Moving from cht, because of the lace content
On Dec 18, 2004, at 19:37, Joy Beeson wrote:
At 06:14 PM 12/17/04 -0800, Weronika Patena wrote:
I remember one with swans... And the girl had to make the shirts out of nettles
at night at a graveyard.
I don't remember the night or the graveyard bit from the version I read, but
I think it did say that spinning the nettles made the girl's fingers bleed.
Later on, I learned that nettles don't have thorns like cactus, they sting.
And long after that, I learned that nettles used to be retted like flax to
make a much finer fiber, that was still used for very special projects long
after flax came in.
Stinging nettle was quite often used as lacemaking thread (BL) in Bohemia (now The Czech Republic). I didn't know that - in Poland, we ate young nettles, but didn't use them otherwise (unless you count childish pranks of pushing one another into a patch of them <g>) - until Lenka Suchanek needed to translate the word into English. The Czech word is similiar enough to Polish so, especially with an explanation of what she meant, I was able to do it.
My "crowning glory day" came this summer, on a day trip from Prague to some lace museums. One of them had nettle lace samples on display. They were a different colour that all the linen ones, even the unbleached linen (more toward grey than beige), so people asked about them. The curator didn't speak English, the guide (who did) didn't know the word. I was curious myself, so started deciphering the labels (a slow job; Polish and Czech may come from the same root, but it was a long time ago... Even Slovak, which is a bit closer to Polish, isn't always all that clear). And there it was; the same word Lenka had asked about! :) So, "it's stinging nettle!" I blurted out. "Nettle" might have been an unknown word to our guide, but, "stinging" she recognized, and accepted the validity of my translation. I must have got at least 5 minutes of respect from the rest of the tour (and a fishy-eye from both the curator and the guide) <g>
Today I have two yards of nettle cloth hanging in my closet -- not the
European nettle of the tale, but a giant nettle called ramie, which comes
from some tropical island. I also have a ramie attache case, which looks
rather like cordura.
I wonder how giant is the giant nettle... Some of the patches my cousins pushed me into grew well above my 6-7-8yr old head. And, seeing them as an adult, I'd judge them to be about 3' on average, with some plants reaching more than 4 feet in height. That's about as tall as the flax plants.
Sometimes I wonder what made people think that the stinging nettle could be turned to thread... Was it when they harvested - for eating - plants that were too old and had grown grown "stringy"?
--- Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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