In preparation for the spinning experiment on the Textilforum, I need to figure out how much fibres to calculate for each participant. And to get a first impression, I spun with the carded and combed wool I have at hand - one hour in my normal thickness, and another hour as thick as I could manage.

Now I'm one of those people who have a very limited range of thickness when spinning. And (unfortunately for this purpose) it is rather on the fine side. So I ended up with two very different-sized balls of yarn; I wound them off today and weighed them with my letter scales.

The "Thick Yarn" weighs in at about 8 g for one hour's spinning time. It is pretty uneven, in spite of my trying oh-so-hard to spin a decently smooth and even yarn. Thick stuff is just not for me. Here you see the sorry results of my thick-spinning:



Beside the huge (haha), bulky and uneven ball of thick yarn, you can see what I spun as my normal thin yarn. The weight? Somewhere between one and two grammes. Both yarns spun with the same wool on the same spindle (which was about double the weight of the reference whorl for the experiment, and fitted with a rather heavy wooden spindle stick). When wound onto a ruler, the thick wool gives about 20 threads per inch, the thin one about 12 threads per quarter-inch.

So now I've outed myself as a thin-spinning freak, can any spinners of thick yarn out there give me a rough estimate of how much fiber in grammes they hand-spindle away in one hour? Just to check against my calculations? I'd be very grateful...

The official Call for Papers for the Textilforum is now out, and a copy is up at our website.

Whether you are researching a textile project involving the craft aspects, working in textile restauration or a professional dyer, tablet weaver or spinner using historical textile techniques, go over there and send us some info about you, your work and a proposal for a paper or presentation. We also need a few more people to take part in the Spinning Experiment, so if you are a seasoned hand spindle spinner, you can use the form to tell us, too. The experiment time (spinning time of 10 hours) will be spaced over five days, so a bit more than two hours each morning will be spinning experiment time, and time for your own disposal after that.

And if you know somebody who might be interested, please pass on the information!

I'm still not finished with preparations for the Experiment test run. I have forgotten to ask the lady running the pottery workshop how much the clay will shrink upon drying and firing, so I'll have to make a wild guess at somewhere between 3 and 10 per cent. Then I have some serious doubts about whether some of the spindle whorls will be workable, since trying to reduce weight while keeping the same Moment of Inertia leads to a thin disc of a whorl... made from ceramic. Used for real-life spinning... where a thread can break. And so can the whorl (unless it breaks when firing first).

Ah, science is fun. I can't wait to break the first few whorls on my next day of fumble-spinning. And should those thin and fragile discs really work... I'll make a bunch more for the experiments. And maybe we can substitute the clay for the big-but-thin whorls with some material with the same density of the fired clay - preferably material that is not as fragile as a 3 mm thin disc of ceramic.

After some very hectic and rather stressful weeks, I feel like things are slowly getting under control again. I have managed to meet all the deadlines even with new and unexpected extra deadlines dropping in, so the struggle to get everything done in time was really worth it. Even my little folder/brochure got finished, printed and delivered in time and doesn't look all bad - two of the pictures turned out a little more "technicolor" than I had intended, but I'd say it is still okay. The two important pics and the text have both turned out fine. I'll never, ever work with Quark Xpress, though - I thought I'd do myself a favour and work with a proper layout programme. It did not turn out well. In the end, it was faster making the layout anew in good old CorelDraw, even if that means not as good control over text layout.

Unfortunately, there is no time to lay back and relax - yet. I hope I can get a good writing flash in this week, and I have to finish preparing yet another presentation. And finally write all the emails I didn't get around to write yet.

The weekend will be spent doing things with clay, mostly in service of the Spinning Experiment that will run during the Textilforum, since I need to have a test run first making and then spinning with the whorls we will use for the experiment. Hopefully there will be enough time to do some other ceramic stuff for my own amusement - and maybe a cooking pot or two will come out of the weekend.

Over the holidays, I have finally found the time to pick up my hand spindle and do some spinning.

I like to spin, I just never get around to doing it - there are so many other textile things that beg for my attention or that lie around half-finished. And so my spinning implements lie dormant most of the time. Since there was not much space at the lodgings where we spent the days around New Year, and since I was not up to complicated work anyway, I sat down and spun on the hand spindle. The output of the two hours timed spinning - normal thin thread and thicker thread, for one hour each - is still on the spindle stick, waiting for evaluation. It will be useful for preparation of the spinning experiment, one part of the Textilforum that I am very excited about: An experiment to find out more about the influence of the spindle and the spinner on the thread produced. If that has piqued your curiosity, you find the whole outline for the experiment on the forum pages, here.

The date for the Textilforum is not yet fixed (and thus not up on the website) - we are working on it, though, and hope to have it nailed down and ready for publication by the end of the week. Unfortunately, it is not too easy to find five days where we can have most of a museum and not get a date cross-over with one of the other textile or experimental archaeology events taking place in autumn - so if you have some fingers unoccupied, please keep them crossed for us!