My explorations of medieval and not-so-medieval crafts, particularly tablet weaving and other ways of playing with string. Weaving, twining, wire knitting, sewing and more! I plan to include both the progress of my projects and the progress of my research into the history of various patterns and techniques.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Spinning Yarn and Tangling Cards

My Birka tablet weaving has been a bit intimidating so today I chose spinning as my activity while I caught up on my shows--now that I've been doing all this tablet-weaving, it feels wasteful to sit and watch something without my hands making something.

I was pleased to find that my spinning skill hadn't declined any in the months since I last tried my hand at. That isn't to say that I'm great at it, but it's reasonably thin and reasonably even and I'm getting better at prepping and feeding in the wool while the spindle is spinning, rather than giving it some spin and then stopping it and then letting the spin travel up some prepared length of wool and so on. I was even using continuous roving rather than breaking off managable pieces and tearing them lengthwise to make them thinner like I did in the beginning. This did become humorous however when I got up to answer the phone, clutching spindle and thread and unwittingly trailing roving across the whole living room and office. Regathering it seemed disturbingly like recoiling intestines.

This evening I finally tackled the weaving again. I got it going and was finding something of a rhythm with it. I have it in 4 packs now, one of which is two combined which only need be separated for two of the eight picks. Even with only four packs instead of five and overlapping them a bit, they take up a lot more working area than usual. And so the spin forming is more quickly a problem than usual. I decided to try changing direction after less than two feet of weaving. The direction change looks quite decent though I'd be tempted to try a couple other potential reversal points to see how they differ. But it looks of a piece, so I wasn't too worried about needing to change directions more often than usual.

Unfortunately, I apparently didn't have the reversed turning sequence drummed into my head well enough. I've messed up the turning sequence somehow and am now in that painful and slow process of working my way backward to a familiar point. I'm too tired to have the patience to get any further with it right now. Hopefully it will look less scary, not more so, in the morning.

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