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A Looming Challenge

Written by Pam Poggiani

Grantville needs people to work in the munitions factories. And the steel mill. And the brick factories. Where will they come from? Why, all those poor women who have to spin and weave all the time can be emancipated right away—just build a spinning jenny and power up those looms!

Grantville needs more cloth, to make uniforms and to provide everyone with a change of clothing. What can be done? Why, build a spinning jenny and power up those looms!

Now, wait just a doggone minute—it is not that easy!

Among the up-timers there are no textile mill workers, no hobby spinners, no hobby weavers. Some up-timers will be sure that great-grandmother's spinning wheel and loom in the attic must be better than anything down-time and want to show them off—those wheels and looms that have not, over the years, been fed to the stove (Foxfire 10, 362). But the down-timers may be hard put to keep straight faces. The spinning wheels used in American homes were great wheels, a design that down-time spinsters on the Continent abandoned over a hundred years before the Ring of Fire. American home looms were simple two- or four-harness looms; seventeenth-century weavers use multiple-harness or draw looms.

The spinning jenny pictured in encyclopedias is not the original of 1764, nor even the patented jenny of 1770, but an improved version from 1815. Except in the Encyclopedia Americana, the parts are not labeled. Even there, the description of how it works is incomplete, and the drawing does not show how the drive wheel at the side turns the spindles. Constructing a spinning jenny from the up-time knowledge known to be in Grantville will be a long, frustrating engineering exercise involving much experimentation.

The seventeenth-century loom is not suited to power. Several inventions and adjustments must be made before weaving, just of wool, can be mechanized.

First Steps

Spinning Wheel.

The simplest improvement that up-timers can suggest is that the down-timers convert their spinning wheels from hand power to foot power: crank the hub of the drive wheel of a low spinning wheel, set a treadle below, and put a connecting rod (known in OTL as the footman) between.

Later historians assumed that the low wheel, with the flyer/bobbin spinning mechanism and the treadle to power it, appeared complete in 1530, replacing the thirteenth-century great wheel. Perhaps, in the absence of written evidence—women's work was seldom documented—these writers assumed that spinsters enjoyed walking a prescribed course while spinning, manipulating the supply of fiber, the thread being spun, and the drive wheel, and that only the treadle could have convinced them to sit. The crank-and-connecting-rod system has been known since about 1500 (HOTb 653-4), for turning wood lathes. But would a wood-turner watch his wife spinning and thereby realize how useful a treadle would be? Not to mention that these later writers attribute the invention of the treadle and/or flyer/bobbin to a mason of Brunswick, one Johann Jürgen. A drawing of the low wheel with flyer/bobbin appears in a household journal of about 1480 (HOTa 204); there is no treadle.

Spinning wheels were hand-powered until late in the seventeenth century (Feldman-Wood). "A Woman Spinning," painted in 1655 by Nicolaes Maes, of Amsterdam, shows the earlier, treadle-less design, as do several earlier paintings, while "Interior with a Woman at a Spinning Wheel," by Esaias Boursse, also of Amsterdam, from 1661, shows a primitive treadle. "The Spinner," painted a generation later by Willem van Mieris, of Leiden, shows a wheel with a fully developed treadle. This indicates that the treadle was first applied about 1660, and modified later.

A few minor tweaks may be necessary: The crank and the far end of the treadle must be in line, and making the table three-legged instead of four-legged is advisable. The treadle must be able to drive the wheel in either direction, according to need, so footman and treadle are tied together with a bit of leather lacing through a hole bored in each. The bearings, probably of leather, between crank and footman and between treadle bar (replacing a stretcher) and the table legs, should be firm enough to hold the wheel in position when the spinster stops it, so that she can stop it exactly when she wants to, and restart it going in the same direction easily.

Photographs of a treadled spinning wheel in operation can be found in the newer encyclopedias (not in the 1911 Britannica), and in Foxfire 10 (356; not in the article on spinning and weaving found in Foxfire 2). Grantville's museum contains a low wheel with treadle, but no up-timer knows anything about spinning wheels and may not even notice the differences between it and the wheels used by down-timers.

