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!

We are back home from a wonderful weekend at Cave Gladium, where I was lucky from beginning to end - wonderful sunny weather (even a bit too hot sometimes), what must have been the best place for a stall on the whole market (right on the "main street" between food area/toilets and the "Hurenweibl"*), incredibly nice colleagues and neighbors all around, and gazillions of people coming by for a question, a chat or a peek into my dissertation manuscript. The latter were so many and so frequent that we put a straw mattress on the ground behind my table and declared it "reader's corner".

And of course there were the requisite food stalls offering a wide variety of things (but I've seen no potato goods), a stage for music (far enough from the stall not to disturb us), there were oriental dried fruits like figs, dates with walnut and nuts, and the"Teezelt", a kind of oriental café that you get on about every larger medieval market in Germany to buy mokka with spices, mint or black tea and sweets to go with your beverage. And I just love to go there for a mokka after closing shop at dusk (because nobody can see my fine threads anyway once it starts getting dark). And a thing seldom seen: One wandering musician walking through the whole festival area playing pipe and tabor - the classical medieval one-man-band!

Taking all together, the Cave is a wild mixture of stalls selling tourist wares, stalls showing and selling wares for Living History, visitors, LH people and costumed people, and everything with a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere. And the Cave is big, no, huge even. I'd say if the Cave organisers take a little care during the next years that the tourist ware stalls don't take over, this festival will soon be as big and as important as Freienfels and Tannenberg, both events for the LH scene but open to tourists.


* The "Hurenweibl" at Cave Gladium is a tavern for LH folks only; there's a guard at the entrance allowing only historically dressed people to pass. (Cave Gladium also sports a "no-tourists-area", a meadow reached only over a little bridge with a guard posted before it as well.)
A Hurenweibel was the officer in charge of the Tross (the camp followers) of the Landsknecht armies. A lot of the tourists are a bit nonplussed by this tavern name or start laughing because "Hure" is the German word for "whore", and "Weib" today is still another word for wife, but in many German regions, its meaning has slipped somewhat from neutral or positive in former times to slightly derogatory. So people not knowing that "Weibl" is an old form of "Webel" as in "Feldwebel" often are misled by the tavern name.

I have finished my head-over-heels rush to meet all my deadlines (and it looks as if I can make it, hooray) and now I'm off to Furth im Wald, for three days of relaxing medieval market atmosphere at Cave Gladium.

Regrettably, there have not been enough registrations for the workshops, so those will not take place. (I'm not sure yet whether it was bad luck, not enough advertising/information or whether there is generally no interest to have a learning experience during a Living History/medieval market event.) Instead, I am planning to sit beside my table full of the new goods to sell and chat with people, relax, maybe sew a little bit and generally enjoy myself.

If you are in the region, the Cave is surely worth a visit - and if you are undecided yet whether you want to see the Drachenstich, this year is your last chance to see the experienced old dragon - because next year, the new dragon will take over!

There's still much to do before the weekend - I have some writing to finish, and of course packing for the Cave has to be done. I could need a second self right now to take care of some things - or at least "an Stiftn" (colloquial not for "a pencil", as German-reading folks might think now, but for an apprentice) to do the time-consuming but no-brainer parts of work. Like portioning off the wool for the spinning experiment, a task for me once I'm back from Cave and holidays. The wool and the bags for the wool are already here and waiting to get together - put wool on the scales, take wool from the scales, put wool into bag, repeat 200+ times. The upside to work like that? I get to sit in the comfy, well-lighted living room, on the sofa, listening to good music or an audio-book of my choice. And I'm actually looking forward to the task because of that!

After a nice week-end, I'm fit for blogging again, but not too inspired as to a topic today. So instead of me thinking too much and straining my brain, here's a link for those of you who don't know it yet:

The Middle High German Database (mhdbdb, standing for Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank) - a database where you can search middle high german texts for word occurrences

and its sister database, the IMAREAL picture database, where you can search pictures for things and persons.

Enjoy!

Tomorrow I will go to Bad Staffelstein to collect the exhibits again and bring them back home, since the two-week exhibition is over. So if you are in the area, today's your last chance to see it!

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!