My spinning for the experiment at the Textile Forum is done - and here's the result:


Three skeins, each with 230+ metres of yarn. Each from the same wool (Eider wool, I love that stuff, it really spins up beautifully), each in the same thickness of 0.5 mm, give or take a smidgen (even the evenest handspinning is not completely even!) and each finished in the same way (placed into a bowl, boiling hot water poured on top, left for 10 minutes to soak, then stretched out, then hung to dry with 1418 g of weight tied to the bottom end of the skein).

The only difference is the amount of twist between these three. The skein on the left has a spinning angle of about 45°, the one in the middle about 30°, and the one on the right about 20° - give or take a smidgen...

As you can see in the close-ups, the angle does make quite a difference. You can also see that it is not all the same everywhere in the threads, even though I always try to spin really, really evenly and really, really neatly.

[caption id="attachment_2718" align="aligncenter" width="196"] 20° spinning angle


[caption id="attachment_2719" align="aligncenter" width="206"] 30° spinning angle


[caption id="attachment_2720" align="aligncenter" width="204"] 45° spinning angle


However, they should be regular enough for our purposes - and next week, during the Forum, they will turn into small bits of fabric, and that fabric will be dyed, and then we will see the differences between the three fabrics. Plus whether the dye penetrates them all equally well, or whether there are differences!

First of all, sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I was away from the computer most of the day, and during the time I did spend physically close to it, we had internet connection issues. These do happen here occasionally, and they are normally no big deal when they do, as they will be over after two or three hours at most... but yesterday, it did mean no access during the time window I had for blogging.

Today is a holiday in Germany, so I had planned to blog yesterday and tell you there'd be no blog post today. Well, plans and how they work out... anyway, this means you are getting this picture today instead of yesterday:


That was my setup on the Long Night for spinning in Dinkelsbühl. It was a wonderful evening with many, many people stopping by for watching the spinning and asking questions. The picture was taken during one of the rare and short moments when there were no visitors there, right at the end of my presentation.

Time really flew by, and the evening was over before I knew it! I loved all of it, and it gave me the opportunity to demonstrate how much of a difference the fibre and the fibre preparation made when spinning on the Great Wheel. I had rolags made from Eider wool (industrially combed, smooth medium-staple wool that I just rolled together with the cards), from Bergschaf wool (industrially carded, crimpier wool with a shorter staple that I rolled together with the cards similarly to the Eider stuff) and from Rouge de Roussillon wool that I carded up from the washed fleece myself. The differences were astounding, with the smoothest, most even thread coming out of the Eider wool and the clumpiest, least even one out of the Rouge. That was partly due to my bad sorting and carding of the Rouge fleece I brought with me, though, and I am sure that with a bit more getting used to that specific fibre, the thread would also have improved a lot.

Demonstrations like these always yield some thread, but they rarely result in wheel spinning output that I'd find acceptable or even good quality. Talking to people to explain the spinning takes away some concentration from the spinning itself, and while I can happily chat along when making my standard yarn on the spindle and distaff, the wheel does take more concentration for me to get a good thread. Another factor is the quality of the rolags that I work with during those demos.

Even though I explain to people during these demonstrations that textile work takes time, and patience is oh so important, I usually skimp on the preparation of the rolags to speed things up a bit. I also make a rolag or two, then spin them up, then explain something else, then make rolags again - and that results in differences each time, which also has an impact. Finally, the combination of explaining and trying to show off the spinning speeds possible with the wheel means I'm not making the best possible thread out of the fibre I have, and switching frequently between spindle and wheel plus carding and combing means it is hard to find the rhythm and workflow for any of these tasks - because obviously, explaining and demonstrating the individual steps and how they work together is much, much more important on these events than making the best yarn possible.

So in case you are at a crafts demonstration one day and have somebody demo-ing with a lot of explanation, you might get to see slightly sloppier work than they normally do, because the priorities have shifted - from working towards the best result possible with the tools and materials available to giving the best explanation and demonstration for you. And that, I'd say, is one of the best reasons that somebody can have for not working up to the usual standards!