Loom.

The first improvement to the loom is the flying shuttle, which will provide some ease for the weaver. The two looms in Grantville's museum do not have flying shuttles; although of late twentieth-century manufacture, they are simple versions of the looms used in the home by women of the seventeenth century. However, the text and drawings available in several encyclopedias should be sufficient once the desire for the invention occurs.

A loom holds the warp, the lengthwise threads of a textile, taut, and provides a mechanism to lift certain of these threads—in the simplest case, every other—while pulling the rest down, creating a shed for the passage of the shuttle. The shuttle carries the weft, the crosswise thread, over and under the warp threads. The usual shuttle of the seventeenth century is a shape known and used at least since the thirteenth century—a boat shuttle. This is a rectangular block with pointed ends; in the top is a trough wherein a bobbin full of yarn can spin, letting the weft pay out through a small hole in the side of the shuttle as it travels across the warp. The weaver opens the shed by pressing treadles with his feet. While holding the treadles down, he stretches forward and to one side to throw the shuttle through the shed with a snap of his wrist, then quickly reaches to the other side of the loom to catch it. A man of average height, or less, can weave on a warp two ells in width, an ell on most of the Continent being 26 or 27 inches. Before opening the countershed and throwing the shuttle back, the weaver swings the beater (or batten) to snug the shot (British: pick) of weft against the growing edge, the fell, of the cloth. The beater is made of two heavy lengths of wood hung vertically from above, holding the reed between the lower ends. The reed, extending across the loom, is strips of reed, set vertically and edge-forward, between two laths. The warp threads pass through the dents between the individual reeds. As well as beating up the weft, the beater and reed help keep the warp threads from clinging to each other.

The flying shuttle, invented by John Kay in 1738, will permit one weaver (instead of two or more) to produce wider cloth, and will improve the ergonomics of weaving. But it will increase the speed of weaving very little. Although Aspin uses the term "doubled" for the increase in speed (p. 14), the actual numbers recorded at the time, and reported by Aspin, show that after the invention, a weaver needed yarn from five or six spinsters instead of only four.

Invention of the flying shuttle begins with modification of the beater. The bottom lath is widened so that it extends forward of the reed to make a shuttle race on which the shuttle can slide. At each end of the beater, beyond the edges of the warp, a box big enough to hold the shuttle is added, with the end toward the beater open for the shuttle to leave by and enter through. The shuttle is thrown from one box to the other across the warp by the impact of a pick block, a small wooden block deep in the box that is jerked or knocked so that it hits the end of the shuttle and then encounters a stopper. There are several ways to move the pick block: the original invention had the ends of a loose cord fastened to the pick blocks through a slot in the front of the box, and the weaver jerked a handle fastened to the center of the cord to left or right.

The shuttle used in the twentieth century with the flying shuttle mechanism is the boat shuttle, but having metal caps on each end with a spring inside instead of being a solid block of wood. These caps came fairly early in the development, as did tiny wheels set in the bottom of the shuttle.

The weaver will still need to check the length of weft left behind by the shuttle before beating it into place. It must be enough to keep the weft from pulling the edges in, but not so much that there are loops of it beyond the edges of the cloth. A neat selvage is the mark of a good weaver.

The treadle and the flying shuttle are minor improvements—they are evolutionary, not revolutionary—but they could incline down-timers to look favorably on more up-time innovations.

Changes: Down-time to Up-time

The modern, up-time, textile industry depends not only on machines—a multitude of them!—but also on improved crop yield, good transport, and, yes, cheap labor even yet.

The down-time European fiber crops are wool, linen, hemp, and silk. The first three are grown almost everywhere; silk is produced in Italy, and in France in an area around Lyons. Cotton is grown elsewhere and imported. Ramie, jute, and other natural fibers are native to, and used in only, the Far East.

Raw Material Supply.

