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.

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.