A man’s seven-year mission to make a dress out of stinging nettles foraged from near his home became a labour of love and healing as he grieved after his wife’s death.
Allan Brown, from Brighton, found solace in nature while walking the family dog Bonnie, and the exposure to the woodlands stirred his curiosity about what material made from nettles would be like.
The 54-year-old creative said: “I couldn’t find any examples of what it felt like. If I had been able to see some and hold some that would have been the end of the inquiry.
“Because I couldn’t, (I thought) the only way I’m going to feel nettle cloth is to make it myself.
“I didn’t know how to do it. I reckoned I could make a really amazing thread from that and turn it into a fabric.”
The father-of-four committed to the process of learning ancient crafts to spin the thread, weave the cloth and more – with “lots of fails” – before he completed the dress made out of 14,400ft of thread.
During the years of crafting, his father died in 2016 and his wife Alex had cancer diagnosed and died in 2018 but the project gave him a sense of moving forward.
Mr Brown said: “I found spinning such a therapeutic activity. I don’t meditate. I find it difficult to sit still but (spinning) took the edge off whatever levels of panic or grief I was feeling.
“I really felt I had been given a gift to hold myself together. When I was spinning, everything was all right.”
What began as one man’s challenge changed after Mr Brown asked an old friend, the filmmaker Dylan Howitt, to help him make a “how to” video for YouTube to share his nettle material findings with the textile community.
They expected a handful of people to appreciate the tutorial but soon found it being shared, with millions of hits.
As the project continued, Mr Howitt carried on filming the nettle dress come to fruition and decided to make it into a feature film which was released by Dartmouth Films in cinemas across Britain and Ireland yesterday (Friday 15 September).
Mr Howitt said: “It’s slow craft, it’s slow filming is how it’s rippled out.”
A Facebook group called Nettles for Textiles grew from the YouTube video success, bringing nearly 28,000 followers from around the world who in turn helped crowdfund the making of the documentary.
Mr Howitt said that the 68-minute documentary called The Nettle Dress was not part of the plan at the start of the experiment.
The BAFTA-nominated film-maker added: “That is almost part of the whole story of this. It’s just about following the process, following the thread, literally.”
