Calculations for the fabric that I'm currently spinning for are finished, and, well, what shall I say? Those bronze age fabrics are... big. BIG.

Which, consequently, means that even though they only have a few threads per centimetre (around 4, overall), they do add up. Which means there's a lot more spinning to do until I'm finished. Overall yarn requirement for the piece of fabric needed to make the Trindhoj find man's garments, consisting of some kind of wraparound tunic and a half-oval cloak, is about... 5700 metres. Plus a bit of wiggle room.

Even spinning quite quickly, and winding into hanks quickly, and wet-finishing several skeins at once (which is taking a lot less time than doing them one by one), that eats up a hunk of hours. So if you're looking for me, I'll be at my spinning place... making yarn. In very nice cat company.

Have you measured your production spinning speeds? If so, I'd love to hear about how much you spin in an hour.

If you haven't done it yet, but are curious - my recommendation is to use a stopwatch, and spin over several hours before measuring. Doing just half an hour or one hour can result in quite different speeds than production over more hours. (Don't ask me how I know...) Note down how long you were spinning for the sessions if your stopwatch tends to eat the current time (I have one that will turn itself off after a while, and then the numbers are gone.) For measuring, find out the circumference of your skeiner and count the rotations.

Then do the metres spun by hours division, and voilà, you have your production speed number for this yarn type and thickness with this tool and this type of fibre... which might be quite different from a different yarn. Which, I find, makes spinning an even more interesting thing!

After doing a bit of spinning in teaching context, properly medieval with distaff and hand-spindle, I'm back to spinning with the slightly more modern method...

First task of the morning was using up the remaining small bit of weft thread for the corded skirt that I had on the spool, and afterwards spinning the last bit of yarn that will be necessary to finish weaving. That, as always, was done by guesstimating how much yarn I'd need and how long it would take me to spin according to my more-or-less known spinning speed for that kind of yarn, and then spinning the guesstimated time.

And afterwards, there was more spinning straight on - for the warp threads for the first of the woven items. Our test weave turned out with a bit too many warp threads per 10 cm, so I'm aiming to spin just a little bit thicker this time around... and hope fervently that it will be the right amount of extra thickness.

Spinning for a reconstruction is always a little bit nerve-wracking for me. There's lots and lots of yarn to be spun, and there's always a little bit of danger to slowly, gradually, unnoticedly (that should totally be a word) segue from the yarn that has the intended thickness, amount of twist, and regularity into a yarn that is just a little off, and then maybe even more off. That's why I do rather frequent stops to check if I'm still in the range, and typically have a "comparison yarn" put up and nicely visible at my spinning workplace.

Apart from that, spinning is a very pleasant job, and I thoroughly enjoy it. Which is a good thing, because for making fabric for garments, a lot of spinning is necessary!

I've made more progress on the corded skirt, even though it's not very visible. That is mostly because most of the time spent on this project today went into spinning more yarn for the cords...



but there was a bit of weaving, too. I'm now at about 42 cm (the Answer!) of 155 for the corded part. I'm also making "progress" on my podcast backlog list, because both spinning and weaving are a very good opportunity to listen to all these stories and discussions that I have in my subscription list.

It is a lot of fun to weave, and cord, this skirt, but it is taking its sweet time. Also, after a while of sitting on the floor in the weaving or cording position, I really need to remember to take a break to stretch and move a bit. Otherwise I'm feeling it when I finally do get up... it's a slightly weird working position in both cases, and it does take its toll on the hips after a while.

It also does take a good bit of concentration to get everything done as it should be - so I am looking forward to the extended weekend a lot now. We have a bank holiday on Monday here in Germany, so I'll be back on the blog on Tuesday.

Those fancy cords with the wool-wrapped rings at the bottom are not only finishing the bottom of the corded skirt from Egtved, they are the fancy finishing touch for belts as well - for several different belt finds, in fact.

Which means they also adorn the ends of the belt found in the Egtved grave... and I've finished weaving the reproduction of that, and now I'm at the cord-making stage:



The lighter grey thread is the weft thread, visible at the edge of the band; then there's single threads (that is the rest of the warp) and the thicker plies on the upper edge are the extra threads inserted to make the fringe full enough - because the paltry 20 warp threads are not enough by far for a proper, nice, bell-shaped fringe or tassel or however you might call it.

Making these was an enormous amount of fun. It was, however, also a series of movements I'm not quite so accustomed to, so in spite of it being a lot of fun, I had to stop before the thing was all done, because my wrists and fingers started to protest the repetitive twisting movements. Tomorrow, though, will see the thing done and completed!

