Here's another little gem regarding the measurement of twist angles: the Human Factor. As in "different people get different results".

I had been suspecting it for a while, and the last Textile Forum gave me the opportunity (and the willing participants, a big thank you to you all!) to do a little test.

If you'd like to play yourself, here is the photo of one hand-spun thread. What twist angle would you read out for this one?

Once you're finished, scroll down... and see what others measured.


Done?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Here you go:


As you can see, measurements of the eight participants of this mini-study range from between 20° and a bit to 48° and some, depending on where the measurements were taken... and who took them. Several people took measurement in a similar spot (there are two small black dots about in the middle of the thread), but even then, results range from 31° to 48°.

So. Twist angle. Hello there. It would have been nice to have a reliable, measureable something to describe threads with... right? Describing fabrics or threads with words is hard in any case, but this just seems to make it even harder.

Sigh.

I've taken a few closeup photos of the sailcloth after washing, and, well, have a look for yourself:


Now... it looks to me as if the twist angle of the white yarn is about the same or seems to be even slightly lower than it was when spinning (I have the reference cards to compare with), but the brown weft yarn now clearly looks higher-twist than what I spun (which was about 30° approximately). This is definitely... interesting.

Next step for the cloth will be getting fulled, and I'll take another closeup photo then and give it another reading. But my first conclusion from all this looking at twists and getting stuff woven and comparing is: Twist angles lie. Do not trust that they are spun like what they appear to be in a finished cloth - and in further conclusion: If you need to do a hair-splittingly exact replica of a piece of fabric, you will have to do test-spinning and test-weaving and look at the angles in the finished fabric to figure out what you will have to spin.

Good thing I'm already mildly crazy, or that would drive me towards craziness indeed. Can't that textile stuff be straightforward once, just for a change? Please?

Today, a lovely green box came in the post - and inside was the sailcloth textile, fresh off the loom.

Here is a sneak peek at the cloth, in its raw state:


As it's a 2/1 twill, the two sides look differently thanks to the different colours of warp and weft.

The cloth is currently drying after a first wash, and then it will get its picture taken again, and after that... I will put my foot down. And again. And again... until it is slightly fulled.

Though I'll finish the rest of the spinning first, I think!

Here is again a link roundup for your delectation!

While we are certainly living in interesting times, with the US pulling the Trump Card to top the daftness that is Brexit, there are also things that make me feel hopeful about the future of humanity: Jews share their synagogue building with moslems after their mosque burned down.

Christina Pappas writes about following in the footsteps of a spinner from 2000 years ago by replicating two textile finds. First up is a slipper.

More archaeology: UCD School of Archaeology is currently accepting applications for its MSc in Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture for 2017/18, at University College Dublin, Ireland, home of the Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture *CEAMC) and host of the 9th Experimental Archaeology Conference (EAC9) in 2015. All enquiries to Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein. Director of CEAMC and MSc Programme co-ordinator.

Hiltibold has links to two videos, one about hide glues (in German) and one about reconstructing a Roman hairstyle (in English).

And that's it for today. Now I'll go forth and have a fancy Krapfen*, because it's the season for them here in Germany!

 
*What the English version of the Wikipedia article does not tell you is that the typical filling in Franconia is rose hip jam... though the article about Hiffenmark in English does. Comparing Wikipedia articles in different languages to each other? Fun!

I've finally caught up on Escapepod. I still have a hard time believing it - that was a lot of stories, and most of them nice to wonderful.

From last year's bunch of stories, my three favourites were:

Joolie and Irdl
Murder or a Duck
In a Manner of Speaking.

The first two are Hugo-eligible, and I think they'll end up on my list. The third I'd nominate in a heartbeat, but unfortunately it is too old. However, if you have the time and like good stories, go check it out - though let me warn you that it is a bit sad. (If you don't like audio productions, you can also read the stories on the website if you follow the link.)

Sorry for the blog silence - my Internet was taking a day off today and only recently reappeared.

Having this kind of trouble today in some way neatly fits my troubles of yesterday, where I tried to fix a Windows issue (the updater does not work anymore, and I'm about to give up on it) and ran into the weird effect of the system eating lots and lots of memory in one vile gulp. Well. It took a while to wrench the memory away from its greedy little paws again, and in the process I found a bit of malware lurking, and... oh well. Computer shenanigans.

So... in case you have troubles with space on your system, or want to see what the big files are, or would like to defragment or scan for malware, here's a few helpful tools:

WizTree - a file browser that shows file sizes, very handy to find the eaters of space of doom.

Spybot S&D - scans for malware and adware.

UltraDefrag - defragmentation tool that can even defrag pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys.

I've done a few more shenanigans with the spinning angle changes conundrum - and here are pictures for you to look at.

Here's a pic of yarn before steaming:


and of a second bit of yarn after steaming:


and the same yarn used as weft for weaving a sample:

[caption id="attachment_2887" align="alignnone" width="640"] Weft is running vertically here, and the thing is quite weft-faced plain weave (I only had a puny frame with huuuuge warp spacing for the quick test...). I'd have preferred a more balanced plain weave, but well. Maybe next time.


In the weaving, the warp yarn was spun to about the same spinning angle, and the same thickness, only in the other direction. (Again - hitting an exact angle and keeping to exactly that angle is really hard, and there will always be digressions.)

So. Can you see differences?