I'll be spinning tomorrow night again - though not for a Forum experiment this time. It's Lange Nacht (long night) in Dinkelsbühl, and the museum Haus der Geschichte is participating.

Which means I will be there, spinning with my handspindle and the Great Wheel, from 19:30 to 22:00 h. The wheel is already in the car together with my spinning bench, there's a box of wool standing ready to be taken along, my spindles are lined up and eager for a spin - so everything is prepared for tomorrow.

And I'm looking forward to some happy spinning time in the utterly beautiful town of Dinkelsbühl!

Things are going more or less as planned here - every morning, I make a list of the things I want to get done during the day. Every evening, I find that I have not been able to get all of them done; partly due to mis-estimating how much I can fit into a day, partly due to not being able to finish them off because of missing information, or waiting for something, and partly because other things got into the way, or I decided to split the work over two days for a reason.

Still, progress is being made. This year at the Forum, we'll have not one, not two, but three tests/experiments (plus some extra dyeing with a fermentation vat that does not count for these) and they all need preparation. So I have wound skeins with 5 g of yarn each, and I'm working on putting the plan and protocol together for the repeat of the Pompeii dyeing experiment plus its add-on (I blogged about that here). It's proving to be not so simple to get all three batches done in a sensible way, so there's a good bit of thinking and checking and double-checking involved in making that plan (which is not yet finished, and probably will not be completely finished today, since I will want to go over it once again with a fresh brain...).

For the second experiment I'm deeply involved in, I have been spinning yarn - one batch with really high twist (a spinning angle of 45-50°), which is already finished, and has its twist set, and is now waiting for its partner. Which is a second batch with less twist (spinning angle of about 30°), about half-finished; and that is another thing I did today, some spinning. With the fabulous Zwirnzwerg! I'm really happy that I have this e-spinner now, it does help immensely especially when going for high-twist yarns. I could never have spun the 50° yarn in that time with any of my spinning wheels.

Why the yarns? We will be testing dye penetration in different fabric densities and with different yarns to find out how reliable the white spots between yarns are to indicate whether something was dyed in the piece or in the yarn/fleece. Which means spinning, and weaving, and then dyeing, the latter two done during the Forum.

There also has been ordering of supplies and materials for the Forum, and there will be more lists of things - things to bring for the diverse activities, lists of when what part of which experiment will take place, lists of meals planned by the catering service, and so on. Good thing I like lists!

Right in the middle of the preparing-for-November madness that is going on here, I have finally, finally managed to take photos of things. New things. For the shop.

Exhibit A:


Stone spindle whorls. These have been on my wishlist for oh, so long, and finally things came together: finds to base the whorls on (from Coppergate, York, dating to the 9th to post-12th century), and somebody willing and able to make them. I'm very happy with these, and I hope I won't be the only one!

There's even more whorl-y goodness. The lovely potter who makes my wheel-thrown whorls has made another batch, and has made more different forms this time: biconical, roundish, and the conical/discoid form I had before. So, Exhibit B:


I'm all in love with all the new whorls, and sorely tempted to diminish the stock by sneaking some of them (or, to be fair, a lot of them) into my own personal toolbox...

One of the things in frantic preparation right now are the experiments for the Textile Forum this year. We'll be having a rather experiment-heavy Forum, and all three planned things involve dyeing - one of the experiments will be a repeat of the Pompeii dyeing experiment exploring the influence of kettle metals, one will be a test about linen mordants with protein, and one will be looking at dye penetration in woven fabrics of different densities.

The lattermost requires appropriate yarns, and I will get to spinning tonight - a few hundred metres of yarn need to be done for weaving several samples. The weaving will take place at the Forum, and since the weaver lives in the Netherlands and I live in Germany, she will only see the yarns right before having to use them.

Most modern weavers use machine-spun, plied yarns, at least for the warp, because they are (usually) stronger than singles. Of course a plied yarn is stronger than just one of its singles, and modern yarns are often soft-spun, which means they are not very strong. So modern weavers tend to be a little nervous about using singles in the warp.

