Innovate UK have funded a Field to Fabric project looking at the potential to grow nettles for textiles. Nettles have been used for textiles for centuries - Mary Queen of Scots preferred nettle for her undergarments (apparently). Innovate UK are great for supporting projects that are a little bit out there so when I asked for funding to see if we could make nettle underpants they were up for it!
We know we can grow nettles here, we think they might be good for bioremediation - could they be used as a crop to treat farmyard dirty water? The plant seems to be similar to flax so we are testing out whether it can be scutched and hackled like flax or carded like wool. I'll post our progress on here.
We'd be interested to hear from anyone who knows anything about nettles.
and here's me telling Price Charles all about it - turns out he has designers who harvest nettles from Highgrove for their fashion collection - and there was me thinking we were being innovative!
This one is pure flax, made from our own homegrown flax - just a little bit special for us - I actually cried when the weaver handed this over!
Some pics below of fabric woven by Mourne Textiles, this is 25 % nettle / 25% hemp / 50% cotton
Initial nettle fibre experiments. Surprisingly soft fibre and we found a pretty quick way to process to this stage. The last pic is yarn spun from raw nettle fibre we sourced in Germany where they've been processing it commercially for a few years. Next step is to send it to the spinners to see if we can make textile and also to a local composite company to see if we can use it like fibreglass.