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Soft yarns, hard facts? Evaluating the results of a large-scale hand-spinning experiment

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Abstract

In 2009, a spinning experiment was undertaken with the aim of evaluating the possible influences of spindle, fibre and spinner on the resulting yarn when spinning with a bottom-whorl drop-spindle as commonly used in Middle European regions. Fourteen spinners participated, spinning two wool types on five different spindle types, resulting in a total of 140 spun samples. The yarns spun during the experiment were analysed using traditional quality assessment methods for the textile industry (measuring length and mass, and using visual survey cards), traditional hand-spinners’ methods (wraps of yarn over a given length of a dowel) as well as an image analysis programme to evaluate yarn diameter and yarn evenness, two properties that are difficult to measure using the classic methods. The results show that the dominant factor influencing the yarn was the individual spinner; neither whorl mass, nor whorl moment of inertia, nor fibre did influence the spun yarn significantly.

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Acknowledgments

This experiment and its analysis would not have been possible without the help of many persons who are due thanks for their help and support. Planning, designing, running the experiment and evaluating the results was done with support from André Verhecken, Karl-Friedrich Pfeiffer, Sabine Ringenberg, Katharina Gottschlig, Reinhard Eisner, Sarah Goslee and Michael Böhnel. Thanks are also due to Roeland Paardekooper and the Historisch OpenluchtMuseum Eindhoven for their logistical support and to Gerhard Eischer for partly sponsoring the wool used in the experiment. Julia Groll designed and made the spindle-whorl “cookie cutters”, and Susanne Schödel-Guthke, Staatliches Prüfamt Textil Münchberg, generously gave me the opportunity to use the high-precision reel for length measurements. And finally and most importantly, thanks are due to the participating spinners Lidwine De Wit, Kerstin Gafiuk, Ruth Gilbert, Sarah Goslee, Ruth MacGregor, Christina Grünefeld, Marion Hartmann, Viktoria Holmqvist, Heather Hopkins, Margriet Klees, Susanna Koskelo, Rachel Lemon, Ave Matsin, Harma Piening and Sabine Ringenberg.

The European Textile Forum, the conference designed to accommodate this experiment and to help meet the logistical challenge it proposed, has now turned into a yearly conference focusing on the practical aspects and problems of historical textile crafts. The Forum homepage is www.textileforum.org. The full dataset of the spinning experiment can also be downloaded from there.

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  1. An der Lauseiche 8, 91058, Erlangen, Germany

    Katrin Kania

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  1. Katrin Kania
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Correspondence to Katrin Kania.

Additional information

Programmes used for this study were Microsoft Excel 2000, Tableau Public 5.1 (www.tableausoftware.com/public/), R with packages R Commander and Rattle (cran.r-project.org/), ImageJ (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/) and MiniTab (www.minitab.com).

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Kania, K. Soft yarns, hard facts? Evaluating the results of a large-scale hand-spinning experiment. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 7, 113–130 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-013-0167-y

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