As I kept spinning from my rolled up wad of wool, I eventually came to the point when I hade to re-roll it to make the cloth tighter. When I put it back onto the distaff, I arranged it in the same manner as in the image of the Virgin Mary from the National Museum of Hungary I showed in the previous post. It puts the wool in a really comfortable position for drafting, escpecially when having the distaff standing straight up in a floor stand, so I thought I just post a picture of it. My wool is a lot more untidy than the Virgin's, but it works great for the fluffier and less even weft thread I'm spinning at the moment!

The Virgin Mary spinning with a free-standing distaff, the Nationl Museum of Hungary, c. 1410, and my sloppy version of her distaff...

Handspinning has completely taken over my spare time lately. I work full time and commute for a total of three hours every day, so I need to set goals for my crafting to actually get things done. If I don't, I will just collapse on the sofa when I come home in the evening and do nothing. Sad but true. So a while ago, I decided to try to spin for an absolute minimum of eight hours per week (with a spindle - wheel spinning doesn't count). It's not much, but it's something and it has made a little difference - I'm getting faster for one thing! And since spinning for me partly consists of collapsing perching primly on the sofa anyway - see video below! - it's not even particularly taxing to keep it up.

These days, I almost always spin with a distaff if I have the choice, twirling the spindle with one hand and drafting with the other. It wasn't love at first sight when I started learning this traditional and time-honoured technique, though. I think 'complete and utter frustration' sums up my initial feelings quite accurately. All aspirations of thread control went out the window and it was like starting all over again with only thick-and-thin, useless yarn as the result (useless for my purposes, that is. I don't do art yarn. Not at the moment, anyway). It took a fair amount of practice, but once I got the hang of it, it quickly became my preferred way of spinning. I went from total frustration to 'No more suspended spindling for me, EVER!' in less than 3 months.

The distaff is a fantastic tool - it works as a third hand. Judging from how spinners are depicted in contemporary art, it also seems to be virtually ubiquitous to medieval spindle spinning (there are a few exceptions, of course, like in this early 13th century manuscript, and perhaps this one from the 14th century). Even when more or less suspended spinning is shown - as in this rather rare depiction of a top whorl spindle, for example - the distaff is still there, and the one-hand drafting technique, too:

British Library, 'The Rutland Psalter', Add MS 62925 fol. 86r, c. 1260.

With a distaff to hold the fibres, my hands are free to draft and twirl the spindle and it gives me a much better workning position than suspended spindling without a distaff does. I also find that it's much easier to control the amount of twist that goes into the thread this way (which is kind of important when you spin yarn for historical purposes). In addition, it completely removes the problem of back-spin - that annoying phenomenon when your thread has eaten all the momentum of the turning spindle and it starts going the other way while you're still busy drafting. Many medieval spindle whorls are small with a low moment of inertia, which means they spin fast, but stop turning really quickly and you have to restart them a lot to avoid back-spin when you're spinning suspended. And guess what - the distaff/spindle in hand-technique more or less takes the 'drop' out of 'drop spindle' (a term I've never really understood anyway - it has no Swedish equivalent; here we just have 'sländor' (spindles), plain and simple). Now I don't mind using my precious clay whorls on our hardwood floors at home, because even if the thread breaks, I don't drop them anymore.

Here's a video of me spinning warp thread for weaving, with a distaff made out of a broom stick. When I've spun a length of thread, I stop drafting and add extra twist to it. As I relax the thread to unhitch the half hitch that keeps it on the spindle, I simultaneously check the twist by feeling the resistance as the thread curls back on itself.
More and more medieval reenactors use a distaff and hand-held spindle when spinning these days. It's becoming quite a trend among historical fibre geeks! Usually, I'm not a huge fan of reenactment fads. Far too often they are based on scant sources and result in odd over-representations when suddenly the whole reenactment community is doing the same thing. And people often end up copying other reenactors rather than looking at the sources themselves, which is not the way to go in my opinion. But when it comes to distaffs and spinning, it's a trend that simply can't go wrong! It's raising the authenticity in reenactment displays by showing tools and techniques that were actually common and widespread both geographically and over time.

