Spinning speeds are a topic (or a question) that comes up again and again - and it is, like all questions about craft durations and times needed and work speeds, a difficult one.

To start off by stating the obvious: There's no cut-and-dried formula for saying how long task X will take when we're talking about crafts. That is even true for modern craft works, where there are machines to help with (and often reduce) work time. Usually, when you are experienced, you can estimate how long something will take, but complications can arise at any time. As soon as more unknown elements enter your task equation, things get more squishy as well. And of course a lot depends on details such as the fineness of a textile, or the finishing of some woodwork (raw surfaces, or do they get sanded, maybe sanded more than once, or maybe then oiled or laquered as well?). 

That said, when we're turning towards textiles, spinning is a considerable chunk of the work time needed to make a woven fabric. And of course your spinning time needed will depend on a lot of factors again - type and preparation (especially prep quality) of your fibre, the amount of twist necessary (which depends on what amount of twist you're going to and the thickness of your yarn), and the tool you are working with, and the proficiency of the spinner. Because we're talking serious amounts here when spinning for fabric, a 10% difference in speed will mean quite a substantial difference in time.

Things that should not be forgotten as well are prep time for the fibre (but that's another can of worms, and we'll keep that nicely closed, with the lid weighed down, and stashed in the back of a shelf in the dark for now) and post-processing of the yarn. Reeling off will also take a bit of time, as will setting the twist - a must-do if you're working with high-twist yarns in the historical style. They are not taking too long each, but they will add up, too, especially if you are spinning smaller portions at one go, because your bobbin is small or your spindle has limited capacity.

Finally, when you are calculating the amounts needed for a fabric, you have to allow for the amount that gets eaten by the initial shrinkage, when you take the raw piece off the loom and wash it for the first time. (For me, that is part of the weaving process, because no textile ever is finished before it's been wet and dried again once.) And, of course, my personal frenemy: the loom waste.

Loom waste is the bits of warp thread that you have which cannot be woven. You have a bit of loom waste with almost every weaving process; in the few special weaving variations that you do not get any loom waste at all, your price for this is more hours spent by doing the last centimetres of weaving with a needle, without the help of your normal method of opening a shed. It's entirely possible, but not something that's done quickly and easily (and it would be quite interesting to compare the amount of time needed to do that, and the amount of time spent on spinning for the loom waste, and compare those two). Loom waste, depending on your loom type, will range somewhere between about maybe 70 cm if you're lucky and have an economic set-up, or 150 cm if your loom is rather, um, hungry. That's per warp thread, mind you - so if you have 1000 warp threads (which would be a 10 thr./cm fabric in 1 m raw width, nothing out of the ordinary and actually rather on the narrow side of things), you're spinning a whole klick just for the waste bin. (You can use the cut-offs for stuff, of course, but they will definitely not be part of the fabric.)

There are quite a few statements about how quickly some people spin around the Internets, and some of them seem rather, um, outlandish to me. The Guinness World Record that has been documented is 99,45 m in one hour; unfortunately there's no statement about the tool used for this. There's people claiming that they spin more than 500 metres in one hour... which to me sounds not feasible, to be honest.

There's two to three limiting factors to how much you can spin in a given amount of time: Your rate of twist insertion (that's the rotational speeds you can achieve with your tool); your drafting speed; and - if you are spinning on a hand-spindle or spindle wheel or some other tool that does not automatically wind up your yarn, your wind-up speed.

I had the pleasure yesterday to meet up with three lovely colleagues for a little bit of weaving together - working with backstrap loom techniques used by the Maya in Guatemala. 

It was really fascinating for me to see the overlaps and the differences between the other bits of backstrap weaving that I have done. Some things remain the same, some things are done slightly differently, some are very different. I've also managed to do a few of the steps much better than in previous tries - so I was pretty chuffed at the end of the day. 

 I'm especially fond of the super simple way the heddles were made for this variation - they are just loops pulled across the stick, no knots, no nothing, super quick to make. Which was a good thing, because I didn't get the length right the first time around and had to re-heddle, and then there was an error or two so I had to re-do some bits again. And of course there were two errors in the cross (how did they happen, I ask myself, and why did I not catch them?) so I'm planning to do the heddles again next time I sit down with this and return the two stray slackers to the fold. (Also one of the heddles is too long, and despite several tries at adjusting it which is possible in theory, I have been quite unsuccessful.)

