I have a really hard time believing that the Textilforum will be so soon. After preparing for it since we conceived the idea last year in October, which feels like ages ago, it's a kind of weird feeling that it all actually happens. And I am really, really excited about it, packing, printing and preparing like a madwoman. I would like to take my entire stack of things, projects and literature, but alas - I will have to sort out a few things that are most important to me and take only those.

While I'm busy, you can go and look at two Youtube videos about spinning worsted style and woolen style, posted by Ruth MacGregor (who will also come to the Forum). She's showing how to spin woolens and worsteds, and I finally really understood the difference between them. Besides, when you can't do some actual calming, comforting spinning, these videos are almost as good for calm and comfort - thank you, Ruth!

(And watching this video made my fingers itch. Badly. Very, very badly. I think I need to sit down for some quiet wheel time one of these days...)

I think that the red digits of numbers 9, 10 and 11 are already burned into my retina from weighing and packing about 300 portions of wool. And making little paper documentation slips for packing with the spun threads is not as tedious as writing each by hand, but still... change spindle type. change date. save as. print as pdf (two pages). change spindle type. change date. and so on. repeat with changed session and wool. That's somehow... mind-numbing. (But I'm finished now, and only need to print out the .pdf files.

Add to this the fact that I have decided (half-last-minute) that it would be nifty to make a statistic of how all the whorls turned out, and that it would be good to have a more accurate weight for all the plastic bags with wool in them, and voilà! there I will sit weighing things again. Once I've made it into town and bought some appropriate scales, that is.

Otherwise, not much has happened - I'm still thinking and preparing for the Forum and the experiment, while inbetween trying to take care of the last things that have stacked up during my holidays. And as usual, things always take longer than they ought to - and I'm sorry for whining that much, right in front of your eyes, right on your screen...

Since yesterday afternoon, fourty plywood discs in two different sizes and thicknesses are peacefully lying on a heap together, completing my selection of experimental spindle whorls. Thank goodness for the invention of power tools and "circle cutters"! Though even with that multi-watt support, it took me a while of fiddling with the large plywood sheets, the cutting gadget (a very cheap tool and accordingly fiddly to use) and the drill in its stand before I found out how to best cut the discs. But in the end, the archaeologist prevailed!

Now all the hard bits of the preparation are finally finished, and the whorls have turned out not to be perfect, but at least very good, and absolutely sufficient for the experimental purposes. So whew! The power of trial runs and solid calculations (with a huge lot of help from André Verhecken) is proven again.

A lot of the wool is already portioned and packaged, and today I'll take care of the rest of packaging before finishing the plywood with a light sanding around the edges and then... glueing the spindle whorls and spindles together.

This is something I would never do under ordinary circumstances. Who would want a spindle that can't be equipped with a different whorl, after all? "Those folks" back in the middle ages certainly didn't need glue to keep their spindle whorls on the spindle, the double-conical form was enough.

But since I am using chopsticks as spindle sticks (totally non-medieval, just like the plywood and the modern glue for assembling these), and since the plywood needs some glue to keep on the stick, and because I just want to make sure that none of the whorls slips off during the experiment, glue it is.

After the spindles are assembled, there's not much left to do for the experiment - preparing the documentation, writing down my notes for the "prep talk" before we start and packing all the things needed for transport to Eindhoven, no more. And well that this is so, since the experiment will start on Tuesday morning next week.

I'm still weighing and packaging wool, preparing spindles and preparing "starter yarn" for the spinning experiment, so the living room is quite taken over by the huge box of unpacked wool and the boxes with wool in plastic bags. Thankfully, once the air is out of the bags and they are sealed, they are pretty slim and thus quite manageable. I think I've never weighed and portioned off so much wool in my entire life!

While thinking about experiment details yesterday, I have also found a solution to keep all the spinning procedures as much the same as possible - which means to slide off the spun yarn after the first hour and start a new batch with the second wool type, again with an empty spindle and using a starter thread. And fortunately, I have also found something to slide the spun wool on.

There's still things left to decide, though. Should the spinning be done with the two wools in the same order every day? Say, first the fine and then the coarser wool, or vice versa? Is it better to do spinning of one spindle on one day, or is it better to change spindles and spin with two different ones, a new one after the first hour? Maybe this changing would diminish a big "getting-used-to" effect (but then, I'd guess that getting used to a new spindle won't take longer than five to ten minutes). Still, changing spindles would give at least a bit of the need to get used to it back, especially since changing spindles in the experiment means a vastly different tool to work with. And it would give me enough time to slide each bunch of spun yarn off the spindle stick and onto its storage tube, weigh it and label it as necessary.

