Bushcraft Shelters: Weaving a Grass Bed

Description

In this video we take grass like plant fibers and weave them into a primitive camp bed for use with a natural shelter. This can provide us with warmth and comfort when practicing Bushcraft or Survival Skills.

This is a very simple method of weaving and with enough fibers it will comfortably support your body weight keeping you off the damp ground.

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Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft here and welcome to another video we're well within winter here in the British Isles and in the south we get a lot of this rain but this morning when it was just overcast not see wet I went out and gathered quite a lot of dead plant material and this particular plant here is called cleavers and cleavers is also known as goose grass or sticky Willy it's edible and does have some medicinal properties to it as well but this farm aveer it dies back and it leaves the dead plant fibers all hanging in the hedges on the woodlands edge in an open exposed areas where there's sunlight and it's very useful because even if it has been raining the wind blows through it and drives it out so it's generally ready to use fairly quickly even after heavy showers and really what we're going to be exploring in this video is making insulated mats they can also be used as thatching for shelters you can make walls that you can hang you can make even thinner mats you can even make a raised camp bed or a hammock out this stuff and we're just going to have a look and explore over this video on how you do that what I've made in front of me here is a frame and you could call this a basic weaving loom it isn't really there are other methods of weaving that we'll have a look at that requires the construction of a loom and they're very flexible and they mean you can work with materials that aren't subject to manipulation like straight twigs or even the unbelief aerial the rosebay family which have very straight hollow stems but this method here is quite good if you don't have a lot of cordage on your any cordage at all and you can't find natural cordage and you want to make something that's very thick and intuitive like a match for example I've tied the ends with the cordage that we've actually collected would be cleavers then it's pretty strong and you can see the em bits are quite thin it it really matter what they're like so these two poles here are quite fixed and when we finish with this these two end pieces will be slid out and we'll be left with the two poles and the mat woven into them and what it will mean is if we have a big log either end we could sit these poles on them a little bit like what we looked at in a previous video where you made a raised bed off the ground just with wood but this one will be actually be made with plant fibres and it will be a little bit like a raised camp bed get you off the ground I've moved most of the material on the ground here the reason being is it has to be available to me even more so if I'm working with grasses its cleavers it's very forgiving and when you twist it up like that it rarely comes undone which is nice and it's quite long too as you can see but if we had grasses they have a tendency to want to unravel on you certain types of grasses here anyway so you want to have all that material available tea so you can ban down take some more and start raveling it up but don't worry about the rain it is where obviously you don't put it in a puddle but just being on the damp ground for a couple of hours isn't going to do it any harm our first bit usually about this thick here so we just twist this very slightly bring it round like that twist it and we have this bunch on the end here what we can do is just bring in more cleavers weave it all in and twist that as well once we twist it all that up we just weave in more you want to make sure it's weaving quite nicely you can always unravel that a bit just tuck it in and twist again but you can see how the cleavers gives you a massive advantage in the length that it grows so you have a lot of materials to play with bring it back round again like that keep twisting going going in the same direction

you're coming to the end now and we don't finish this off by tying it off anywhere or wrapping it round we carry on twisting like this make sure it's nice and strong and then we bring this rain pole like that carry on twisting and we start bringing this through the cords so let's go under this one like that and we'll go over that one and under this one this will add a lot of strength so I'll set up you can tuck these up as well

and make them tight or you can keep the past it's more like and net it really is up to you and will affect the warmth of the setup

p.m. just on my last strand here to finish these off I usually just wrap this around so we'll just do the last one and then we'll come under there and just literally put that through that and that'll be fine I'll stay like that okay looking good so one way the bed can be used is I've just dropped some logs up here like a thermal wall on the side put some tags in it's very crude but it's just demonstration mainly to get the bed off the ground just to show you and you can use it a little bit like a race camper it's pretty sturdy there are some areas that I probably should have twisted a bit tighter but you can see it sort of has me off the ground quite nicely it's very very comfortable very comfortable really conforms to the back of your body and far better than the ground or sleep map so the materials you used to build one of these and what you use it for is really down to your imagination it's a very versatile thing and it doesn't just have one intention it's not just designed to be a raised back it can be used for many many different things and depending on what you're building it really is up to you and the materials you have available to you but I generally use these as raised beds I've actually found them very very comfortable to sleep on warmer and far more comfortable than my hammock they just take a long time to make comparison comparison to putting up a hammock and like all natural things it just depends how long you intend to spend out summer or what you're practicing whether you're just going out to practice primitive living skills and you're taking very little gear with you and you want to utilize what you can find but it's the gathering of the materials that takes the longest with this method so I hope you found it useful you can obviously just lie on this on the ground as well my advice would be to make it thicker but these are very very suitable just with a sleeping bag inside a busy bag as well if it's very done and you know you'll be very comfortable you can even use them with wool blankets if you want to I just make sure some of the wool was underneath these obviously wrath of the wind can bite you a little bit if it's quite breezy underneath but they're really comfortable so I hope you found this video useful stay tuned for more videos will be doing more types of weaving and shelter construction in future videos and thanks again for watching

take care