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.

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.

Well, or at least warp time - I've started spinning for the warp for our textile reconstruction. The first bobbin has been spun, and reeled off, and it was quite a bit of yarn... 

The original textile has very, very tightly twisted yarn in the warp, so I've been trying to spin to the same degree of twist without overtwisting it (so that it corkscrews in places). That is a challenge - but, well, I have a few more kilometers to go, and I'll surely get more relaxed about it soon. 

But for now... the weekend is coming, and I'm very much looking forward to that!

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 already looking forward to NESAT - this conference is always a highlight of the three-year-period that NESAT takes place. This time, it will be in Warsaw, Poland. I've been to Poland once already, many years ago, for an excavation, and I have a lot of good memories of these weeks, so it will be really nice to re-visit some of the local delicacies. And, of course, meet with the friends and colleagues from all over Europe.

The conference programme looks quite stuffed with interesting things - you can find it on the website, in case you are interested.