Details like these are what I find so very fascinating about archaeological experiments. Even if you take a very simple thing to find out about as the basis of the experiment, it will get down to details that might not seem much at first glance, but that might be making or breaking the whole thing.
Our experiment basic idea is quite, quite simple: Find out about the influences of the different factors in spinning with a hand spindle. There are only three main factors, the spinner, the fibre, and the spindle itself; but the latter already offers two influencing elements, its moment of inertia and its weight. The spinner's influence can only be estimated if all the other influences are well known, so we only need to find out about these. The approach to that is like in any laboratory work: If you want to find out what a specific value does, just change that value and nothing else. And that is exactly what we did in designing and calculating four whorls, starting with a "reference whorl" corresponding to an actual archaeological piece in both weight and moment of inertia. (This, by the way, was not easy - the calculating was, but trying to guesstimate the shrinkage of clay from wet to fired and developing a method to get whorls all alike each other did prove difficult.)

So now we have five whorls and two sorts of wool, fine and coarse - the only thing we need to do now is run the actual experiment, with up to twenty spinners each spinning ten hours altogether, one hour per fibre and spindle. And, of course, deciding which spindle goes into action when, and with which fibre, and in what order. And what to document, and when, and how (you can never document too much, but you can't write down something that you haven't thought about...). And how to label each test batch. And, and, and...

Which gets me back to the title of today's post: Experiments are Awesome! But they always seem to multiply their demands on time and brain cells. And they never end up as harmless as they seem at the beginning.

I'm back home from a wonderful, relaxing holiday time, and now I'm settling down to the last preparations for the Textile Forum.

The whorls have been fired in the meantime, and they are now safely sitting in a box on my table, waiting to get equipped with a spindle stick each. Using the special "whorl-cookie cutters", that were custom made to my calculated measurements, worked really well. The whorls came out very much alike, they fit the sticks very nicely with their holes, and so I'm quite confident about the whorl part. I snuck back to work yesterday already, spending some time to portion and package the small parcels of wool to give out at the experiment, making sure that everybody gets the same amount of wool to work with.

Now there's the obligatory stack of e-mails to go through - as usual after being away for some days - and the last bit of preparation to make. And very soon it will be time to start writing the lists for packing and gather together all the stuff!

It never ceases to amaze me how experiment preparation develops. Even the loosest schedule will tighten up towards the end because of unforeseen complications. And in addition to that, every experiment planned will always take more time, effort and money in preparation and actual execution than planned - I've never had one running differently.

As you can probably guess from this, I was occupied with preparations for the Spinning Experiment yesterday. I spent about four and a half hours making the special spindle whorls, all shaped as cylinders. The reference whorl - a flat disc-shape - was by far the easiest to make, once I had found out how to best do it, while the two other clay shapes - tall, rather slim cylinders - each took much longer. I ended up with the planned 20 whorls for each shape plus two extras for the tall ones, and a few more extras for the reference whorls that will go into my teaching/demonstrating stack if enough survive the experiment. Now the only thing I have to do is to keep my fingers crossed that all the whorls will dry and fire well and without accidents - and after they are finished, I can do the necessary weighing and measuring to fix measurements for the two types of whorl still left to do (but those will be plywood whorls). And then the spinning experiment can start!

I am inundated in chopsticks, and that is a Good Thing - because these cheap, all-alike, slim and slightly conical things will serve as the spindle sticks for the Spinning Experiment.

I have thought long and hard about what I could take for the experiment. One of the first ideas was to have twenty spindles and four different whorls each, and rotate the whorls during the spinning process. But then there is another variation in the process, one we can't measure or calculate: The order of spinning with different spindles in the test. What if it makes a difference whether someone starts the experiment spinning with spindle A and then B as opposed to spinning with spindle C and then A? And so on? So I arrived at the conclusion that the safest bet would be to give everybody the same spindle at the same time.

Which means making one hundred twenty spindle whorls (plus a few to spare in case of unforeseen desasters). And ideally, attaching all those whorls to a spindle stick so that they can't slip when you drop the spindle (something I do fairly often with an unknown, new and maybe awkwardly running spindle). Which means - as one possible solution - to glue a stick to each whorl. Which in turn means making one hundred twenty spindles glued together... with identical whorls and identical spindle sticks. There. Since our budget is not so big (read: nonexistent), cheap was not an option but a requirement. And slim, identical, slightly conical-at-the-top, round sticks for little money? You got it. Chopsticks.

That is why I am sitting here with a box, newly arrived, containing one hundred pairs of Taiwanese bamboo chopsticks. Next time, when we have won the lottery got a budget for a similar experiment, we might use proper sticks for another spinning experiment. For now, bamboo will do.