourced locally, and not shipped all over the place to be processed and retailed - the associated carbon emissions will be considerably reduced.

But which kind of plant, growing widely in north London, can be turned into fabric for me? Hemp would be great, as it grows fast and in all kinds of conditions. These days, alas, owing to worry about (actually quite different) cannabis and drugs in general, you need a licence from the government to grow hemp. Even if you have a license, I'm told, you may find your crop torn up by officious local authorities and/or police.

What about stinging nettles? We've plenty of urtica dioica, to use the technical term, near my house. For the moment, the government has nothing against nettles. Indeed, it is partly funding the wittily named STING consortium (Sustainable Technology in Nettle Growing) which is carrying out all kinds of trials on nettles for use in fabrics.

STING was proud to unveil recently a woman clad in a bikini made of nettle. Meanwhile this quite brilliant book lists fabric as one out of 101 Uses for Stinging Nettles  and these people sell nettle fibre - but they're based in France, which is hardly local.

According to a report in the Guardian, the technology for extracting fibres from nettles on an industrial scale is still in development. But hang on. Our medieval forebears must have been doing this without industrial-scale machinery. On the ever-cheerful Self-sufficientish website, somebody writing under the pseudonym Barbara Good (from The Good Life, remember?) advises crushing the stems and peeling away the hard outer surface. "It's a bit fiddly, but you get the hang of it fairly quickly. It can be done bare handed if you pull them the right way (like our ancestors used to). I was shown how to do it, but it's not an easy thing to describe!"

If I have any success, I'll report further.

Comments

[Esther Phillips]

Such a shame that industrial manufacture is the immediate hammer solution. It seems a brilliant idea but not vast monocultures of nettles - we need mixes. They are also meant to be good for rhumatisms and certainly are good for insects - and can be eaten. To leave something for the insects though I would hope they can be harvested after flowering. We need to start being way more intelligent in our "use" of nature - there needs to be something for everbody. Only like that will our species in the long-term survive. And now the long-term and the short-term are getting closer and closer together!

[Laurie Mills]

Huddersfield based fabric manufacturers Camira are now producing nettle based fabric followig work done by De Montfort University (based in Leicester), so this is not all French based.

[delia]

if once you managed to get hold of tea from the chinese & rubber from the french in south america... surely you can go over there and find out about it....... tee hee....

[Mathew Negru]

In Nepal, they still make cloth from the local stinging nettle, called Sissnoo. The most common use is for a traditional garment called a fenga, a sleeveless vest made of narrow lengths of the cloth tightly woven on a backstrap loom.

There was a British NGO project about two decades ago to try to develop the product for export by adding wool to the nettle fibre. One imagines the Nepalese would have good information on alternatives for small scale processing technology and spinning of the thread. Pure Sissnoo makes a beautiful, variegated dark honey colored fabric and is warm for cool weather wear....It's opne of my favourite textiles.

I heard some years ago that nettle cloth was also made in Scandanavia, but I know no details.