In art, medieval distaffs appear to be around a metre in length, held under the arm, tucked into the belt, held between the knees while sitting or sometimes mounted on a stand. The Roman or ancient Greek tradition of short, hand-held distaffs doesn't seem to be the way to go for medieval spinning. I've found one medieval image - or rather a sculpture - with what might be a hand-held distaff. It's St Gertrude of Nivelles, a 7th century saint often portrayed spinning and surrounded by rats. However, it might just be that the rest of the distaff has broken off, but I couldn't tell by looking at the statue whether that was the case or not. It's a nice rat, though...

St. Gertrude of Nivelles, wooden sculpture,1390-1400. Originally from Pfarrkirche St. Michael in Spiringen, Switzerland. Swiss National Museum, Zürich. Pix by Vix.

As far as I know, not a whole lot of finds have been identified by archaeologists as distaffs. I mean, a lot of the time they would just be plain sticks, so there's not much to identify really. There's a medieval one from Schloss Gottorf in northern Germany (see below), though, and several distaff heads have been found at medieval Novgorod in Russia. From Staraia Ladoga, also in Russia, there are reported finds of distaffs from as early as the 9th century. Both the ones from Novgorod and those from Staraia Ladoga seem to be 'bat distaffs' with a top section shaped like a paddle, a type that remained popular in Russia well into the 19th century (Sherman 2008). It's not a type that seems to be depicted in European medieval manuscripts, though, and although similar distaffs exist here in Sweden from post-medieval times, I've decided to stick with the straight stick version for now. Although Novgorod traded a lot with Europe through the Hanseatic League in the Middle Ages, I'm personally a little wary of using finds from such a relatively far-off place when my focus is southern Scandinavia/northern Germany (on the other hand, the huge amount of well-preserved wooden objects makes it very difficult not to glance eastwards to Novgorod every once in a while...).

Medieval distaff (and also spindles and parts of niddy-noddies), Schloss Gottorf, Germany. Pix by Vix.

There are many ways of dressing a distaff. The most commonly depicted versions in medieval manuscripts appear to fall into two (very!) broad categories:
- the more or less fluffy fibre bundle, often tied in place by a narrow band
- the cone-shaped fibre bundle, either tied with a band or with some sort of cloth (?) cover, or both. More images of medieval distaffs and spinning can be found over at my Pinterest board Medieval Fibre Preparation & Spinning, where I've also tried to add the original source for all the pins.

'The Holkham Bible', British Library, AddMss 47682, fol. 4v & 6r, 1320-30.

A nun (St. Gertrude?) spinning in the company of a helpful cat. 'Maastricht Hours', British Library, Stowe MS 17, fol. 34r, 1st half of the 14th century.

British Library, MS Royal 10 E IV, fol. 49v, early 14th century.

Another one of those rarely depicted top whorl spindles! 'The Taymouth Hours', British Library, MS Yates Thompson 13, fol. 23v, 2nd quarter of the 14th century.

Could this perhaps be an image showing the elusive practice of spinning dyed wool (see this previous post)? 'Ormesby Psalter', Bodleian Library, MS Douce 366, fol. 71v, c. 1310.

Basically, it's perfectly possible to achieve all these different shapes using a simple straight stick as a distaff. The cone-shaped ones may have some sort of structure underneath, perhaps like a 'modern' (19th century) cage distaff or something similar, but it's difficult to tell from the contemporary images exactly what's hiding under the fibres.  

In some cases, it's obvious that the images show flax being spun rather than wool - if the spinner (or monkey, in the case of the illuminated manuscript below) is running the thread through their mouth, it's a pretty good indication of flax (or hemp) spinning, since it's commonly spun wet.

A monkey spinning flax. British Library, Additional 18851 f459, 1480s.

