Thanks again for all you input on the headwear thread - and for the replies to the Spinning thread. I'll tackle the first two now.

fiofiorina said...
I use a hand distaff when spinning "Roman" and a long one for medieval displays. I still sling the thread under the whorl, as it made the difference between whorl falling to the ground and breaking and spindle falling to the ground and whorl surviving. For modern spinning I prefer working with the short Roman distaff than holding the wool in my hand. But that's me.  

I have had better experience with the whorl not breaking if it was not firmly attached to the spindle, since it can then slide off the spindle when it drops - the stick takes most of the impact, and the whorl survives. But if the spindle drops, there's always some danger of the whorl taking damage, whether firmly attached to the stick or able to slip loose. Key with spinning with a whorl only slid onto the stick is to make sure it really sits firmly enough so it does not just slip off and fall down from the stick during spinning. (Though mine have done so frequently, too, and they did survive.)

Lady Lamb said...

I learn to spin for myself with the help of some books and YouTube. I don't need to pass the thread under the whorl, and in case it helps you can make a small opening at the tip of the spindle. At events I try to use a distaff but this is my problem. I'm not used to it. I try to support it on my belt so it won't fall and my left hand it's free to grab the fibers, but sometimes I find that difficult. Another problem is that with a distaff I have some tendency to break the fibers. I don't know if you can give me some tip, or maybe I just need to get used to the distaff.

You have several different possibilities to use a distaff - hand-held if you use a short stick, tucked into the belt if you have a long one, or tucked under your arm. Have you tried to place the distaff in your armpit? If you let your arm hang down, it should fix the distaff firmly in place.
If all this does not work, or if you feel too distracted by learning how to hold the distaff and learning how to draft with the new arrangement, you could also fix it to something else and stand or sit beside or in front of it until you are used to the new method.
If you have a tendency to break the fibres, maybe you are drafting too slowly with the new arrangement?

First of all, thanks to everybody who commented with links or hints to medieval headwear on yesterday's post. I will go hunt all those things down and have a good look at them. And if anybody thinks of any more, please comment to yesterday's bleg - it really is helping me!

And today's post... is going to be something similar-but-different. I am preparing a workshop on historical wool preparation and historical spinning, and I'm very, very much looking forward to it. However, I have been mucking around with this and that and fibres and spindles for a good long while now, and my spinning skill was never acquired in the traditional teacher-to-student manner. Thus, I have learned many things differently. And I do not have good insights into what makes a switch to historical spinning difficult for somebody who has learned hand-spindle spinning the modern way. (If you need to brush up on the difference, the two most important bits in my opinion are that historical spinning uses a distaff for holding the fibres, and there's no slinging the thread around under the whorl before fixing it at the top. There's more, but those are two very common differences.)

Hence, I will make you an offer. Are you spinning with a hand-spindle? Have you tried spinning historically? Whether you are spinning historical or modern, I would like to hear about what problems or questions you have. Is there something you just can't get to work? Or something you wanted to try but cannot figure out?

I will try to answer your questions here in the blog - and use the material for my teaching. This way, everybody wins: I get to know common problems, and you will get an answer. And I will try my best to make it a helpful one!

I had a wonderful weekend, spent with friends doing nice and weekendy things like playing boardgames (among them a few hilariously bad ones), chatting, eating cake and planning future craft projects (theirs, not mine).

But before that, on Friday evening, I finished off the workweek with some... work. Hot, interesting, adrenaline-flush-making work. I dragged our firebowl and wood and stuff out in the garden, and I started layering in wood and the now bone-dry clay whorls I made. Which makes that procedure some weird cross-over between kilnless firing and pitfiring.



As expected (because you always have them in a kilnless firing procedure), there were losses.


Most of what you see in that box, though, are not whorls, but the remainder of two of the three medieval type piggy banks that I put in as well, even though I knew there was a very, very high probability they would not survive it. (Because their time for drying... let's just say it was not generous. At all. And my mum taught me better.) But I still wanted to know, and I don't know when I'll be doing this again, so...

Losses on the pieces that had dried out properly were not so high. And most of the whorls came out whole and nice and black:


I have a thing for reducing-athmosphere fired pottery. I mean I like pottery colours, especially white and off-white, but I just dig the black stuff. I now have one (non-functional) very very crudely made piggy-bank that has no piggy shape and 57 spindlewhorls to re-stock the online store with. Not all of the thicker whorls are perfectly round, so I might have to test a few and maybe take them out, but overall they do look good. And my fancily decorated disc whorl even survived as well:


That, my friends, was a really nice Friday evening.

A while ago, I wrote a teaser post about a plying technique that I wanted to write about - and then I almost forgot I promised you a follow-up post.