Wool (undercoat of Ovis aries) is from sheep that have been bred for the purpose for millennia. A major part of the wool supply comes from Britain, which, in the 1630s, does not tax its export. For more wool, there must be more sheep. What will they eat? Australia or America could feed them, but not Europe. Breeding for quantity as well as quality of wool has been underway for something over 6,000 years; formal Mendelian theory may be of interest to down-timers.

Flax (Linum usitatissimum) and hemp (Cannabis sativa), bast fibers, can be grown anywhere in Europe; at this time, flax is a major crop in areas just south of Thuringia, and hemp is major in several areas of Germany. They will grow in almost any soil, as long as it is deep enough for the roots.

When grown for the fiber rather than the seed, flax is sown thickly, to keep the plants growing straight with little branching. Weeding is necessary only once, when flax has grown to about six inches. Modern fertilization might help, but if the soil contains too much nitrogen, each flax plant will yield less fiber (EB14f 430). When grown for the seed, flax is sown much less thickly, so that each plant branches and produces more seed.

Flax is subject to wilt, and several other fungi and viruses. For this reason, flax is not planted in the same field year after year; a field should have at least five years between crops of flax. Resistant strains of flax were developed early in the twentieth century, becoming available around 1920 (EB14f 431). No flax was grown in the area transferred in the Ring of Fire, however, and redeveloping resistant strains, starting with only the conviction that it can be done, will take some time.

Cotton (Gossypium spp.) is a tropical plant. It is imported from the Levant (Syria to Egypt); most of it is grown in India, and nearly all of it, no matter where it is grown, is G. herbaceum, Indian cotton. Some is G. arboreum, tree cotton, also a native of India. Up-time Egyptian cotton is not a native of Egypt; G. barbadense is a native of South America and, down-time, is grown only as Sea Island cotton, not having been introduced to Egypt yet. The English colony of Virginia began cultivating G. hirsutum, Upland cotton, which is native to tropical North America, in 1621 (Hartsuch 164); there was still very little cotton in England as late as 1640. The German states, being closer to the Levant, may have more cotton at this time.

Cotton is subject to many insect pests; the boll weevil is simply the most famous. Cotton must be hoed to reduce weed growth, chopped, constantly, as the plants are grown too far apart to shade out weeds.

Grantville can do little to affect the cultivation of cotton, as most of it is grown far away.

Silk (cocoon of Bombyx mori) needs a warm climate. James I of England tried to find one in his own territories, but was unsuccessful.

Silkworms cannot be cared for by machines; in fact, up-time silkworms get more human attention than down-time worms did. In the nineteenth century, the silk industry experienced a great die-off. Pasteur was consulted and determined that the worms must not be crowded, that the eggs must be microscopically inspected for disease, that only the best cocoons should be allowed to produce breeding stock (Barker 297–8).

An important part of sericulture is the cultivation of mulberry; an ounce of silkworm eggs plus a ton of leaves yields 12 pounds of reeled silk (EB14h 522).

Up-timer biological and agricultural knowledge will be useful. While specifics known to Grantvillers may not be applicable, the general principles can be applied in the search for improvement.

Harvesting and Processing.

Much of the initial processing of the fibers is done where the product was raised, primarily because of the cost or difficulty of transport and the lack of any use for the by-products. Wool grease and the accompanying dirt are washed out of the fleece a week or more before the sheep are sheared. Cotton seeds weigh about three times as much as the lint, and are discarded in place.

Wool. The shearing of sheep is much faster up-time than down-time. With the old-style hand clippers, a man could shear 30 plus or minus 10 sheep in one day; with modern powered clippers, he can do about 100 plus or minus 20 (Van Nostron). This does not mean that the same shearing will be accomplished by a third as many people; individual sheep will have to be captured and dragged to the shearer at the greater rate, and their fleeces folded and packed. Up-time, a shearer works four two-hour sessions in a day.