This smaller amount of shorter cords has also confirmed my suspicions about how the yarn for the corded skirt should be spun and dimensioned in order to make cording as easy as possible, and that is quite, quite hard spun!

Sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I got so caught up in textile work that about everything else on my "to do daily" list slipped past me, including (obviously) doing a blog post. It was a very successful day otherwise, though. I have progressed from the "pure testing" stage into the stage where testing segues into actual work; so yesterday, I made two warps.

The current museum project is the reproduction of Bronze Age garments for a museum, to be used in hands-on sessions for visitors. I've posted about the wool problem before (there's no sheep left with the appropriate mix of fibres), so I'm using compromise wools. The rest of the project, though, I'm of course aiming to get as close to the originals as possible, so the people handling the items will get the best experience, and impression, possible.

This means spinning to the same thickness and twist angle as the originals - which is not quite as easy as it sounds, because, well, there's aiming to do something just so and managing to do it just so, and those two don't necessarily coincide. Also, if a yarn looks right when your are spinning it does not always mean it will look right once it's been soaked and stretched and dried again, or when it has been made into a warp. Things can happen on the way... and then you will have to adjust.

Trying to get as close as possible also means weaving, or plying, or twisting tests. There's been one test warp for the Egtved belt a while ago, where I found out that my yarns were a bit too thin; now there's a second warp strung up in the living room, and this time, it looks much better.



I'm working with 1:1 scale printouts of the finds to check if what I'm doing is the right size, and shape, and density. The feeling when you hold your piece next to the print, and it matches? That's so, so satisfactory.

This is the first of the warps I set up, the one of the belt; the other one is for the corded skirt, and that setup was, so far, also successful. The skirt band consists of several sections, the first of them without the extra selvedge cord for the corded part, and with a plied weft, just plain woven - and I have already finished that part. It looks very unspectacular:



You can already see the thick selvedge cord anchored in the weave, and coming out on the right side. Next section will be the part with the cords!

 

Let's get back to some more textile-related things, shall we?

Test spinning has finished, and now... more testing is about to happen: I'll set up the warp for an Egtved corded skirt, and I'm all excited about that!

Before I get to warping, though, you're getting a shot of the test yarns, all nicely set up in a row:



I did some labeling, and weighing, and measuring, of course. Just like I expected, even though I tried to spin all of them about the same thickness and the same amount of twist, there are considerable differences between the individual fibres. The Nm, for instance, varies between 0.8 and 1.9.

If you're not familiar with Nm, that is a gauge measurement for yarn thicknesses, and it tells you how many metres per gram a yarn has. So Nm 1 would be a single yarn with one metre per gram; Nm 5 would be a single with 5 metres per gram. If you have two numbers, like in Nm 10/2, the second one gives the amount of yarns in the ply, and the first the overall count - so the Nm 10/2 would be a two-ply yarn with ten metres per gram, made up from two singles. (In most yarns, you can assume that the single yarns in the plied yarn will be similar, so that would mean they both are an Nm 10, and the plied yarn thus ends up being Nm 5.)

In my test spins, the Gotland yarn has the lowest Nm, with 0.8; it's also the fibre that is densest when I portion tops for sale, and thus makes the smallest 100-g ball. The others were more or less similar, ranging from Nm 1,3 to 1,9 - with the irregularities of hand-spinning, and the squish factor when skeining (the tension, and half a round more or less), and the relatively small sample size, that, to me, does not look like such a significant difference than between Gotland and the others. More spinning will come, though, and maybe then something more reliable will show up.

First, though... off to warp!

(edit to fix typo!)

Today was mostly spent spinning - I'm doing test yarns for a fabric reproduction project. One that has me very, very excited - it's Bronze Age fabrics, and making the yarns for this is one of the tasks coming up for me now.

So I'm doing test spins currently, trying to get a feel for the different fibres that come in question (all of them compromises, because of the lack of real Bronze Age type sheep with their very special type of fibres) and getting a feel for the thicknesses and twist levels that should be suitable. Once the test skeins are done, they get a bath:



and then they are hung up to dry.

Afterwards, I weigh them, label them, calculate the Nm value (that is purely out of curiosity, though), document how long it took me to do that amount of yarn, and once the last batch will have gone through this, weaving tests can start.



It's always fascinating to see how different types of wool spin out differently, and have different properties afterwards (like the Nm count) - even if the yarns have about the same thickness and the same amount of twist.