Make Your Own Cloth
You're kind of helpless if you have to ask someone else to make all your fabric, rope, and baskets, no?
We'll try to get you some better life skills.
Making Your Own Thread, Yarn, and Rope
If you have to rely on someone else to make rope, clothes, and baskets, you're pretty helpless, no?
Pretty much anything can become a spot of thread or rope. All that matters is that the fibers are about 10cm (4in) long, and pliable. A lot of plant matter can be shredded.
Flax (which makes linen) and nettles are actually kind of famous for a soft thread. If you walk up to a cannabis plant, grab a leaf, and pull down, it's kind of cruel to the plant, but will produce a ball of twine as-is. Coconut husks, palm fronds, and grasses can usually have some very decent fibers split off, and the dead lower leaves of irises, daffodils, tulips, and the like, while usually poisonous (soak in water to reduce this, but...) can usually be crocheted and woven as-is or split for some very good fibers.
There's a lot more plant sources. Meanwhile, every spring, most of the wildlife sheds its winter fur on the mountainsides, which can be gathered. It's not vegan, but it is vegetarian or freegan. Things which cannot make thread can sometimes still make baskets, including small branches and vines, and grass or leaves which have not been split for fibers are where grass skirts, grass mats, and the like come from.
There's a couple tricks to getting fibers out of things...
• Retting
To rett is an archaic term meaning "to rot." One method is stream retting; find a nice creek or stream, stick your gathered plant material there, and weigh it down with some rocks. When it has rotted, gather the fiber.
Field retting involves using the morning dew to remove the plant matter from the fiber by laying it in a field.
• Scutching
Scutching involves taking a flat wood knife - any flat slat will do - which is slightly blunt, and hacking at the plant. This can sometimes make the plant matter fall away while leaving the fibers free.
• Heckling
A heckle is a board or other base (or piece of cardboard) with many pins or small nails sticking up out of it. If you whip it with a plant, it may split the fibers.
...and a couple tricks to making things you don't split into fiber weavable.
• Soaking
Soaking plant matter in water for a day or two sometimes makes it more pliable.
• Boiling
Boiling and steaming can make plant matter more flexible, to the point that even stiff wood can be bent.
Of course, once you've got your fibers, you'll have to do something with them...
• Twisting
Grab a tuft of fibers, possibly combed, and literally twist them with your finger, or by rolling your palm against your thigh. When the tuft gets short, simply work more fibers in and continue.
• Plying
When you have a long skein of... probably, a thin yarn... fold it in half, and twist it the opposite direction of the twist of the fibers. This is called plying the thread. It makes it much stronger.
Crochet
Take a piece of string. Make a loop. Now pull a loop through it.
One of two things happened; either you pulled your loop apart, or you have a slip knot. You'll get it with practice.
If you reach through that loop, and pull another loop through it, you can pull it tight, and do this again and again until you have a chain of stiches called a sinnet. You can also push a loop through a stitch in the sinnet annd pull it through.
A small stick with a notch in it is called a crochet hook, but sometimes they're made out of metal.
Knitting
If you have a bunch of slip knots side by side on a string, you can put a stick through them.
Congrats, you're ready to start knitting.
Like crochet, you use another stick to pull a loop through the nearest loop. Unlike crochet, you then drop the first stitch off the first stick, transferring the whole thing back and forth between two sticks.
With a few more sticks, you can also practice something called knitting in the round.
Weaving
A loom is... two sticks.
If you tie a piece of cord from the first stick like you're hanging a scroll, and then tie a long second cord to the second stick and use it to hang the second stick from the first stick by weaving a figure-eight pattern, you now have a loom; these cords are the warp fibers.
You can now tie a bit of yarn to one of the outside warp fibers, and weave it over, and under, and over, and under. If you want to switch colors, tie it off and tie the new one in.
When you're finished, just cut the loops wrapped around the two sticks, tie the ends together, and fray the edges. Rugs, placemats, scarves, strips of cloth... it's all possible with a loom.
If you tie the two sticks to two other sticks, like a picture frame, it makes a frame loom. There are other ways.
Baskets can also be woven, knit, and crocheted. If one takes, for instance, a handful of stalks of grass, and lays them like an asterisk (*), one can take boiled grass and weave it over, and under, and over, and under, bending the central stalks up slightly to curve the basket as you wish.
Now you can make baskets and cloth from random things you pick up.
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