A sting in the tale: weaving with nettles helped turn grief into joy

Recovering from the loss of his wife, Allan Brown turned his hand to an ancient craft

In 2016 textile artist Allan Brown, 54, a baker at the time, finally gave in to his four children’s demands for a dog and got Bonnie, a golden labrador-cocker spaniel cross. Already exploring ways to live sustainably for a low-carbon future, Allan decided to use their country walks near his home in Brighton to forage and learn about medicinal plants and those that could be used for making cloth. He knew the names of loads of plants, but the most ubiquitous was the stinging nettle, that hated outlier that grows amidst rubble and gravestones, stinks when boiled, and had stung him very badly when he fell into a clump of them as a child.

There was something about the nettle’s “fuck-you attitude” and its resilience and stubborn ubiquity that spoke to Allan’s interest in public land for common usage. “I thought, ‘I wonder if nettles have ever been used to make clothing, and if they have been, how was it done? I just had to set about trying to do it myself,”’ he recounts in The Nettle Dress, a mesmerising documentary directed by his friend Dylan Howitt about Allan’s life with nettles and the devotional dress he made in honour of his late wife, Alex, a keen sewer and maker.