But sometimes people claim you can tell what fibre is being spun in an image just from the shape of the fibre bundle on the distaff. I'm not so sure. Medieval images just aren't detailed enough and most distaff shapes can actually be created with either wool or flax. It's just a matter of how you arrange the fibres. Wool can be gathered into long, thick tops that look very much like flax strick (hackled flax bundles) when tied to a distaff and flax, on the other hand, can be wrapped like candy floss around the distaff head. Which ends up looking rather round and fluffy and wool-like. Long fibres that hang straight down may of course be flax, but then again, this is what my distaff looks like when I'm spinning worsted wool:

Combed wool from the double-coated Värmland sheep, a Swedish landrace breed.

And this is how I go about dressing it:

Top left image: hand-combed tops rolled into little 'bird's nests' for storage. Bottom left image: a wide band of woollen cloth (150x10 cm) with pieces of the tops arranged in layers. Right image: the band and wool rolled around the distaff and secured with a pin and a linen tie. A similar way of doing this can be found at Katrin Kania's blog A Stitchin Time: How I dress my distaff.

Here's another way of getting the fibres onto the distaff; this works very well for industrially prepared tops or for hand-combed wool, but carded rolags can also be tied to the distaff in this way.
Combed tops (or their modern counterpart) can also be wound around the distaff, as may be the case in this image:

'The Queen Mary Psalter', BL Royal 2 B VII, fol 158, between 1310 and 1320.

Modern carded batts or hand-carded (or even just teased) wool collected into a big pile can be rolled into a nice little package like this...
...which looks a lot like the distaff arrangement in this image...
 

'Speculum humanae salvationis'. GKS 80 2o, fol. 6r, the first half of the 15th century. Det Konglige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Denmark.

...and also like the Virgin Mary's fibre bundle in this image (but without the angel):

Virgin Mary, pregnant and spinning. Anonymous, c. 1410. Hungarian National Museum, Budapest.

The package can be attached to the distaff at a jaunty angle as in the image above, or simply stuck unceremoniously onto the top of the distaff as it is:

There! Let's start spinning already!

As long as the fibres aren't too sticky, I've found that almost anything goes when it comes to dressing a distaff. A great messy tangle is fine - as long as it's possible to pull the wool off it one-handed, it'll work - but it will affect the thread. Snags, neps and sticky fibres on the distaff naturally make a less even thread, while carefully prepared wool really helps in spinning a smooth thread. Like so many other things, the end result owes so much to the preparations. I often use the tie around the bundle to control the flow of fibres, adjusting it to give me just enough resistance to draft against when I want a non-fuzzy thread. I personally find it helps with a little bit of resistance when I want a smooth thread, but for fluffier yarn I just let twist do most of the drafting for me. At the moment (in between sessions of spinning for weaving), I trying to learn how to do a proper woollen long draw, which of course requires yet another slightly different one-handed drafting technique. I'm starting to get some usable thread out of it now, and it's good practice for the day when I finally get myself a great wheel...


Textiles tools from medieval Novgorod:
http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/NovgorodfabricP.html
 
Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Volym 4: "From Flax to Linen in Medieval Rus Lands" - Heidi M. Sherman, 2008.

Dressing distaffs:
How I Dress My Distaff- A Stitch inTime

So what IS just sogreat about adistaff? - 15th Century Spinning

Lately, I've been spamming Facebook and Instagram with prettily arranged collages of differently coloured dyed-in-the-wool...wool. I bought it from The Mulberry Dyer at the market during this summer's big reenactment event, the Battle of Azincourt 1415-2015.

Why did the reenactor go to France? To stand slouching forlornly in a muddy field. In the rain. Apparently. Photo: Karolina

I also spoke more French at (yes, at...) bemused strangers than I've ever done before, which is very unlike me but in A Good Way. And I really enjoyed the market at the event.

The Azincourt Loot. Wool, a wooden mug, the ink pot, thread reels and spindle whorls

The wool turned into big rolags. IT'S SO FLUFFY!!!

Spindle and distaff collage. The colours, THE COLOURS!

