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...):

I arrived back home from Eindhoven yesterday evening, after a week of all things good and fibrey (or stringy). More than a hundred of spindles were spun upon, masses of tablets turned, waffles and chocolate eaten, large quantities of coffee and tea consumed, and laughter and fun abounded.

The Textilforum was everything I had hoped and wished for: A meeting place for craftspeople and scientists, a place to chat and exchange knowledge and personal experiences with different historical techniques, to network and have fun together, a place to do some shopping for textile-crafts-related things and tools that cannot be found just everywhere, and an opportunity to have some nice, juicy bits of science that requires more than just one or two skilled craftspersons. So overall, a complete success, and I am sure that every visitor to the Forum also went home with something new and delightful learned.

For the experiment, I had the joy and privilege of working together with fifteen wonderful spinners to generate a really large dataset that will help a lot for researching spinning and spindle whorls in the future. This dataset and lots of number-crunching from it will probably keep me on my toes for the next few days and weeks, but the data already looks very, very promising. The first results were already presented to the spinners and lecture audience on Saturday evening, and more results are the topic of my talk at the liveARCH conference in Hungary in October. A good reason to set to work on all the cops of yarn and questionnaires!

I think that the red digits of numbers 9, 10 and 11 are already burned into my retina from weighing and packing about 300 portions of wool. And making little paper documentation slips for packing with the spun threads is not as tedious as writing each by hand, but still... change spindle type. change date. save as. print as pdf (two pages). change spindle type. change date. and so on. repeat with changed session and wool. That's somehow... mind-numbing. (But I'm finished now, and only need to print out the .pdf files.

Add to this the fact that I have decided (half-last-minute) that it would be nifty to make a statistic of how all the whorls turned out, and that it would be good to have a more accurate weight for all the plastic bags with wool in them, and voilà! there I will sit weighing things again. Once I've made it into town and bought some appropriate scales, that is.

Otherwise, not much has happened - I'm still thinking and preparing for the Forum and the experiment, while inbetween trying to take care of the last things that have stacked up during my holidays. And as usual, things always take longer than they ought to - and I'm sorry for whining that much, right in front of your eyes, right on your screen...

Since yesterday afternoon, fourty plywood discs in two different sizes and thicknesses are peacefully lying on a heap together, completing my selection of experimental spindle whorls. Thank goodness for the invention of power tools and "circle cutters"! Though even with that multi-watt support, it took me a while of fiddling with the large plywood sheets, the cutting gadget (a very cheap tool and accordingly fiddly to use) and the drill in its stand before I found out how to best cut the discs. But in the end, the archaeologist prevailed!

Now all the hard bits of the preparation are finally finished, and the whorls have turned out not to be perfect, but at least very good, and absolutely sufficient for the experimental purposes. So whew! The power of trial runs and solid calculations (with a huge lot of help from André Verhecken) is proven again.

A lot of the wool is already portioned and packaged, and today I'll take care of the rest of packaging before finishing the plywood with a light sanding around the edges and then... glueing the spindle whorls and spindles together.

This is something I would never do under ordinary circumstances. Who would want a spindle that can't be equipped with a different whorl, after all? "Those folks" back in the middle ages certainly didn't need glue to keep their spindle whorls on the spindle, the double-conical form was enough.

But since I am using chopsticks as spindle sticks (totally non-medieval, just like the plywood and the modern glue for assembling these), and since the plywood needs some glue to keep on the stick, and because I just want to make sure that none of the whorls slips off during the experiment, glue it is.

After the spindles are assembled, there's not much left to do for the experiment - preparing the documentation, writing down my notes for the "prep talk" before we start and packing all the things needed for transport to Eindhoven, no more. And well that this is so, since the experiment will start on Tuesday morning next week.