Join Guest Teacher, Ashli Tyre, for an exploration of stinging nettle for fiber!
Nettles have a rich textile history. For thousands of years, people have looked beyond the sting of the nettle to create cordage, thread, and cloth. One of the best ways to understand nettles as a fiber plant is to work with it from harvest to finished textile—so that’s exactly what we’ll do. Along the way, we’ll discuss the characteristics that make nettle fiber unique and gain a deeper appreciation for the potential hidden in a plant that many people avoid.
In this workshop, we will explore how the common stinging nettle plant can be transformed. We’ll discuss how to identify nettles, when and how to harvest them for fiber, and how to process the stems to extract usable fiber. You will work with freshly harvested nettles to extract fiber and learn a simple technique for twisting the green fiber into cordage. We’ll build a small pin loom and weave a nettle textile, giving you experience with every stage of the process from plant to textile.
This workshop is ideal for anyone curious about wild fibers - no prior spinning or weaving experience is needed.
You’ll leave the workshop with:
Knowledge of nettle identification and harvesting
Experience extracting fiber from nettles
Your handmade nettle cordage
A simple pin loom you will make yourself
A small nettle textile
The skills and bravery needed to continue exploring stinging nettle fiber on your own!
Once you start to see the potential in a patch of nettles, it’s hard to look at it the same way again. What begins as a sting can become cloth through a transformation that reveals the potential of the plants growing around us.
From our guest teacher: “My hands lead the way- slow, deliberate, grounded. I weave with wool, leaf and bark in their natural forms, each piece carrying the marks of the land and the hands that made it.” - Ashli Tyre, textile artist living in Issaquah, WA.
Minimum age: 14 with accompanying paid adult
Class registration is NON-REFUNDABLE. However, if you want to sell or give your spot to a friend, I’m happy to welcome someone else in your place. Due to the nature of the projects (materials/soaking, etc) and the small class sizes, I’m unable to support refunds or credits.