It's not easy being green. The Muppet: spun, wound onto reels for plying, and plied

And here's how I make the big rolags:

The commercially prepared and plant-dyed wool is much too sticky to spin as it is when using a distaff and the one-hand drafting technique seen in medieval depictions of spinners. It needs to run smoothly from the distaff into the thread, so the sticky fibres have to be separated. I do this by drafting the top into a much thinner one. From this top I then pull off shorter lengths of fibres and arrange them next to each other in a big fluffy pile before rolling them up and attaching them to the distaff. Now the fibres will be all mixed up when I draft and that's the way I want it. This particular type of Shetland wool has pretty short fibres and although it's perfectly possible to both comb it and spin it worsted style, it doesn't really make what I think of as a true worsted thread, not in medieval terms (for that I want longer and hairier wool). So I prefer to spin it as a woollen thread.

 

 

In medieval times, the fulled fabric was stretched on tenterhooks while still damp to get its final shape (from which we get the English expression 'to be on tenterhooks'). Not having a tenter around, or even a wall on which to nail my fabric, I had to make do with the slightly more modern finishing treatment of rolling it on a plastic tube instead. And re-rolling it once a day until it was completely dry. Normally, this wouldn't have been a problem. As it happened, me and boyfriend J-E were leaving to go backpacking in Switzerland the day after I returned from the fulling mill... No time for the fabric to dry.

Rolling the fabric (or keeping it stretched out) while it dries is rather important to get a good finish and remove any wobbliness introduced into the fabric by the violent fulling process. Skipping this stage was not something I wanted to do after spending so much time and effort on my fabric... Letting it dry on the plastic tube was not an option either; I didn't want to risk it going mouldy in my abscence! Eventually, I resorted to a kind of speed drying that worked surprisingly well: The house we live in has room for drying laundry in, equipped with a great big hot air fan. I stayed up all night (more or less), re-rolling my fabric every couple of hours, letting it sit on the plastic tube in the drying room in between.

Fabric. On a roll!

Swiss Collage: Best train ride ever! - Neuchâtel tomb - Happy Swiss biscuits

Pattern pieces

The first cut! The brown thread marks one of the three weaving faults in my cloth...

Both the colour and the frayed edges turned out a lot better than expected

A slightly hairy thread...

Felling the shoulder seam à la Herjolfsnes

So what to do with small amounts of very pretty, handspun wool? Samples, of course!!! Here's what I did with the woad-dyed Finnish Jaala wool from the previous post:

Striped tabby sample: Before and after fulling

The white yarn is also spun from the Jaala wool Mervi gave me and I thought I'd use it to try out a few stripes in both regular tabby and extended tabby. Medieval fabrics often have stripes in a different weave from the rest of the cloth. Making weft-faced stripes in an otherwise more or less balanced cloth makes the stripes stand out more and the difference can be seen quite clearly in my sample (see Textiles and Clothing, c.1150-1450. Medieval Finds from Excavations in London for examples of actual medieval fabrics with stripes).

This sample isn't woven on a proper loom; I simply put some warp threads between two clamps and used a shed rod and soft heddles for the countershed. Rather sloppily tied heddles, I might add. Well. I should have known better. The one thing about heddles is that they should never ever be sloppy. They are what makes weaving work (among other things), unless you decide to pick each and every shed by hand. Still, I managed to get 30 cm of weaving out of this 4 cm wide set-up before I gave up. It's been a long time since I did any serious weaving like this, with soft heddles and no reed, and I'm really out of practice! It was difficult to keep both the width and the weft even. Next time I'll use my table loom instead, even if it's for a small sample like this. It takes a little longer to set up, but it makes the weaving so much easier...

So, after two weeks of working with this very appropriately coloured Finnish wool, my stash of samples is happy to receive the following additions:

Finnish wool, finished

The white and blue balls of yarn in the middle are the ones I used for weaving. The third yarn is a two-ply spun from the leftover fibres from the combs, sorted and teased out by hand. The fourth yarn is also spun from the leftover fibres, but straight from the combs, lumps and all. It's interesting to see what a difference a bit of extra work does to the quality of the thread!

"I knew they were crazy, those Finns, but blue sheep? Really?!", said boyfriend J-E when he came home yesterday and found me with an impressive fluffed-up cloud of blue wool. 

