A bunch of skeins is hanging out in the cellar, where it's nice and warm, and they are all drying. Actually they are almost dry - but I prefer to be really sure and leave them a little longer, if I can, than take them off sooner.



This is a little more than 2.5 km of yarn. I'm wet-finishing the skeins - soaking them in hot tap water (which has about 60° C here) for about 20 minutes, then stretching each skein, then hanging them to dry with a bit of weight to keep the yarn slightly stretched. It's not a lot of tension they are under, just enough to hold the yarns more or less straight.

I've marked each skein with a number, corresponding to the sequence they were spun in - and I'm very, very curious now to find out if the yardage has changed with the wet finish. Soon. As soon as they are completely dry...

Sometimes I have days (or is it still nights?) when I wake up way too early and cannot get back to sleep... so I usually get up and try to do something useful. Such as... work.

Today was one of those days - which means that it's now mid-afternoon and I'm feeling a bit more tired than I'd like to be, but there's still a stack of office work to be handled. (If you're wondering what I did the rest of the day, the answer is simple: For most of the time, I turned fluffy stuff into yarn.) It's no huge help that the cat is curled up on the sofa, napping and looking very cute and cuddle-able. There's visible progress, though. Yarn is happening! Not quite as quickly as I'd like it to, but hey, that's life.

Spinning speeds are something weird anyways. When I'm spinning for a project, I record all the time I spend on it, and I try to split time-keeping and -recording into the individual tasks to have a better overview in the end. So I will make notes for the time spent spinning, skeining, and wet-finishing the yarns. I did this for past projects as well, and I found that spinning speeds are not completely consistent. That is partly due to current form, partly depends on the kind of yarn to be spun and the fibre (and fibre prep), but there's also another factor: It's quite easy to fall into a slow, relaxed, dreamy pace even though I can draft faster. That will lead to slower spinning speed, of course, thank you Captain Obvious.

I'm not quite sure where that comes from - when I still only had my little wheel, the limiting factor was not the drafting speed, but the treadling speed. (There's only so fast that you can pedal.) With the hand-spindle, flicking speed and spindle turning speed is one limiting factor, the other is winding up speed. Winding up takes a lot of time, even if it's done quickly and efficiently. With the e-spinner, neither of these is there - so I can spin just as fast as I can draft.

In theory, that is quite, quite fast. I've done short test runs to find out how fast I can go, and it was significantly faster than with the spindle or treadle wheel - I think it was in the 140 m per hour range, or even a little higher. There are, however, limits to a sustainable drafting speed. I've learned that while I am able to go as fast for a short time, I'll fall into a slower rhythm when I am working for longer stretches of time. Which is okay - no sprinter is going to hold their speed for a marathon distance. The really evil trap, though, is when things start to feel so meditative and calming that spinning speed goes down some more, and more.

So when I'm production spinning now, I'm not only checking regularly for thickness, twist angle, overall okay-looking-ness of the yarn, progress on the bobbin and whether I have to move to the next bit of bobbin, and status of my tea cup (which includes heat and fill levels of tea), but also remind myself to keep up the good speed, and not start dawdling. I'm also wondering if people back in history had the same issues when spinning, and how they handled things. Did the medieval housewife care about whether she could be faster, or not? Was there more of a "it takes time, and will be done when it's done" mindset than we have today? I could well imagine that - but, of course, that is wild conjecture.

What do you think about the need for speed in medieval crafts, and medieval production? Is that a modern thing only? Did it depend? If so, on what? And if you're a spinner, are you leisure spinning, or production spinning? Do you have different spinning speeds? Have you ever tried to spin as fast as possible for a longer time? I'd love to hear about your experiences...

Here I am, with some more spinning done, and another three bobbins full.



Well, by now they have been emptied and partially re-filled. I also found out that my estimate of how much needs to be spun was a considerable amount lower than the final estimate is, after doing a test weave sample. It's the Law of Reconstructions and Reproductions, it seems, that if one mis-estimates anything, it's always a mis-estimate towards lower, quicker, easier, or cheaper than it turns out to be in the end.