Just to make sure that the yarn is suitable for weaving - as in "strong enough" - I was sent instructions for testing, taken from "Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom: Discover the Full Potential of the Rigid-Heddle Loom, for Beginners and Beyond by Syne Mitchell (Storey Publishing 2015)". The two tests are the snap test and the drift test. For the snap test, you take the yarn between your hands so that about 10 cm are slack and then "snap your hands apart sharply"; for the drift test, you apply even, slow tension.

The instructions in the book say that if the yarn survives the snap test and "stretches and then stops" in the drift test, it's suitable as warp yarn. Can you guess my problem?

"Sharply" is not a very quantifyable thing. So if I take my yarn and pull my hands apart sharply, it will break. The same is true if I take a four-ply Regia sock wool yarn. In the drift test, my yarn will stretch and stretch and stretch and eventually snap... so according to these instructions, it would not be suitable for weaving.

I think the problem here is that you'd need to be a weaver and know the amounts of tension or snappiness in your own weaving process to really make these tests helpful. For non-weavers like me? Or for "remote testing" yarns? It needs to be more quantifyable.

So here's my equivalent to the drift test: Tie an empty plastic water bottle in the middle of a piece of the yarn to be tested, then tie the two ends somewhere so that the bottle hangs in a suitable way to be filled. (Hint: A shower or bathtub, or someplace outside that can take a splash of water would be good places.)

[caption id="attachment_2677" align="alignnone" width="319"] Setup for the drift test. Please do admire the typical "bathroom-in-Germany-in-the-Seventies" tiling in the background. The white spots on the handgrip also tell you that we have really hard water here.


Measure out a certain amount of water, such as one litre, which will be one kilogram. Then, slowly and with as evenly a stream as possible, pour water into your bottle until the yarn snaps. The difference between the amount of water you filled into your pouring container and the amount still left is the weight the yarn could take - in my case, about 880 g.

Now the equivalent to the snap test: Tie a weight to one end of your yarn to be tested, then measure out one metre of yarn plus a bit to hold, starting above the weight. Take the end of the yarn securely in one hand, the weight in the other, hold them side by side high enough, then drop the weight. If the yarn bounces back, it has survived the test. If you are not sure on how much weight is necessary for the thread to pass the weaver's requirements, add more weight until it snaps. (Obviously, the smaller the increments of added weights are, the smaller your squishiness factor will be. My yarn snaps somewhere between about 60 and 100 g of weight.)

I've finished my test run with the e-spinner, and the result is 745 m of two-ply yarn.

The things I learned... they are many.

I am a sucker for slow colour gradients in yarns. Always have been - so I had a lot of fun spinning, and I was delighted with the result:


What I'm not as fond of, though, is when the slow colour gradient doesn't match up properly. Which was, unfortunately, the case from about the middle of the two batches. Where there should have been a lot of bright, clear yellow, there was a lot of overlap between yellow and orange instead, and the other colours followed suit.


I'm especially not fond of the mix of very light and rather dark, like the mix of purple and salmon on the very right end of the bobbin. But there was nothing to do but persevere, and finish the plying.

I'm not the queen of plying, by the way. I can spin alright, but I'm not plying often enough to have a lot of practice, so there are more places than I like that are badly plied.

The bobbin was finished in spite of my unhappiness with the colour match:


and at least at the end, the colours did match up better again. I guess I'll find out how it looks when I figure out what to do with 745 m of fine two-ply yarn. Knitting, probably. (Suggestions for patterns are welcome.)

Next step was measuring out the length - that means skeining. Next thing I learned was a two-fer: The plying differences did not even out even though I had a long stretch of the yarn between bobbin and skeiner; and my skeiner is not up to the strain a large amount of wool places on its arms... so I definitely need a new one now, and have to repair the old one. Good thing my length measurement is done via a separate tool and not through counting turns on the skeiner!

Once the measuring was done, I soaked the skein in water, and now it hangs for drying. There are, as mentioned, ample spots where the plying work is not perfect. There are also quite a few places where I could have done a better job spinning. But since the aim of the whole project was to gain experience with the new tool and to get a speed benchmark, that I can live with... especially as I found out that I can spin rather quickly. So now I can calculate for spinning medieval-style yarns on the e-spinner for reconstruction projects. Plus I have some nice colourful yarn to play with. Hooray!