I told him, "The Finns don't have blue sheep, however, they've got Mervi" (of the Hibernaatiopesäke blog).

Jaala sheep's wool, dyed with woad.

I got this sample of wool from the Jaala sheep from Mervi this summer. She had dyed it with her own home-grown woad! The result: deliciously blue wool that was begging to be spun. 

The wool: very soft and short-stapled. And blue.

The dyed wool was very fine, with an average staple-length of about 4 cm. Since I wanted to be able to use as much of it as possible (preciousss fibresss...), I decided to make a proper effort preparing it. To get a nice, even colour I first needed to mix all the fibres thoroughly. I did this by pulling the staples apart by hand and turning the wool into the fluffy cloud of blue that my boyfriend commented on. In Swedish, this is called tesning. I then chose, rather counter-intuitively, to comb the wool rather than carding it. Combing wool this short is not the usual practice these days, but it's very probable that it was prepared in this way in medieval times. The use of wool cards in the middle ages is a rather interesting, not entirely straight-forward subject. The comprehensive history of wool cards goes something like this, according to John Munro (who sadly passed away recently):

Wool cards arrived in Europe during the later part of the 13th century, probably borrowed from the Islamic cotton industries in Spain or Sicily. Some historians argue that cards were being used as early as mid-11th century, but, according to Munro, it's unclear whether they refer to wool cards or fullers' cards, used to raise a nap on fulled cloth. Wool cards, as we know them, were quickly banned from use in many (not all) of the professional textile centres around Europe, at least for the production of high-quality cloth. In some places, carded wool was allowed in the weft yarn, but not for the warp (just like the use of the great wheel for spinning the thread). Later, in the 15th century, several of these bans were lifted, although many producers continued using only combed wool for their cloths. (Munro 2003, in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles).

This information is all about wool cards and their use in professional cloth production. But how widespread was the use of cards (and the great wheel, for that matter) among everyday spinners, who didn't spin for the big textile centres? When was the use of cards established in my native Sweden? Did we even use them here in medieval times?! I haven't managed to answer any of these questions. It doesn't help that in both English and German, the medieval word for cards/karden is also used for the teasel heads more commonly associated with raising the nap on fulled cloth. Some books (and about 10 million webpages) actually refer to teasels being used for carding wool, too, but I'm not entirely convinced. I've yet to see a reliable source, or someone who's actually carded a whole fleece with teasels. I have a suspicion that the strain of carding raw wool would be a bit too much for the teasels, but then again, I might be wrong.

(please prove me wrong! either with a good, solid reference or by a practical test. I have a bunch of teasel heads from Dipsacus sativus - the cultivated teasel that is used for finishing cloth - but no time to try them out myself at the moment...)

Anyway. The questions above, together with my general interest in trying things out, made me reach for my combs rather than my cards to prepare the very short Jaala wool. Here's the result.

The short and slubby leftovers and the combed rolled-up fibres, ready to spin.

Almost half of the wool ended up in the leftover pile. The very fine fibres had a tendency to stick together and form slubs, but once I had combed through a batch, it was easy to remove the slubs before pulling the rest of the fibers off the combs. To compare, I carded a tiny bit of wool too, but it turned out much more slubby and uneven. Even with fibres this short, combing worked wonderfully. It would have been better if my combs had had finer and more closely-spaced tines to match the fibre quality, but on the whole I'm happy with the result. Spinning the combed rolags was quick and easy!

Most of the leftover fibres are only a couple of centimetres or less, so I will first draft them into a fluffy semi-thread by hand before taking them to the spindle. It makes the short and lumpy wool easier to handle, but it also takes a lot of time and I have several hours left before I'm finished. So, back to work, and a great big thank you! to Mervi for giving me the spinning blues... ;-)

A spindleful of blue, and the beginnings of the last batch.

