Nettle hammering uses the same concept as flowering hammering. The main difference is Nettles are used, not flowers. I chose to use nettles as the project im working on is inspired by the story the Wild Swans where the protaganist Elise knits jumpers out of nettles to save her brothers and turn them from swans back to princes. I used this in a less literal sense and instead of knitting using nettle, I dyed the fabric of her dress green using natural dye drawn from nettles (and Spirulina), which you can read about in m natural dye blog post.
I have chosen to hammer the nettles on top of the dyed fabric as well, and then hopefully when I get time I will embroider into them. So to find out how I did it scroll down!
Before hamemring or dyeing fabric its helpful to mordant the fabric - which basically means the dye will stick better to the fibres. You can do it without mordanting but it may mean the colour isn't as strong or it's patchy. I mordanted this fabric using a process involving soya milk, which I did before dyeing it so to read more about that process see the blog post about natural dye where I go into more detail.
So I took scraps of my natural dyed fabric to use for experimenting with nettle hammering.
To start I picked some decent sized nettle leaves (using gloves!!!) then I placed them onto the fabric and put another layer of fabric on top. This is important as it takes the leftover juice from the plants and also is great as it makes a pattern on both sides of the fabric.
Then I started to hammer. As it has been a while since I last did any flower hammering I tried with a soft rubber hammer an a heavy rounded metal hammer. What worked best was very light hammering with the metal hammer all over the leaf. You can see in the picture above where i missed sections and also the stem of the leaf has too much juice and completly blurred.
After hammering you can peel back the leaf and take a look at your new pattern! It is very simple as long as you take your time and don't rush or hammer too hard, it's all about practice.