The Great Wheel had its little outing, I once again got to appreciate how much more evenly I can spin with the spindle and distaff as compared to the wheel, and on the other hand how much faster the wheel is. 

As usual on an event like this, I got to take one quick break (when the guys from the next tent over were doing their fighting show) to dash out of my spot, re-fill my water bottle, get a coffee and a bite to eat, and go back. It was also very sunny on Sunday, so even though the tent provided shade, it got quite hot. Enter the Glorious Medieval Cooling System: The linen underdress and linen headwear will be very, very cooling if wet. Thus part of my water bottle's contents did not go inside of me, but into my dress to wet some of the underdress, and on my head. That worked very well, and kept me comfortable even through the hottest bits of the day.

Then, at the end of our festivities, I found one of the friendly museum ladies to take some pictures of me spinning:

As you can see on the floor, I didn't even make too much of a mess! 

The thing about a medieval-style Great Wheel? It's really Great, as in Large. Looking at images, the wheel appears to be really huge, compared to the spinners. And when one thinks about it, that is sort of understandable - after all, the aim is to get a lot of twist quickly, and there are no gears involved. So the size difference between the wheel and the disc on the spindle (often called whorl, but I find that confusing) has to be as large as possible.

When I built my reconstruction, I was thus looking for a size that would compare to the illustrations we have, and of course with a look at its intended use - demonstrations. Which meant it also had to come apart easily, and the single pieces had to fit into the car. 

Which they do. The wheel itself has its own special spot right under the roof, where it's built to fit perfectly:

The board end in the foreground belongs to the bottom (main) board. The rest is one box with the small pieces (like the wedges, drive band, and spindles) and one pack with legs and the holders for spindle and wheel. 

So now I just have to add the rest of the equipment, and we're ready to roll!

(Ingelheim. Sunday. See me there if you can, and say hello!)

The wheel is set up, and it's been far too long since I've last taken it for a spin - it took me a bit to get it all running smoothly again. Though that is also due to trying the other spindle, which (still) does not work as nicely as the one I usually have.

Why? Well, it would be nice to know... The wheel is always a little wobbly, and depending on how the individual bits are aligned (and they have a tendency to shift a bit during use), the drive band stays on... or not. The "other" spindle has more of a tendency to shift, and there's only one good groove on it, so as soon as the drive band manages to hop out of that groove, it's gone and off completely. 

As there's no grooves or higher sides on the rim of the wheel, the drive band will also tend to slip off if the wheel is not well enough aligned. That can happen if the fixing wedge of the wheel support works itself loose, or if the whole thing is leaning a bit to one side and the wheel wanders on its axle, or if it's put on the wrong way around (though it is theoretically symmetrical, it isn't quite).

So. All those are reasons enough to take it out and give it a little test drive before it appears at a demonstration, but the main reason is actually for me to get some practice in... or I will have a very, very tired right arm very quickly otherwise! 

Because I have to wet and stretch the skeins anyways, the plan for the warp yarns this time was that I add some sizing in that process, saving Silvia (who will do the weaving) from that extra prep step.

As it's here and available already, we settled on animal glue for the sizing. The idea behind sizing is to strengthen the threads against friction and abrasion on the loom, making it easier to weave and giving a better end result. So I dissolved some animal glue in warm water, bathed the skeins in their hot bath to set the twist, pressed out as much excess water as possible and gave them a good long soak (about half an hour) in the gluey liquid. 

And because I arrived at the conclusion that it might be interesting for you to watch, here's a video showing... spinning. Or, to be more precise, drafting. That's me production spinning for the current project, and the bobbin that I made this video on averaged out at a little more than 160 m per hour. (Personal best.) All you will see is my drafting motion, and I found it very, very boring to look at, but then I've looked at this from a slightly different angle for a lot of hours by now, and it's much more interesting if you're actually doing it. (Still of limited interest though. A hundred times a very little will still not be much...)

Again, this is possible because the wool is very easy to spin and the thread is in my absolute comfort zone, thickness-wise. I need to concentrate more than I have to do at slower speeds, and stopping the spinner for adjusting the winding lead on the flyer has to be done slowly and with care, otherwise there will be a lot of slack thread. Similarly, starting up again should be done slowly.

Both hands are working here, by the way, though the front hand (my left hand, I'm strongly left-handed) does most of the moving. The other, though, subtly presses down on the fibre a way back or lets go, which helps me to draft evenly, and turns the end of the top to help catch the fibres that I want to catch.

The spinner can do a max speed of about 1650 rpm, and it's set to a little less than 3/4 max, so it's probably runnning somewhere around 1000 to 1200 rpm. I have about 1.5 bobbins to go for finishing the warp, that's a bit more than 1.2 kilometers. And then... the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the yarn is in the weaving (and then wearing). 

As I've stated in one of the previous posts, there's a lot of different statements about spinning speeds around on the Internet. They are, in a lot of cases, outrageously high. 