Edit 2014-01-31: In the comments below, Panth of the In My Lady's Chamber-blog linked to two post about teasels and cards. Read them - they're well-written and well-researched and sheds some more light on the subject of wool preparation!
Teasels for carding - a myth? 
Teasels: a quick note

References:
Jenkins, David T. (red.). 2003. The Cambridge history of western textiles. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

I will have to make more samples with my yarn. The fabric I'm going to use it for is not a tabby, but the old 14th century favourite 2/1 twill, which of course requires a different sett. But now I know that my spindle-spun threads work and will stand up to the wear and tear of being dragged through a loom. So...back to spinning!!! 

Obsessive Sampling Disorder (OSD)

For some reason, my first version of this post disappeared yesterday. I don't know how, but it's not online or on my blogger homepage. People's comments are still there, but not the actual post. Ah, well. I'll have to try to reconstruct it, since my next post is connected to it. Here goes...

My spindle, now with thread!

I'm spinning again. After years (yes, years) of quiet practice, I'm now reasonably happy with my handspun thread. At last, I feel that I control the output of my spindle. So now would be the time to get going with the Slightly Insane Wool Project I wrote about here. But combing and carding all that wool...well, it takes a lot of time. And I want to spin now!

So I've chosen to go for a Slightly Modified Wool Project instead. Rather than preparing the wool myself at this time, I've settled for pre-prepared Shetland wool, just to start things off with. I begun spinning warp thread from it a couple of weeks ago, at the 100 Jahre 14tes Jahrhundert event at Ronneburg, Germany, where I went together with friends from Albrechts Bössor. It was a wonderful event with great people, excellent food and lots and lots of textile talk, including a workshop on frilled veils (which Isis of Medieval Silkwork has written about here). I spent most of the weekend hanging out in the "textile room" upstairs in the burg, lounging in the (mostly) sunny courtyard or down by the gate with the guards, always with my spindle close at hand.

At the Ronneburg: Spinning and talking textiles with Mervi of the Hibernaatio blog

I also - finally! - got to fire a 14th century handgonne!

This past year hasn't been a particularly creative one, textile-wise. Or blog-wise for that matter. I simply haven't had the time or energy to create anything original or produce something worth posting about. The Slightly Insane Wool Project ground to a halt as I got more and more particular about the thread I spun. I went back to practising with pre-prepared, store-bought Shetland tops.

It wasn't until the Easter holidays last week that I actually started working with the wool I washed in the last post over a year ago! I practised longdraw drafting on my spinning wheel for two hours on Easter Monday and the result was...well, take a look at the lovely Ruth MacGregor spinning on YouTube and you'll know what my attempts did not look like... But at least I'm back in the game now, sort of.

So far, the things I've put on this blog have had something to do with medieval textiles/clothing, or the re-creation thereof. Lately, I've mostly done things like quite modern knitting and crocheting - very much for recreational purposes, but in the non-hyphenated sense of the word. Nothing even remotely traditional, medieval or even historical. And therefore, no posts.

But I've been thinking, why limit myself to medieval textiles? I work in a museum with huge modern textile collections (huge on a non-V&A-kind-of-scale. And modern in this case means post-1800), so most of my professional life is spent dealing with modern stuff.

Earlier this year, the museum received a dress from around 1880 which I got to register in the museum catalogue. It wasn't one of those fancy late 19th century silk dresses worn by the well-to-do, which museums are so fond of putting on display - it was a reasonably simple woollen dress. Fashionable and well-made, but simple. It piqued my interest. So rather than just adding it to the catalogue, I took the opportunity to measure it thoroughly and draft a pattern of it. The next step is of course to try to make one for myself (there I go again - re-creating...). My theoretical knowledge of drafting patterns for modern clothes (the 1800s qualifies as modern for me) is non-existant, so I have no idea if my pattern will work or if I will ever be able to adjust it to fit me. But I like a challenge. And I might even make a proper post about it later!

Anyway, working with the 19th century dress got me looking into more recent fashions, slowly dragging me out of the 14th century. Now I've read up on 17th - early 20th century clothing and tailoring techniques, immersed myself into the surprisingly fascinating world of the so-called "Västgötaknallarna"**, along with the early cottage industry and well-developed putting-out system for producing cloth in this region. And as a result of my new-found interest in post-medieval things, I made an amazing find at a second-hand shop about a month ago: