Many people have known of the warming and healing properties of Nettle for thousands of years. There have been a number of legends told over generations about Nettles strength and its ability to protect from the evil eye. These legends have been passed down orally from family to family, with many of them starting as children’s fairy tales.
What is made from the thread
Carpets were woven from it, ropes were twisted and fishing nets were made. From thin and long fibres, fabric for clothes and bed linen were prepared and blankets were sewn. Nettle is known for its unsurpassed power to influence health: to this day, nettle yarn socks save from rheumatism, belts save from sciatica and headbands from migraines. Nettle threads improve blood circulation, normalise blood pressure, enhance visual acuity and relieve pain of any origin due to the ability to harmonise human energies.
Studies were carried out by professors of medicine, and they said that dressings made from nettle yarn would have a bactericidal and hemostatic effect. That is, wounds treated with such materials will heal faster than when using bandages made from traditional fabrics.
Collecting Nettle
It would seem that everything is so simple – a weed that grows on every hillock in huge volumes is easy to take and use for good. Many businessmen wanted to put the production of nettle fibres in their factories. But the nettle turned out to be both magical and inaccessible: it lends itself only to thoughtful and monotonous manual labor. Even a young child can get a nettle thread, the main thing is perseverance and love for this thread. Not everyone manages in the same way.
It is indeed a painfully long and laborious process. Nettles are collected in summer and autumn when they have grown to their prime. The plants are collected, dried and then soaked for a long time. Then they are dried again to get the material from which the spinning fibres are extracted. If you collect nettles in winter or in the first half of spring, you will get a ready-made material: biting rains, dews, frost and fogs have already taken care of it, but then you have to get it out from under the snowdrifts.
Processing Nettle
To get yarn, the plant is first crushed up in special mills. The quality of the yarn depends on how conscientiously the stems are mashed. “If you don’t blast with a pulp, you won’t take it with a spinning wheel,” a peasant proverb warned. It is a process to remove the wooden parts of the stem from the crushed plant. The plant is ruffled with a special rattle that is similar to a large wooden knife. The material is then scraped, first with large maple combs and then with small combs and brushes. After some time and labor, long and clean fibres are obtained which can be used to make threads. This process takes more than one day.
And so it turns out that the nettle thread is a piece of work and very time-consuming. While in the age of high technology there is no other way to do it other than with careful intentions. This makes it a difficult resource to obtain. Therefore, the price of one nettle shirt is incredibly expensive. But maybe it is for this reason that the strength in the nettle thread is so high, so much so that even one thread on the wrist is enough to feel it.