So I returned home a very happy lady after that day, and with a few more insights on what is important on a loom type like this, both in regards to the process and the tools. A grand day out indeed!

I'm fitting a bit of spinning in every day now - and there's noticeable progress. Or, more precisely: The first three bobbins have been filled, and been reeled off, and now I have the first three skeins of yarn, destined to be the weft yarn for our fabric reconstruction. 

They might not look like much, but it's almost 1.5 km of yarn, with a rather high twist (as you can see from the skeins crunching up). A bit more to go for the weft, and then I will go on to spin the warp yarn, from a different kind of wool and with even higher twist. The warp in the original is actually really, really hard-spun, and it will be interesting to reproduce this. I just hope it will behave on the loom and not be too hard and awkward to weave with!

Not paper as in paper used to make membrane threads, but a paper about membrane threads - Caroline Solazzo, Cristina Scibè and a couple more researchers have published a paper about their work on membrane gilt threads. It can be found in "Nature", and to my great delight, it's open access.

You can read "Palaeoprotomics and microanalysis reveal techniques of production of animal-based metal threads in medieval textiles." here.

In this case, "it" is the spinning - with the first bobbin all done and completely filled: 

The second bobbin is not full yet, but as soon as it is, I will wind skeins from both of them, measure the amount done, weigh them, and set the twist. And then the rest will be spun.

I'm starting with the weft in this case, and I'm trying to make it a little bit thicker than in the test run; same will happen with the warp. The weft in the originals is rather unevenly thick and thin, so I'm sort of trying to not pay too much attention to thickness while staying in the appropriate range.

It's funny how trying to match a non-perfect original thread is about as hard (though maybe in a different way) than trying to match a really well-done, almost perfect original thread!

In case you're a knitter and enjoy looking at, and thinking about, different stitch structures and what a special move does to the surrounding stitches, you might want to check out Naomi Parkhurst's Stitch Structure series.  She's looking at increases and a cast-on technique as well as some other things like elongated stitches - with lovely drawings that make it very clear what is happening. I do enjoy blog posts such as that, and it's always nice to get this slightly different look at knitting!

I'm back, I've taken a bit of time off yesterday to make up for the weekend, and now it's playing catch-up with all the tasks left to do this week. 

The weekend was lovely, and fun, and a little exhausting (for everyone, probably, not just for me). Friday morning, as I was ready to go to the train station, I got a message from the app that the train I was planning to take would be 98 minutes late... which, knowing how things go, means it would arrive even later by the time it was supposed to arrive, and I would not be able to catch the second ICE, and would travel at least double the amount of time scheduled. 

Now... if it would have been a 2-hour journey, I would have considered doing it. But it would have been almost 6 hours as scheduled, so... no. Which meant I did take the car after all, and drove there, and I did that rather early to avoid getting caught in Friday evening rush hour traffic. (Plan worked.)

I spent a very nice afternoon and evening with the organiser of the workshop and one of the other participants, and then on Saturday I set out with them to make a lot of brain cells work hard. In theory, tablet weaving is very, very easy - you have to be able to tell light from dark and count up to two. In practice, putting all the things together and remembering all the new rules can make heads spin...  

We started with warping (as I usually do in my workshops) and went on to explore threading and turning directions, stripes and monochrome surface weaving before moving on to diagonals and freestyle diagonal patterning. 

As usual, I took way too little photos during the whole thing... I am always too distracted to remember to do so. This time, it was a little better thanks to "take photos" cues in my workshop script - which means that I can at least show you a photo of part of the room:

That was taken during a break, with everyone getting some nice food and filling up on coffee.

And in case you're curious: Installing the edge tablets did go quite well, but next time I will do the installation a little later, in hopes that that will make things a little bit easier. 

After the end of the workshop on Sunday afternoon, I packed up everything, was gifted with a bit of food for the road and set off for home, tired but happy.