Yesterday somehow was one of those slow, feels-like-nothing-gets-done days, so I sat down in the sun to do some spinning. And what can I say, other than my spinner-self showed my scientist-self that the latter had totally underestimated the power of the spindle stick when designing the spinning experiment... but let me explain.

For the Hallstatt project, I am spinning a thread thickness that does lie below my normal don't-think-about-it, do-it-in-your-sleep thickness. It is thin enough to mean that I need to pluck out or stretch out even micro-slubs to get a smooth, good-quality thread. It's always very hard to give difficulty ratings to thread, but it is definitely not the most undemanding spin.

My favourite spindle is one that I have been using for quite a while, since before I got the spindle-stick replicas made. That means the stick is home-made, from an old cedar wood arrow, and that means it is whittled down on top and bottom, but not to a very pointy point - more like a token rounding off on top especially. (Whittling is not my forte, and I much prefer spending my time doing something I can do well.) And since I don't usually spin for production, but mostly for demonstration, I usually leave the stick in and just slide off a finished cop of wool (most often to stuff it somewhere and forget about it for a while). But I have used the whorl with the Bergen sticks too, and they generally do work for me - I'm just not using them normally.

When I went to the Wooly Week Workshop, I brought my spindle whorl, a few of the Bergen sticks, and the cedar stick (with the whorl on that). And when we started, I used the cedar stick because, well, it was already in there and handy, and I use it all the time when I demo. So I did get "spun in", if you want to say so, with the spindle on the cedar stick, which I used all week for the tests.

Fast forward to the "production phase" here. Since one of the benefits of a removable whorl is that you are able to just swap sticks and ply off the two spun-full sticks later on, I thought I'd just continue with one of the Bergen sticks. And that is where I was thwarted yesterday. I tried spinning with the Bergen stick - and the spindle runs very well, very fast with it; there is little wobble because the tip is tapering so nicely; it feels good... but I was not able to spin the correct gauge thread with it, and I got breaking thread way, way too often. Believe me, I really tried hard to spin with it, but it just would not work. Finally I switched back to my thick-tipped cedar stick, and it worked much, much better again. So what happened? What is the difference between the sticks?

Is it added weight? The Bergen stick is a bit heavier than the Cedar stick, but that is not what brought me down - during the Wooly Week, I usually had a good-sized amount of thick starter thread wound around my spindle, bringing it up to a significantly higher weight than yesterday's assembly with Bergen.

Is it changed MI? According to André Verhecken, who does research about MI in spindle whorls, the stick does not change much - and a difference of one or two grams will not change anything significant in the MI.

But something changed when I changed sticks - something significant enough to keep me from making the thread I wanted to make. And as I watched myself spinning, I found out what else had changed - the stick diameter close to the top, where I put my fingers to give spin to the spindle. Bergen tapers very slowly from an already slim shank to a slim point about 3 mm wide, while Cedar is much thicker, probably about 6 mm in diameter where I place my fingers, and tapers over a short distance only. And I got the impression that when I give twist to the thinner shank, the spindle will turn a lot faster than when I give twist to the thicker shank... which would be a considerable influence on my spinning, and which would explain why I was getting more breakage - too much spin on the thin thread.

That means that, given time and practice, I could most probably adapt to the faster-spinning spindle setup and change over to the Bergen sticks, either giving less (slower) spin to the stick or drafting faster; though for these fine, finicky threads, drafting faster is not really an option.

And it means that, because I was not aware of how much spindle stick shape can influence spinning, the stick was a variable totally left out of the experiment 2009. On the other hand, adding yet another variable to check would have been too much for one week of testing time, and of course all spindle sticks on the experiment spindles were the same - so it's possible to develop a follow-up experiment with modified spindle sticks and then continue researching into this topic with all the data we have.

