(For transparency: This blog post was written on 19/12/2024 as an extended version of an LinkedIn post dated 27/10/2024. It has been backdated to the date of that LinkedIn post so that it appears in the correct order in the blog summary.)

Welcome to the fibre-processing corner of my website.

“Fibre processing? What’s that got to do with translation?” I hear you ask.

Well, I could give a long and complicated answer about how it ties (no pun intended) into all of my specialist areas. For example, understanding the steps of manufacturing textiles is a key part of working on texts about making those processes more circular. Or take the food systems angle: There is huge scope for adding value to some of the by-products of the food system (like sheep’s fleece), or introducing fibre plants such as flax into rotations as a valuable cover-crop. Or I could even make the case for ‘the big picture’ – a good translator needs to be curious about the texts they work on and about how things work. For me, that is expressed in a genuine love of understanding how the things we interact with on a daily basis (like our clothes) are made.

But the honest truth is, I just really enjoy thinking about it, and I strongly suspect there are a few of you out there who feel the same. And if that’s you, you can find a list of all the previous posts on this topic here.

Today’s topic is: nettle peeling

I think of myself as a verbally dextrous person – it’s in the translator job description after all. But I will admit that my vocabulary shrank to a few choice words whilst pruning an inherited monster bramble bush yesterday. There’s basically nothing left, but it will grow back, and when it does I can train it into a manageable fan shape. It’s also yielded lots of material that I can use for cordage/basket experiments next year. It will spend the winter retting, conveniently covering up an empty bed that I left too late to sow with clover.

Most people seem to recommend stripping the stalks straight away, but they must have tougher skin than me.

Speaking of retting, swearing and thick skins, I won’t repeat what I said when I discovered I had over-retted my flax. It was nowhere near ready last week, but when I went to test it yesterday, several of the stems just snapped completely, and the outer fibres – bark and bast – both slid off the stem in a squidgy mess:

It was probably the rain – this process is normally done in the dry months of July and August. Is this the end of the flax posts, I hear you cry? We’ll see – I’m hoping that the centre of the bundles stayed a bit drier, so there might be some salvageable material in there. More on that once it’s dried out and I can have a go at rippling it. And if not, there’s always next year – would it surprise you to know hear I’ve rejigged my rotation to create a patch for flax and dye plants?

In the meantime, I thought I’d tell you about the nettles. They’ve been drying out and are ready for peeling. It’s a slow process, but oddly satisfying. You go along the dried stem, bending it to break up the inner core (the pith):

Then you run your fingernail or a knife along to break the stem open lengthways:

Then you bend it back on itself to force the pith away from the bast (and any remaining unretted bark):

Can you see the similarities with the long strands of the flax bast fibres in previous posts?

What you should ideally be left with is long strips of dried bast:

Actually there is still a certain amount of bark still attached to these strands, but they’ll come away when carded. You can see that I’m just dumping the pith on the ground for the soil to eat, but you can actually use it for papermaking apparently – a hobby that is too messy even for me.

Now, you can spin this as it is – or cord it, technically. The distinction is blurry, but cording is normally understood as a hand-only process where you both spin and ply the fibres at the same time. It might be because I’m a spinner, but cording has always looked fiddly to me, especially compared to the alternative of wrapping the fibres round a stick and rolling it along your thighs. I’ve heard this technique described as a “Navajo spindle” or the “Chilean/Peruvian method”, but apparently it probably existed all over the world but has disappeared from the record because sticks rot. This is what I’ll be attempting with the brambles with the time comes. The nettles I’ve already started carding, but that will have to wait for next time.