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. 

I'm very, very happy about two wonderful prototypes... of shears!

Shears were more common than scissors for most of the Middle Ages, at least according to archaeological evidence. They are still in use for some things today, so you can relatively easily get simple shears in either a fairly large or a very small size - for shearing sheep, pruning plants, or snipping threads.

The medium-sized shears, though, they are hard to come by if at all. And if you're going for historically correct shapes of the blade and the overall form, well, here's none of them that will pass scrutiny. So for years, I have searched for someone willing to accept the challenge and make shears for me to sell.

Finally, I found someone. These shears are made just like the originals were: With steel cutting edges, welded onto the iron body, in the shape and size they should be (around 14 cm in length). A nice, rounded bow at the end, and a bit of decorative waves just before the blades start. They are sharp enough and well enough aligned that they will cut fabric nicely and cleanly. 

There will be a little bit of fine-tuning to make them softer to press together, as cutting at the moment requires a little more strength than is comfortable for doing more than just short bits, and then they will turn up in the shop at some point. And I am thrilled they will!  

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.

Drafting speed is the other thing that can limit the spinning speeds you can achieve.

There's different techniques that can be used for drafting, and they will result in slightly different types of yarn. Whether those are easily to tell apart by eye is another question, and it may well depend on individual circumstances.

Technically, if you spin what archaeologists define as "worsted", your fibres are prepared in a way to align them all parallel, and your drafting process is in line with the fibre direction. That will give you a smooth, strong yarn. For woolen yarn, fibres are less strictly aligned, and they are drafted more or less from the side, so they may end up more or less folded in the yarn, or at least not quite as straight as in worsted. This will get you yarn that is a little fluffier and a bit less strong. For spinning woolens on a Great Wheel, I prepare my fibre with cards into rolags, and then I draft from the end of the rolag, which means the fibres are sort-of-parallel to the thread length axis, but not quite as much as in worsted. Most importantly for the drafting, though, you can do a long draw from rolags, which is very quick to do.

A variation of long draw can be done on hand-spindles, and it can also be done on a treadled spinning wheel. While I have personally not fallen in love with any of these variations (yet), they will increase drafting speeds considerably. However, they will not result in a worsted yarn type - so if you are going for that specific kind of yarn, you're still stuck with the "short draw" technique.

When you do long draw, the speed with which you can draft against twist depends, again, on the rotational speed you are getting. Long draw also needs to have something to draft against, whether that is the draw-in pull of your wheel, a fixed spindle tip, or your second hand temporarily holding the yarn. When you are doing short draw, the speed of rotation you have sort of sets a minimum speed you have to get to while drafting, to avoid the twist running into your fibre supply too quickly.

In any case, and whether using short draw or long draw, there's a limit to how quickly you can move. This limit depends on whether you're going for a sprint, that is if you're trying to spin as quickly as possible for 10 or 15 minutes, or if you are going to spin for an hour or two, or even longer, as you will do for production spinning. We'll come to that once more again, later.

Finally, if you have the interrupted process where you wind up in a separate stage, this time will be added to your actual spinning time, regardless of what the limiting factor of that process was. Wind-up time depends on how quickly you release how your thread was secured to the spindle (if there was something securing it), how quickly you wind up (that's the rotation you can achieve for the winding), and how long it takes you to set up for the next make.

On a spindle wheel, it means stopping your rotation in spin direction, un-winding a little bit by reversing rotational direction, then rotation in spinning direction again to wind up. From there, it's a fluid transition to the next make as all you have to do is leading your thread from the winding area to the spindle tip and then drafting again.

On a hand-spindle, you have to undo whatever secured your thread to the spindle tip (unless you were spinning in-hand and have a similar situation to the spindle wheel); unwind a bit to reach your cop, then winding up the yarn while you move the spindle towards the distaff or fibre supply in your hand. Then you need to re-secure your thread to the spindle before the next make. You can shave off some time by practice and efficient handling of the wind-up; if you do not change finger and hand position for winding up as compared to your spinning finger position, that will help. You can also have a hook or spiral notch at the spindle tip which can eliminate the need for a half-hitch, though with practice, making and undoing that hitch also takes only a small amount of time. 

Again, though: There are limits to how fast one can move and do these.

So - let's look at the individual limiting factors, or potential limiting factors, to your spinning speeds.

For the actual spinning process, there's the insertion of rotation - your rotational speeds achievable with your tool - and the drafting speed. You'll run into one of those before the other, and inevitably, that is what will limit your maximum achievable speed. We'll look at the rotational speeds first.

How you get the rotation that you want or need depends on the tool you're using, of course. Most modern hand-spinners use a treadle wheel (at least my impression is that most modern spinners are wheel-spinners). Here, your rotation is limited by the speed with which you can treadle and the ratios you can have between your wheel and your flyer and/or bobbin (depending on wheel construction). In general, if your wheel is larger, you will get higher speeds. If the size difference between your wheel and flyer/bobbin is larger, you will get higher speeds; so you can tune your wheel, to a degree, with an appropriately smaller-sized bobbin. However... there's limits to that; I have once tried to super-tune a wheel that I have, and it did not work in a rather spectacular manner. Because you also have slippage on a wheel, and changing the diameter of the pulley part of your flyer or whorl will change friction between your drive band and the pulley... and if the angles don't lead to enough frction to get everything running smoothly, well, your pulley can be as theoretically well-suited for high speeds as can be, it will still not work properly. So there's limits to what you can do regarding the transmission.

If we look at the hand-spindle, the speeds you will be able to get depend on a lot more factors. Your technique of how you set the spindle into motion; if you use the finger flick, the thickness of the upper end where you grasp the spindle is one of them (thinner means higher speeds achievable) and your finger strength, as well as the weight and shape of the whorl will all influence how well your spindle runs. Of course the frequency of your setting the spindle in motion also is important, as well as the amount of time that this action takes away from your drafting time if you're spinning long suspended.

If your tool is an e-spinner, your rotation speed limit is the limit of what the tool will deliver. This means it takes a bit of stress away from your body - you don't have to do movements (and maybe train them) to achieve high speeds, just twist a knob or press the pedal down some more, and you get more twist. The speed I'm running my e-spinner at? Well. According to its manual, it can get up to 1650 rpm with the foot pedal attached (which is the case when I'm working), and I have very rarely, if ever, cranked it up to max. But even if it's "only" running at about 1000, or 1200 rpm, I'm pretty sure that I would not be able to get that speed on a treadled spinning wheel, let alone on the hand-spindle.

Which means that for me, when working the e-spinner, the limiting factor is my drafting speed... which is what we'll be looking at next.