And this means that my scientist-self will think about spindle sticks, and experiments, and how it could be tested, and all kinds of things like that during the hours I will spend spinning the Hallstatt threads... after I whittled myself another chunky cedar stick, that is. Because that will take a lot less time and effort for me than to learn now how to cope for the higher spin on Bergen for the Hallstatt threads. Because after all, my spinner-self is still just a lazy spinner.

I am fully occupied with sorting through some stuff here, trying to stow tools and materials in a better way than before, getting my textile technique demonstration projects maintenanced and ready to show things again, plus planning for and working on some stealth projects.

And I have one non-stealth project to blog about, too: My "Fehlerschautafeln" have arrived! These are rectangular black cardstock boards with slits punched into each of the long sides. Using these slits, thread can be wound onto the card and then sits in exactly parallel lines. And then it's very easy to get an impression of how evenly spun the thread is, if it is smooth or rather fluffy on its surface, if there are any thick blobs of fibre or badly twisted bits, and so on. Now I just have to decide how to handle all the thread samples with their vastly different lengths - should I start winding about five metres in, where possible? And if yes, from the beginning or from the end? Or should I try to get the middle section of each thread? Going "x metres in" would be much easier to accomplish, but I am willing to do the "more work" approach if there is a good reason for it; however, the method has to be the same for all the samples (except the utterly short ones where I'll use an alternative method of determining where to start).
I can wind about 3,5 metres on each of the boards; most of the spinners made between 30 and 40 metres of thread during the one hour spinnng time. 3,5 metres would thus correspond to about 6 minutes of spinning time.

Now, if you spin for two hours, and there's a sample from hour one and from hour two - when in each hour would you suspect are the most representative six minutes to pick?

I'm still crunching on all those numbers and will be for a while, I guess. Next item coming up will be to handle all the samples again: Spooling them back into cops from their skein-state for better handling and easier storage and measuring thread diameter as well as making an "inspection card" for each of the samples. These are cards in a contrasting colour to the thread, where the thread is wound on in parallel lines - that gives a quite good first impression on how even the thread is.

And for now, I think I need a better graph program than ol' MS Excel. Any suggestions?

I'm back from spending a very instructive and very nice (though also quite exhausting) time in a textile laboratory, measuring the lengths of all the thread samples. For this, I had the use of a thing called "Weife" - a special, very accurate reel with thread guides and a counter, turned with the help of a hand crank. Two full lab days were needed to measure all the thread samples, and I can probably still do the sequence of motions in my sleep: Open small bag, take out thread sample and label, smooth out label, replace empty drinking straw on the "spool-holder" with the sample on its straw, turn crank until counter stands at next full 10 metres, note down the number it stands at (I filled one whole page on a notepad with number after number), search for the spinner questionnaire of that session, double-check that it is the right questionnaire.
Fix end of thread to the reel, start turning the reel (all the while taking care that no snag on the sample spool changes the tension too much or leads to thread breakage). Once the red starter thread turns up, stop cranking on. Temporarily fix the red thread end somewhere to maintain tension and keep everything in place. Read the amount of full metres, then measure the rest down to the last centimetre. Write down amount in metres on both label and spinner questionnaire. Secure the skein with the red starter thread, take down from reel, fold together securely and put back into small plastic ziplock bag together with its label. Place spinner questionnaire on the "done" stack, place finished sample into large ziplock bag. Repeat until all samples of spinner are done, then put stack of questionnaires into large bag too, close bag, put into box, take out next spinner's bag. Start early in the morning and repeat until lab closes.

While this might sound very, very tedious, I actually did still enjoy myself. It would probably have been the most mind-numbing thing ever if that had not been "my" spinning experiment - but as it is, I had a lot of things to discover and marvel about. One of my pastimes was finding out again who had which spinner ID letter - some I did remember at once, and some I needed to read one or two questionnaires. And then, of course, the data! The metres spun! The different thicknesses (though I did not see much of these turning the reel, that blurs up everything). And, most interesting to me, the fact that a spinner complaining about bad, slow spinning in the questionnaire does not at all mean that the thread had to be bad or short - quite on the contrary: Complaints usually meant nothing in regard to thread length. My guess is that a "badly running" spindle will automatically require more concentration and thus a higher output compared to an undemanding one.

