Week seven continued to be filled with mostly spinning and some combing of wool. I didn’t have much energy to do more than that this week (or the week before, or the following week) to be honest. There’s nothing like having health problems interfering with your ability to function, no?
But spinning is a low energy activity that doesn’t involve too much thought in the actual physicality of it. Though, I suppose that isn’t 100% true; it’s just that I’ve been spinning long enough that it’s mostly second nature to me. The only part that is difficult is drafting the wool: drawing out an amount of fiber for twist to enter into, which transforms the fiber from roving to yarn. Drafting on a spinning wheel is a little different than drafting on a spindle, and I have a lot of little neps (little balls of wool made of very short fibers that have squished together). They’re quite small and if I was spinning a thicker yarn they wouldn’t be an issue, but I’m spinning a quite fine yarn, so when they get drafted in, they become rather obvious. I either have to carefully pull them out if they make it into my yarn, or catch them in the roving and pull the out before they’re drafted in. It’s annoying and it’s shown me that I should have combed my wool more. I usually did about four passes with the combs and I know I was careful, so the neps aren’t from me tearing the fiber. I just didn’t comb enough. At least I know this for the rest of the fleece that I still have to comb.
I checked out another book from the library: Ariadne’s Threads: The Construction and Significance of Clothes in the Aegean Bronze Age by Bernice R. Jones. While the garment I’m creating isn’t covered in this book – the chiton was probably a foreign garment adopted in the Bronze Age but started being worn by Athenian women in the Archaic period (about 8th to 5th centuries BCE) – the author is doing something similar to what I’m doing, just on a much larger scale and with much more research. The author is also using modern materials, though they do not state if they’re using modern methods. At least, I couldn’t find any place in the book where they discussed their methods for creating their garments. I want to assume they did it by hand because that makes the most sense to me, but it’s never a good idea to assume. It seems odd to engage in experimental archaeology and use a sewing machine. All of this has really gotten me thinking; I sort of wish I had time to construct my own warp-weighted loom, the kind that would have been used in ancient Greece, and taught myself how to use it. I love the idea of recreating textiles to the best of our abilities in order to understand ancient garments, but I feel making the fabric for those garments is half of the story.