Down-time, all sheep are sheared with scissor-style clippers: shearing blades set on a flat spring. Up-time, most sheep are sheared with an electric handpiece, invented about 1900, much like the ones used to shear recruits in boot camp. But the desired outcome of shearing sheep is not a bald sheep; it is a good fleece. While the up-time handpiece can shear closer than the old clippers can, it also requires more care in avoiding skin tags and bits of sheep that protrude. Nicking the sheep's skin is a very bad thing—it exposes the animal to infection and infestation, and besides, blood is so hard to get out of wool.

In the twenty-first century, the modern shears are powered by distributed electricity or individual batteries. Before the power grid spread everywhere, they were powered by small motors set on the rafters of the shearing shed, or by someone turning a crank.

When a sheep is sheared, the locks of wool cling to each other, forming a fleece. Shearing usually begins down the middle of the underside of the sheep, so that the edges of the fleece are belly wool. This permits skirting of the fleece, the removal of the matted belly wool, which can be sent to the lanolin boilers. Then the fleece is folded, tips in and cut ends out, rolled up, and tied. The fleeces are packed into woolsacks—the English woolsack held 364 pounds of wool (Hartley 135)—ready for shipment by the wool merchants. Up-time, compressing the pack is done with a mechanical press, instead of by people walking on the fleeces in the sack.

Flax and Hemp. The harvesting of flax is done by hand—even up-time. These plants must be uprooted, pulled up by hand; if the plants are cut from the roots, or the roots removed later, the fibers will be degraded in the process that separates pith and outer coating from the fibers of the phloem (EA 576). A field of flax is harvested all at once, by a line of all available people crossing the field, although the shorter plants and the longer are separated. Harvesting of flax for fiber is best done before the seeds are ripe; harvesting later yields less flax of poorer quality. A field of hemp is harvested in two passes, the male plants first and the female plants ten days or two weeks later.

Different regions handle harvested flax somewhat differently, but in nearly all, the seeds are rippled free immediately; the tops of the plants are pulled through a comb with the seeds falling onto a sheet below. After that there is a drying period; the flax is stooked in the field to dry for a few days in the sun. In parts of Flanders, the flax is then stored in a shed for a full year, but in most places, it is retted immediately.

Retting is the way that the boon, the pith and the outer coating, is partially rotted to free the fibers. Down-time, retting is often done in a pool dug near a stream. The length of time depends on the weather; it takes at least ten days, and can take up to three weeks. The water left after retting cannot be discarded into the stream, as it will have a detrimental effect on the fish, but can be spread over the fields as a fertilizer (Moore 50). Up-time, retting is done in huge, temperature-controlled, indoor tanks; with the temperature at a constant 80°F, retting takes about a week (EB14f 430).

When retting has progressed as far as it should, the flax is dried again, and the boon is broken, by means of a hand-operated breaking box. Scutching, done with a board and a paddle, removes the boon completely. Then the flax must be hackled, combed, to separate the line flax, 20 to 30 inches long, from the shorter tow. (Line flax becomes strong linen thread; tow is used unspun for stuffing, or can be spun into a softer, weaker thread.)

Up-time, all of these procedures, rippling through hackling, even drying, are performed by machine, instead of by hand with simple tools. In both systems, the plants and the resulting fibers are kept as parallel as possible.

After breaking, scutching, and hackling, the flax goes to the women of the area for spinning. Most of the hemp will go to the men of the rope walk; a nineteenth-century man-of-war used 80 long tons of hemp, the yearly product of 320 acres (Hartley 157). The longer fibers of hemp are not easily handled by distaff and spinning wheel (Davenport, Spinning 98); only the shorter hemp fibers go for clothing.

Cotton. Harvesting cotton continues through much of the growing season, as each plant has flowers, developing bolls, and ripe cotton all at once. The first harvester was developed in the 1850s; it stripped the plants, leaving only the stalks. This was extremely wasteful, and required more hand labor to separate the mature cotton from everything else. Immature ("dead") cotton cannot be spun and woven. It was not until the 1940s that the modern spinner harvester was fully developed; it pulls the mature cotton, which is expanding out of the bolls, free (EB14c 90H). The spinner designed for Upland cotton, which bursts upward, cannot be used for Indian cotton, which spills downward.

