This week was all over the place. I did a little bit of everything. This was the week that I started spinning. I had a good amount of wool prepared to spin and I needed a change of pace; combing wool is a bit, well, boring. I imagine it’s a much more enjoyable activity when in the company of other people. I decided to clean my spinning wheel a bit before I started. Spinning wheels need to be regularly oiled before use, but that oil can accumulate and become messy, which was happening with mine.
I love spinning. One could argue that spinning yarn is not that much more exciting than combing wool, and I suppose they could be right. For me, though, it’s very meditative, and I love seeing the transformation of raw fiber under my fingers. Until recently I have only had drop spindles, which are one of humanity’s oldest tools. I treated myself to a spinning wheel in the spring, though, and I’m glad because if I tried to do this project with only a drop spindle….well, I would spend the entire school year only spinning. The first thing I did before spinning in earnest was spin a small sample of yarn. I want the yarn I weave with for this project to be a fineness of 24 wraps per inch (wpi), meaning that the yarn would wrap around an inch of a ruler twenty-four times. I spun up some of the wool, plied it, and washed it to see if I had put enough twist into it, if I needed to spin finer or thicker, etc. Once I did that, I could officially start spinning my yarn.
I also spent a good chunk of time looking for books this week. I found myself becoming interested in what fiber work looked like inside the home in ancient Greece. There’s a good amount of information about cloth production in the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, but that’s too early and too industrial for what I’m curious about. There is also information about fiber production on a small and large scale in ancient Rome, but while ancient Greece and Rome are often grouped together they are distinctly different. Finding information about “women’s work” in archaic and classical Greece (c. 1000-300 BCE) is oddly difficult. Looking through the bibliographies of the books I currently have has helped, but either the books are in another language or unavailable to me. It’s quite frustrating. Granted, I’m also distracting myself once again from researching ancient Greek clothing. My attention span seems to go everywhere these days.