Some tidbits of the data: least amount spun was 2,90 metres, maximum length spun was 72,69 metres. Overall, the least amounts were spun on the 15/5 (the spindle from Hell with almost no moment of inertia) and on 52/41 (the thick cylinder whorl with a very high weight compared to its moment of inertia). However, this does not mean that these spindles were not also used productively by some spinners - 60,00 metres and 66,98 metres were also done on those two (by th same spinner, by the way).

Spinner output is influenced by the spindles used, but not in a similar pattern over all spinners, and with the more experienced spinners, there is not as much variation as you might expect given the very, very weird "spindles" used in the experiment. And thread thickness ranges are another very interesting thing: Some spinners seem to have a "thin range" and a "thick range" with a distinct gap between those two.

These are just the very first results, and I hope to get some (or even much) more out of that. There are lots of possibilities now to look at all the variables - which means doing all sorts of different sortings and of course different graphs to see if something can be seen.

It's all very, very very very interesting. I'll be off to play with yummy data some more now...

If anyone of you is looking for a way to widen the skillset and learn a heap of new things as autodidact, I can only recommend running a conference with an archaeological experiment. It is amazing how many things you can hone on that - including not only computery stuff like database wielding, but also things like photographing.

I spent the day yesterday behind the camera and a photo-tent (for good lighting). In the photo-tent? A sheet of paper with orange millimetre-grid and changing motifs (but all of them similar, and very wooly). And I progressed from photos like this,


when I started fiddling with the settings,



to this as the final result:



All photos are taken with a very long exposure time and a very small aperture to get a high depth of focus. I'm very happy that my camera has a setting exactly for things like that, which means that once I set up the label and wool cop, I only have to press the button once and then wait until the camera on its tripod has taken three pictures with slightly different exposure time...

Today I will take the rest of the photos, which is easy work but more than a bit boring, since the long exposure time means that it takes about two to three minutes for each item to finish. And in that time, I can more or less just stand around and be bored...

Now, slowly, I remember the things that I was planning to tackle before the Forum took over completely - smaller things as well as medium to big things (like the website relaunch, finishing an instructional video for netting and finding out how much fabric is needed for the new small market stall).

Yesterday, though, was mostly spent with the experiment dataset. I'm still looking at and photographing each spinner's individual output and playing around with the weights spun to see if there are general tendencies. And there are, and yet not. While for example spinner A made a totally predictable yarn only influenced by the fibres - with one fibre smoother, thinner yarn than the other - other participants have two sorts of yarn, quite thin and very thick, and they have no obvious connection to either spindle or fibre. It does need a seriously wacky spinning instrument to throw them out of their usual yarn type and thickness range, though, and sometimes not even the wackiest of spindles will do that. So this is a very intriguing start, and I hope I will find some more connections or possible connections.

I took the day off yesterday (well, mostly) and had a wonderfully relaxing time just reading, snacking, relaxing and napping, so now my wakefulness-levels are almost normal again.

Now that I'm in the quiet of my own little study again (crammed full with the boxes of the experiment), I really start to miss the chatter and bad jokes and friendly banter and "string talk" of last week. And slowly I realise that the Textilforum has indeed taken place, that we really did it, that the experiment was really wildly successful, and that I have a heap of things to remember the wonderful week by, including my first ever badge for making a fire without more than two matches (heehee! All that training was worth it!), the most ugly cardboard-piggybank ever made by man or woman (and a very well-fed one at that, thanks to the generous people at the Forum) and the now-famed cat timer that usually resides on my workdesk but had taken a venture out and did some important work in the spinning experiment.

There are already some pictures online at Phiala's blog, summing up nicely all the things that went on, including the silliness. Here's a random picture taken during the spinning experiment (they are not sorted yet, of course...):