GRASP THE NETTLE A story spun in nettle It began with curiosity. Allan Brown sauntered through the woods by his home with a botanical guidebook, trying to name what grew nearby and discern what could be foraged for food or fibre. One plant was always abundant, its vivid green leaves so perfectly serrated that they looked as if they had been cut out with pinking shears. Of all the plants, the humble nettle captivated Allan’s imagination. Surrounded by lanky summer growth, Allan wondered if the fibres in the long, slender nettle stems could be used for cordage or maybe even woven into fabric. “If right at the beginning of the process someone had shown me a bit of nettle cloth and said, ‘this is what it looks like, and this is how you do it,’” I would have thought, cool, and moved on to the next thing,” Allan says with a laugh. “But it was because I couldn’t even find a picture of it – just lots of tantalizing, almost mythological or folkloric hints – that I realised I would have to make it if I wanted to experience what it feels like.” Though fabric doesn’t readily survive in the archaeological record, research indicates that people have been making nettle fabric since at least the early Bronze Age. But, as is often the case, the skills and techniques unique to this fibre were mostly lost to time. Knowledge remained squirrelled away in forgotten books or handed down to scattered knowledge keepers. Allan’s curiosity bloomed into fascination, so he did what humans trying a new craft have done for millennia: experimented and asked questions. “At the beginning,” he says, “I was just finding people to show me the next step. We have a wonderful network of guilds here in the UK – spinners, dyers, and weavers. I was amazed at how open these people – usually women – were with sharing their knowledge.” Though nettle-specific practices were scarce, the principles used for other fibres like flax and hemp offered a solid foundation. As Allan learned the steps of processing, spinning, dyeing, and weaving to transform these fibres into durable fabric, he noticed how familiar the gestures felt and how rewarding: “As soon as I started spinning, it just felt so deeply rewarding psychologically,” he says. “It’s no accident: this must run deep in our fingers.” He wasn’t alone in his desire to reconnect with the unique experience nettle fibre offers. Allan’s friend, film director Dylan Howitt, suggested they record the steps of making nettle fabric in a short film. It resonated with so many worldwide that Allan created the Nettles for Textiles online community to share knowledge and ideas. “Nettle’s resistance to mechanisation has almost become a symbol showing us a way back into a more human way of working,” Allan explains. “I’ve found similar echoes in what other people are doing and recognise a collective need to feel connected to slow processes.” Allan’s fascination with nettle fabric tipped over into an obsession 4 SELVEDGE 72 section as he set his sights on creating a Viking-style dress requiring seven metres of fabric – or 14,400 metres of handspun yarn. Allan’s days became measured by the revolutions of his drop spindle. Each year, he harvested nettles in the summer and spun them through the winter, twisting the story of his own life into the fibre with each season. Some were seasons of joy, others of sorrow. He spun when he sat vigil as his father died. He spun when he sat beside his sleeping wife, Alex, who was diagnosed with cancer at 45 years old. He spun in the long days of grief after her passing. He began to weave when he had enough thread to warp the loom. The material grew by centimetre and then metres. Woven from seven summers of nettle and seven winters of spinning, Allan’s fabric took on a fabled quality of its own: “There is a sort of magical element to it,” he says. “I can see why these objects would have been used as shrouds or to mark totemic events in one’s life because it has your story in it.” The completed dress, worn by his daughter Oonagh, ultimately became both a memorial to his wife and a tangible manifestation of the support Allan found in the plants themselves. “There’s a sort of resilience that you’re being taught,” he says about the many days spent growing food and fibre on his allotment. “Sometimes crops fail. Sometimes flax is good; sometimes it’s not as good. But it’s retraining you that sometimes you simply have to wait and adjust. And knowing that helped so much with losing Alex when the full weight of it was on my shoulders.” Also woven into the dress is the care Allan received from the growers and crafters around him: “There’s just something so grounding and ordinary and ancient about chatting to people while you garden or tell stories while you’re spinning and making together,” Allan says. After witnessing the impact of their short film, Allan and Dylan created a feature-length documentary, The Nettle Dress , chronicling Allan’s journey and the dress’s creation. The gentle, beautiful film has struck a chord with its audiences: “There’s a celebration to it. There’s a danger when navigating our current ecological crisis for it to feel overwhelming and crushing,” he says. “But I’ve seen this sort of bubbling effervescence. It’s less of a loss and more of a return to the good parts of something we lost along the way.” Even with the dress complete, nettle’s fine, strong threads continue to connect people: “It’s so strange to me that all of these connections could result from my fiddling around with fibre,” Allan admits. “But everyone’s own story feels equally as inexplicable. These threads just keep connecting us in an almost mycelial way.” ••• Kimberly Coburn Join us for an online screening of The Nettle Dress followed by a Q&A with Allan Brown and Dylan Howitt on Wednesday28 June. Get your tickets at selvedge.org ©Dylan Howitt, ©Mark Carroll.