While most of the ladies on medieval images have a long distaff that clearly holds fibres, like this:

Psalter of Fecamp. Ca. 1180. From Petzold, Andreas. Romanische Kunst, art in context. Köln: Dumont, 1995, p. 97.

and some fewer ones have a short distaff that also clearly holds fibres, like this:

Detail from Giotto: Annunciation to St. Anna. Scrovegni-Chapel, Padua. 1300-1320. From Flores d'Arcais, Francesca. Giotto. New York: Abbeville, 1995, p. 150.

something about this picture has always sort of tickled the back of my brain.

Young woman, Pseudo-Apuleius, 13th century. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 93. From Kotzur, Hans-Jürgen. Hildegard von Bingen 1098-1179. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998, p. 336.

It's not the usual what she's holding; it's clearly a shorter distaff than usual, and the form of the stuff on the distaff is very clearly defined, very spindle-shaped and not fibery-looking at all.

Let's jump to another topic: the problem of plying. I don't know how well you manage to spin the same amount of length on two spindles or spools - I don't manage so very well; there's always some of the yarn left on one side when the other side has already run out. There's a theoretically very easy way to avoid this, though: To fold the yarn spun in half (from one single spindle, spool, or cop) and ply it with itself. When there isn't a foulup, you end up with a neat two-ply with no singles left.

There are different instructions on the 'Net on how to ply from a center-pull ball, and there's also the Andean Plying Bracelet which both are means to achieve the desired end-result: a skein of single folded in half and plied up. Both involve re-winding the spun yarn from the bobbin of a spinning wheel (where it's an absolute necessity) or from a spindle.

Me, I'm lazy. I like to be lazy. I promote winding spindles in a special way so that I can, after spinning, just slide that cop of yarn off the spindle onto a slim bit or stick of wood or so for storage. (Chopsticks, by the way, work fine.) And the way that I wind my yarn results in a stable, spindle-shaped cop of yarn that is essentially something not too unlike a center-pull ball. So I tested plying directly from the  cop (transferred to a slim stick) onto the spindle... and it works, and very very well too.

There's me doing it...

... and a close-up with a slightly different hand position that occurs quite frequently during the process.


So... here's a method that is efficient, easy to use, will result in no waste of yarn singles, and does not require extra tools (you can use a spindle stick to ply from). And I'm hooked on this new technique.

There's this half-joking rule for IT guys and programmers that goes:

If you have a job to do and need to find out how long it will take, do the following.
Estimate the length of time you will need to do the job. Now take that number and increase it to the next number of magnitude - minutes into hours, hours into days, days into weeks and so on.
Now you add three. That's how long it will take.

Maybe I should start to use this rule as a hard-and-steady rule for my work stuff - like getting the webpage overhauled (well, yes, that did go on hiatus for quite a while), the online shop running (I didn't realise how much Holy Saint Bureaucracius would need to be revered) or the Spinning Experiment all wrapped up.

Ah, the Spinning Experiment. Yes, the results have been found and the paper is in the processing; but I have one thing left to do with the data, and that is cleaning it up a little, translating some of the extra info into English and then packing it up nicely for everyone to download from the Forum webpage. And for that, I need to sort through the yarn cop photos.

I took at least three photos from each sample, and I will just upload one, the best one regarding light and contrast. So I need to pick out those that should be uploaded, resize them a bit and then pack them into a .zip file. And that's still left to do. Sometimes I'm really, really amazed at how much time that Experiment gobbled up... though I'd do it again, it has been totally worth it.

And sometime soon, you will get a note on this blog that the data is up...

Somehow, the time this year flies like crazy - I just realised that it is almost Ascension Day. There was a bunch of things that I had planned to finish before the long weekend that this induces... but I will probably not manage all of them.

That greenish blackboard is looking a bit less green and more black today, thanks to a bunch of things to do finished since Friday (and thus vanished from the board). On the list for today is packing a bunch of files and sending them off: the article about the spinning experiment results is finished, and I'll give it a last once-over before getting it to its destination.

Associated with this, I am planning to put all the experiment data online so that everybody interested can download the results and do additional research, develop theories, or - in case of the spinners  - see how their spinning looks on a survey card. I have to go over the database for this and make sure that everything is in there that should be in and that nothing is in there that shouldn't, and that will probably need another few days. You will hear about it on this blog, of course.

Spinning experiment work, here I come again!

I'm being very lazy today, and I'll just point you to a very interesting article over on the Abby's Yarns blog about the debate whether the hand spindle or the spinning wheel is the better tool for spinning.

Abby comes from the Andes, and she learned how to use a low-whorl hand spindle for production spinning. Do read her article - it's  a really, really good one.