Up-time, cotton is shipped with the seeds still present. Down-time, seeds are removed by hand right after the cotton is picked. When the gin was first invented, it was used on the farm, because of the costs of transportation—cotton seed is two-thirds or more of the weight (Peake 19)—and because there was little use for cotton seed. Without modern oil-pressing machinery, cottonseed oil is somewhat toxic (EB14a 615).

Three different cotton gins have been invented. The wire teeth gin invented by Eli Whitney, and the saw gin improvement of it by Hodgen Holmes, damage the lint, especially lint of longer fibers, more than roller gins do (EB11a 259–260). Some seeds are broken in ginning, and the bits often stay in the cotton, needing to be removed later—which is, with the full machine processing and handling of up-time, after it is woven. Up-time, the Whitney-Holmes gin is still used for Indian cotton, which produces very short lint.

Cotton linters, the very short fibers that coat the seeds of Indian and Upland cotton but not those of Sea Island or Egyptian, will not be available. These were ignored until the second decade of the twentieth century (Peake 18), when they were found to be useful in several industries (paper, rayon, and "Boom!").

Silk. Up-time, cocoons that have set (about a week after being spun) are subjected to high heat, or poisonous fumes, to kill the chrysalids before they can break out of the cocoons; they are stored until the factory rep collects them. Down-time, reeling is done on the farm from "live" cocoons—they are put into very hot, but not boiling, water to soften the sericin enough to allow unwinding. Live cocoons produce silk that is more lustrous; dead ones yield a more even yarn, better for power weaving (Hooper 33).

One silk fiber (a bave of two brins of fibroin embedded in sericin) is only 1/3000 inch thick (Hooper 4). Several cocoons are reeled off together (three to eight—Patterson II 197, or six to twelve—Hooper 34). Of the 4,000 yards a silkworm spins to make one cocoon, only about half a mile (give or take a couple hundred yards) can be reeled for use (Hartsuch 286–287). Down-time, the rest is discarded; not until 1671 was silk waste carded and spun (Hooper 112).

As each cocoon is exhausted of reelable silk, another cocoon is added to the pot, until the required length to make a hank has been reeled. The ends are tied together and secured so that they can be found later. Twine is tied around the silk threads at several points in the circle to keep them from tangling, and the hank is removed from the reel.

Some of the methods used in reeling are fairly late developments. Up-time, cocoons are unwound from two pots next to each other, each group onto its own reel, but between the pots and the reels, the two threads are twisted around each other about six times. This croisseur (croissure, croisure), this "essential part" (Hooper 36) that presses the filaments together so that they consolidate, dates from 1828 (Barker 301). The use of glass rods and rings to guide the fibers between pot and reel is probably established in down-time Italy already; smooth glass does not snag and impede the silk fibers the way bronze or iron can.

Spinning.

Spinning is the process whereby fibers, either animal or vegetable, are turned into yarn. There are three phases: the fibers are drafted, pulled partway past each other; the resulting length is twisted, so that the fibers curl around each other and do not pull apart; and the spun yarn is wound onto a stick so that it can be stored without unspinning itself or tangling up.

A spinning wheel is a machine that, in combination with a human, performs these tasks, originally a mechanization of the drop spindle. The drop spindle dates back thousands of years; it is a stick with a weight: gyroscope and flywheel. The spinster hitches the spun yarn to one end and starts the spindle spinning; as it spins the fibers, its weight pulls more out of the spinster's upraised hands. When the spindle reaches the ground, the spinster stops it, unhitches the yarn and winds it around the stick, rehitches the yarn, and starts the spinning and drafting anew.

