Survival Guide: Make YARDS of natural cordage in MINUTES

Holy shit. This was a masterclass in plant fibers and natural cordage. Color me impressed

I live in the U.K. and Nettles are abundant. Stems for cordage, leaves for tea and cooking = minimal waste.

You can use bast fiber from certain trees. Milkweed makes good cordage, but please don't harvest it until after the monarch butterflies are done with it; they eat it as caterpillars to make themselves poisonous to predators. Around September should do.

Traditional cordage often utilized the rhetting process, soaking cordage in icy cold winter waters. The process is actually a fermentation of sorts that allows microorganisms to eat away at the woody tissues surrounding the fibres/fibers.

You certainly have a knack for explaining things.

To speed up fibre collection, traditionally in some cultures a spiked brush tool was carried around with a twill. You don’t have to beat the material and even tall grass stalks work with this method since it creates a thin fibre material. The brush can be made from wood so long as you sharpen them and dowel into pockets in the head. The back of the head is used for cracking the fibre out through rubbing it back and forth. When using the brush part you grab your bundle of fibre and wack it and pull towards you repeatedly until it becomes closer to hair, then it should be just about ready to use and you can make the decision whether to make it finer material by using a fine comb version of your previous tool. Some material will get lost refining it further but it will start to look like actual hair at a certain point.

I’ve wondered where the heck ropes and cordage came from in survival applications for years, thanks so much for this!

Basket weaving is another primal skill that's well worth knowing....

Excellent post. As an OG, I call these skills "bushcraft" as "survival" has distracting connotations. All such skills teach confidence in nature and, when you least expect, survival.

You just answered a question I’ve had for 4 years now! I have some land that I only get to in the fall/winter months, and I always find a stalk that has fine fibers and makes amazing cordage. Never knew what the heck it was until now, it’s Dogbane. Thank you!

Okra stalks make EXCELLENT cordage. Cordage is definitely the first thing people should learn. Once you have cordage, you have a bow drill. MUCH easier than a hand drill.

Elm bark, hickory, juniper, thistle, ash bark, I've even used oak bark. Wild grapevine, elm roots, pine roots, and honeysuckle don't need processing to work either, there are others as well.

There's a variety of yucca, possibly Adam's Needle, that grows in Oregon that I am certain would do very well in southern Idaho. It is hardy to zone 4. If you're looking for plentiful material that grows wild, yucca is probably not the thing in northern areas since even though some varieties are very cold hardy they're mostly limited to curated landscapes. A similar landscaping plant, the New Zealand flax, also produces extremely strong, long fibers that make superior cordage. The flax processes down somewhat thicker than yucca and can be difficult to work with when dry. On an unrelated note, I have found that the inner bark of cedar makes an extremely soft twine that, once it has been thoroughly worked to remove fine splinters, is very comfortable against the skin. Another excellent skin-contact fiber source is day lily. The dead leaves, when collected early in the morning when they are still damp with dew, are easy to twine and produce, flat out, the most comfortable skin-contact twine I've ever encountered. On a very unrelated note, i never start with the "halfway" technique of starting my twine at the center of a bundle of fibers. I always start with two bundles so that I can double the loose, starting end back over and splice it in to make an integrated loop at the beginning end of a piece of cordage. Ima keep rolling with the unrelated. I also make narrow rope using three strands of twine. Keeping the position of each strand relative to the others is critical for making three strand rope by hand. The method is exactly the same as the reverse twist but instead of a pattern of A, B, A, B, A, B the pattern is A, B, C, A, B, C. I've also tried four strand, but the resulting rope is too loosely wound at that point. You can continue doing three strand twining with each finished rope, so three strands of twine become one thin rope, three thin ropes become one thick rope, three thick ropes become one cable, etc. It takes a BOATLOAD of fibers to make any rope of decent length. Three ten foot sections of twine make a three foot section of thin rope and three ten foot sections of thin rope make a three foot section of thick rope, so figure that for every nine hundred feet of twine you'll end up with about ten feet of thick rope. You'd better really need a thick rope to dedicate that much work and materials. Final unrelated. If you're clever, you can use twining techniques to make a knotless net. It seems hard at first but once you get the hang of it you can crank out a lot of net. Again though, it really uses up a lot of material, so you'd better actually need a net.

ive used this technique to make bowstring before (with standardised length artificial fibres) so its been great to learn how to chain together fibres!

Excellent video on making cordage. Thanks for sharing. I was down in Williamsburg Va at a Native American display and an elder showed me how to do this. He captivated my learning immediately. Then he used a flint and steel and char cloth to light his pipe and these skills increased my interests in the old ways of surviving

Such clear and effective instruction! Thank you! I love the clearly shot closeups of the finger work and splicing in new fibers.

Boiling the fibers with ashes will make a long lasting cordage. (Ray Mears tip)

Some kind of oily substance was always used, while making the cord, for elasticity and durability. An outer layer of wax or tar if available, can make it good for underwater usage as well.

I live in Indiana and use both dogbane and milkweed but since my wife died and i have been struck with severe spinal stenosis I'm concentrateing more on teaching others than doing as much myself. To me strong cordage is invaluable so i concentrate on the three plants you mentioned. Sometimes willow is the best material available in certain areas but even fibers from cattail leaves works well enough if your stuck in swampy areas. Dont forget mulberry. The young cambium layer is pretty good. Ive even used the tassles from ears of corn. Not great but it works and you dont see many people using it. Got to get it when its at the right point or its too weak. Too late it will just crumble.

We are really lucky here in New Zealand we have a few plants that give extremely strong fiber. Harakeke (Phormium tenax ) was a major export for extremely strong rope and Tī kōuka (Cordyline australis) which while a shorter leaf gives an extremely strong fiber and was the primary line for fishing. I have fished with it and landed fish of more than 12 pounds. Tī kōuka is found as an ornamental in the American upper mid west coast known there as Cornish palm. It was a food resource for my people in areas where other staples would not grow, it can be felled and the pulpy center can be eaten, it was called "millionaire's cabbage" in my childhood because it costs the life of the plant.