In a quite well-known, frequently cited book by Almut Bohnsack about spinning, there's also a list of how much could be spun on a handspindle... and these numbers, again, are very high. Outrageously high, if you ask me. Careful reading of the text, however, shows that for getting these numbers, the author measured the rotational speeds achievable by the different spindles, and did that measuring right after flicking them, with no resistance by the thread to speak of. These were in the ballpark of c 3000 rpm - and then, this number was taken as the maths basis to calculate how many twists per metre you need for yarns in different thicknesses (all of them very, very thin),  and how long it would take for the spindle to deliver this number of twists. No consideration of drafting speed or winding up, and no taking into account that the spindle slows down, and that twist in the yarn will make turning the spindle harder.

Other calculations on the 'Net sound like it's a normal thing for someone to do close to 250 or even 400 m per hour, but if you follow the numbers to the source, they are extrapolations from - you may have guessed it - the speeds achieved during competitions that ran for 10 or 15 minutes.

So. Statements and calculations like these have resulted in the fact that I have very, very little trust in spinning speed numbers stated somewhere, without a very detailed explanation on how the numbers were derived. There's a huge difference between spinning for a few minutes and timing it, and spinning for production. Back in the days when I lacked experience and was going for the first reconstruction projects with hand-spun yarn, I did my time budget calculations from a 15 minute test spin. Even though I tried to work at normal speed, I was much, much quicker than in the actual process. Lehrgeld, we call that in German. (Tuition fee would be the translation...)

Which means that I trust the numbers that I have for myself, and timings that I have taken myself (like for the spinning experiment), and there's a few other people that I know and whose numbers I will take for true. 

And there's still issues with these numbers... because comparability of spinning speeds also depends on the type of yarn you are doing, if you're using the same tool. For instance, if I'm spinning with hand-spindle and distaff and I'm making yarn of c 0.9 mm diameter and with a really high twist, someone else making yarn with 1.2 mm diameter and medium twist may be much faster than I am... but might not be faster doing the same yarn type. Someone spinning for speed and not minding if the yarn is rather irregular - can this be compared to someone spinning yarn for a specific purpose and going for consistency? If I get a bad spot in my production, I will interrupt the process and fix the spot (unless it's within the acceptable parameters, then I'll just go "huh" and let it slide). That takes time - I would not do that if going for speed.

So in case you're now interested in my speeds... my hand-spindle spinning is reliably at about 60 m per hour. I haven't tried speed-spinning there; this is "explain and demo" or production speed spinning. I'm not using my treadle wheels for spinning anymore as they are too slow, but the e-spinner will get me between 80 to 160 m per hour for production spinning, with most of the yarns in the 90-110 m per hour range. Doing ahundredfiftyplus takes a good bit of concentration, and is only possible sustainably if it's a very well-prepared fibre suited for this and a yarn thickness that is in my comfort zone. 

If you're spinning, I'd be happy to hear about your thoughts about speed, and about your speeds. My recommendation is to get a stopwatch that you place next to your wheel; that way you can track your spinning time easily and accurately. Time yourself for spinning for a whole bobbin, and then measure out the whole bobbin, that will get rid of a lot of the variation in your spinning. 

Another thing to consider when talking spinning speeds is the duration of your spinning - because it's a difference whether you are doing a sprint, or whether you are running a marathon.

For my spinning work, there's an amount of time I can comfortably spend spinning in one go, and there's an amount I can comfortably spin in a day. Once the individual sessions get longer, or there's more sessions in a day, it gets, well, no so nice. After all, it's prolonged sitting in one position, with limits on how much you can vary it, and it's the same repetitive motions again and again. I've had one reconstruction where things went south with the first try, so I had to spin the same amount of yarn once more, and at times there were grooves in my finger where the yarn ran over it. Not fun, I can tell you.

So if we're looking at production spinning, the sweet spot would be a spinning speed that allows the spinner to make as much yarn as possible in the time available, but still at a rate that feels comfortable and sustainable. You can spin fast for a bit, and you can certainly gain a bit of speed with practice, and it's also possible to tweak speeds some more - but in the end, there will be a limit to speed gains.

If you're looking at ethnographic sources and see spinning videos from other places, where hand-spinning is still done for yarn production purposes, the spinners don't appear rushed at all. To me it often seems like there's no pressure to get the task done as quickly as possible, or even pressure to get the task done - it's spinning, it happens, there's time for it while chatting with others, or walking somewhere, or herding animals or whatever other things are going on in the same time (or not). 

Was it the same in medieval Europe? I'd suspect that more or less it was. Of course there's an expectation on how much one spins in a given amount of time, but there was probably not the hardcore mindset of "time is money, work quicker" that we tend to have today. We'll never find out, and there will also have been individual differences (if you spin for money as a service provider, you'll probably look at it differently than when you're spinning for yourself while you have the necessary fabrics for now, and are just making sure you're not going to run out of fabric in a year or so). 

It always boils down to the same thing, though: There's a speed that you can comfortably sustain over periods of time, and that will make sure your yarn stays consistent in quality. This is the speed that one should look at for production speed, and for speed calculation. That speed will also depend on whether you're doing something else at the same time (even if it's only chatting!) or if you are concentrating fully on your spinning, as well as on all the other factors discussed previously. Spinning as quickly as you can is definitely not the speed you'll be able to hold up over several hours, just like you won't be able to sustain a running speed for a sprint over the distance of a marathon.