The most obvious part of a spinning wheel is the drive wheel, turned by the spinster. The rotation of this wheel is transferred to a small wheel, a whorl, part of the spinning mechanism, by way of a drive band, a length of linen or hempen twine. This length is spliced, preferably, but can be tied, into a loop; Amos recommends a knot he calls the "Fisherman's Bend," but the accompanying illustration shows the Fisherman's Knot (Ashley #1414). The spinster controls the drafting of the fiber and the amount of twist.

There are two mechanisms by which a spinning wheel imparts twist, the spindle and the flyer/bobbin.

A spinning wheel's spindle is a straight stick, pointed at the front end and with a whorl at the other; with drafted fibers held at a 45° angle to the spindle, the fibers wrap around it and then drop off the end with each rotation, producing one twist in the fibers. The spindle is also the stick for the yarn to be wound upon. This winding is accomplished by first turning the drive wheel the other direction just enough to free the yarn from the point. Then the spinster moves closer to the drive wheel, moving the hand holding the end of the spun length so that the yarn is at a 90° angle to the spindle. When the wheel is rotated again, in the same direction as for spinning (not, as many technology historians report, the opposite direction), the yarn winds onto the far end of the spindle and she moves toward the spindle as it does so.

The flyer/bobbin is a multipart mechanism. The flyer is wishbone-shaped, with the addition of a central shaft ending in a whorl at the far end—overall, it looks like the Greek letter psi. The fiber goes through the orifice: into a hole in the base of the flyer and out through a hole in the side of the base. From there, the fiber goes along one of the arms and is turned around one of the bent metal wires on the arm, a heck, to the bobbin. The bobbin is a hollow cylinder with a flange, a cop, at each end; it fits loosely on the central shaft of the flyer. The bobbin usually has a whorl attached outside the far cop (or the far cop is a whorl), so that it can be turned by the drive wheel too; the drive band describes a folded figure eight, twice around the drive wheel and once around each whorl. The whorls of flyer and bobbin are of different diameters so that their speeds differ. As the flyer rotates, the drafted fibers are twisted, and then wound onto the bobbin. Of course, as the bobbin fills up, the relative speeds need to change; either flyer or bobbin can slip against the drive band. The bobbin is filled in sections; when the diameter of the wound yarn gets too great, the spinster stops the wheel and moves the yarn to the next heck to fill the next section. Leonardo da Vinci drew an oscillating mechanism to wind yarn onto the bobbin from one end to the other and back, obviating the necessity for the spinster to move the yarn (Ponting 30–31), but it was never adopted—perhaps not even known to others at the time. When the bobbin is full, the mechanism must be dismantled so that the bobbin can be removed; the drive band is taken off the whorls, the flyer whorl is removed, and the bobbin is slipped off the shaft. A new bobbin is installed, the whorls are replaced, and the drive band is set in place again.

The drive wheel was originally powered by hand. Often, when the drive wheel was supported on only one upright, a peg was attached to one of the spokes for the spinster's use; her right hand on this peg constantly described a circle, turning the drive wheel. The original spinning wheel, with a drive wheel about 5 feet in diameter, required that the spinster stand. This version is now known as the great wheel.

As far as can be determined at this date, this great wheel always had a spindle. To change the angle of the fibers, the spinster had to walk from one point to another. Her task was complex, especially when she was spinning line flax: She had to turn the wheel, carry the distaff that held the fibers, and use both hands on the fiber itself.

The low wheel, with a drive wheel as small as 18 inches, could be turned by a woman seated in front of it, still using her hand on a peg, with the distaff set conveniently on the spinning wheel's table. If she was spinning a fiber that needed both hands, she could give the wheel intermittent power pulses. Small drive wheels often have heavier rims, indicating some pre-Newton understanding of angular momentum. The earliest drawing of the low wheel shows the flyer/bobbin, fully developed; of course, the low wheel could also operate with a spindle.