Soon there will be a stack of skeins large enough that it will be time to draw a hot bath for them, and give them their settling soak. I've marked every skein with its number in the spinning sequence, so I can label them once they are dried - with the length in metres, the weight and grist. That will hopefully help to see how consistent the yarn is.

I'm also thinking about doing at least a partly re-skeining after washing and drying the yarn, to see if there's shrinkage. If so, I'd need to adjust the amount of yarn spun so it doesn't run out before the fabric is finished...

I think there's not much of a comment necessary, the picture says it all:



This, dear friends, is really pleasant work in a pleasant place with very nice and butt-warming pleasant company. And a nice podcast to boot.

Calculations for the fabric that I'm currently spinning for are finished, and, well, what shall I say? Those bronze age fabrics are... big. BIG.

Which, consequently, means that even though they only have a few threads per centimetre (around 4, overall), they do add up. Which means there's a lot more spinning to do until I'm finished. Overall yarn requirement for the piece of fabric needed to make the Trindhoj find man's garments, consisting of some kind of wraparound tunic and a half-oval cloak, is about... 5700 metres. Plus a bit of wiggle room.

Even spinning quite quickly, and winding into hanks quickly, and wet-finishing several skeins at once (which is taking a lot less time than doing them one by one), that eats up a hunk of hours. So if you're looking for me, I'll be at my spinning place... making yarn. In very nice cat company.

Have you measured your production spinning speeds? If so, I'd love to hear about how much you spin in an hour.

If you haven't done it yet, but are curious - my recommendation is to use a stopwatch, and spin over several hours before measuring. Doing just half an hour or one hour can result in quite different speeds than production over more hours. (Don't ask me how I know...) Note down how long you were spinning for the sessions if your stopwatch tends to eat the current time (I have one that will turn itself off after a while, and then the numbers are gone.) For measuring, find out the circumference of your skeiner and count the rotations.

Then do the metres spun by hours division, and voilà, you have your production speed number for this yarn type and thickness with this tool and this type of fibre... which might be quite different from a different yarn. Which, I find, makes spinning an even more interesting thing!

After doing a bit of spinning in teaching context, properly medieval with distaff and hand-spindle, I'm back to spinning with the slightly more modern method...

First task of the morning was using up the remaining small bit of weft thread for the corded skirt that I had on the spool, and afterwards spinning the last bit of yarn that will be necessary to finish weaving. That, as always, was done by guesstimating how much yarn I'd need and how long it would take me to spin according to my more-or-less known spinning speed for that kind of yarn, and then spinning the guesstimated time.

And afterwards, there was more spinning straight on - for the warp threads for the first of the woven items. Our test weave turned out with a bit too many warp threads per 10 cm, so I'm aiming to spin just a little bit thicker this time around... and hope fervently that it will be the right amount of extra thickness.

Spinning for a reconstruction is always a little bit nerve-wracking for me. There's lots and lots of yarn to be spun, and there's always a little bit of danger to slowly, gradually, unnoticedly (that should totally be a word) segue from the yarn that has the intended thickness, amount of twist, and regularity into a yarn that is just a little off, and then maybe even more off. That's why I do rather frequent stops to check if I'm still in the range, and typically have a "comparison yarn" put up and nicely visible at my spinning workplace.

Apart from that, spinning is a very pleasant job, and I thoroughly enjoy it. Which is a good thing, because for making fabric for garments, a lot of spinning is necessary!

I've made more progress on the corded skirt, even though it's not very visible. That is mostly because most of the time spent on this project today went into spinning more yarn for the cords...



but there was a bit of weaving, too. I'm now at about 42 cm (the Answer!) of 155 for the corded part. I'm also making "progress" on my podcast backlog list, because both spinning and weaving are a very good opportunity to listen to all these stories and discussions that I have in my subscription list.

It is a lot of fun to weave, and cord, this skirt, but it is taking its sweet time. Also, after a while of sitting on the floor in the weaving or cording position, I really need to remember to take a break to stretch and move a bit. Otherwise I'm feeling it when I finally do get up... it's a slightly weird working position in both cases, and it does take its toll on the hips after a while.

It also does take a good bit of concentration to get everything done as it should be - so I am looking forward to the extended weekend a lot now. We have a bank holiday on Monday here in Germany, so I'll be back on the blog on Tuesday.