The first one: You can skip drying plants entirely. Take the retted plants and beat them into fibre, possibly slightly wet ones.
The second one: If you're not a fan of waiting for wild nettle to ripen before harvesting, you will end up with at least three separate groups of retted nettles.
Young nettle fibres won't mix with threshed nettle fibres, which won't mix with whole ripe nettle fibres.For some reason, I have
four different groups of nettles. It's a little bit enraging when you can get at least two more bundles out of the plants, but you can't because they're in bunches of 10/10/10/10 and you need 15 in a bunch.