The low wheel replaced the great wheel on the Continent well before the seventeenth century. About the middle of the seventeenth century, some wheels were made with the drive wheel between two uprights, which makes for more stability, but of course the peg could no longer be used. Instead, a hand-crank might be applied to the front of the wheel. While the low wheel could be fitted with a spindle, nearly every drawing and painting of a low wheel shows the flyer/bobbin, which is excellent for flax. England and her colonies lagged behind the Continent in this area. As a result, the only low wheel in Grantville is the one in the museum, which may be of twentieth-century commercial manufacture. This wheel has a treadle, and the mid–seventeenth-century improvement of a tensioner, too.

The only visible part of the tensioner is the tension handle, a peg sticking out of the left-hand end of the table, which may be mistaken for a decorative element, or a handle to assist in lifting or moving the spinning wheel. But the tensioner is a useful addition to the flyer/bobbin. Turning this peg moves the mother-of-all, the assembly holding the spinning mechanism, toward and away from the drive wheel, allowing ease in putting the drive band on or removing it. A smaller movement, changing the tension of the drive band just a little, permits the whorls to slip more or less so that the relative speeds of flyer and bobbin change.

The flyer/bobbin mechanism puts strain on the yarn; it works very well for line flax, but not with weak fibers. On the Continent, spinsters used a low wheel fitted with a spindle for cotton and for weaker wool fibers, while in England and her colonies, the great wheel continued to be used for these (even after the low wheel was known there), earning the alternate name of "wool wheel."

Wool, flax, and cotton are very different fibers, requiring different preparation for spinning and different spinning techniques. Silk is in a category of its own, being thrown instead of spun, but the process will be included in this section.

Wool. While each breed of sheep produces wool of an expected type, different flocks of sheep, and different parts of one animal, undergo different stresses (weather and friction from botanic and manufactured items). A fleece comprises many locks of wool; within that fleece, these locks vary in color, length, fineness (diameter), handle (the "feel"), and amount of crimp. Before it can go to a spinner, each fleece must be sorted by an expert; each fleece will have six or more grades of wool in it. The sorter will also pull the kemp, the outer coat, which cannot be spun with the wool. Domestic sheep have very little kemp; certain breeds have more than others, and within breeds, the weather affects how much kemp a sheep grows each year.

As a general rule, longer wool fibers are coarser and have less crimp than shorter ones; these coarser fibers, as long as 18 inches, are worsted, and the finer, crimpier ones, as short as 1.5 inches, are woolen. Worsteds produce a harder yarn, suitable for (up-time) suits and dresses; woolens produce a softer yarn, more easily felted, suitable for (up-time) coats and blankets. Although both trap a lot of air in the yarn because the crimp guarantees that the fibers cannot be completely against each other (worsted is at least 60% air, by volume [Davenport Spinning 20], and woolen more), they feel quite different, and are prepared and spun differently. Each fleece will be all, or primarily, worsted or woolen—or even, perhaps, entirely of very coarse wool suited for carpets.

For worsteds, the longer, coarser wool is combed: A lock is drawn through tall, fixed combs, working bit by bit from tip to middle and then from cut end to middle, to remove all tangles. The shortest fibers are removed in the process; these noils can be mixed with woolen fibers. The combed lock of tops is called a sliver.

For woolens, the short, fine wool is carded: a lock of wool is spread across a hand card (of wood, studded with bent wires); an identical card, held in the other hand, is drawn across the first. The wool tangles are straightened out as the wool is transferred from one card to the other and back several times. When the fibers are neatly parallel (not tangled and going in every direction as stated by many technology historians), the wool is rolled up, cut ends toward tips, so that the fibers form a cylinder; this is called a rolag.

Up-timers may have heard of the hand-tool called the drum carder, intended to replace the hand cards. The drum carder has two cylinders of different sizes, both studded with bent wires. The wool is spread out carefully and one of the cylinders is turned with a handcrank; the other cylinder turns too and, ideally, the wool fibers are parallelized in one rotation of the larger cylinder. The lap is then carefully removed by hand and rolled up. With only the name of the tool, and no drawings or descriptions available, an up-timer may produce a better version of this tool.

Wool needs to be at least a little greasy during combing and carding. If the wool has already been scoured so that all the natural grease, the yolk, has been removed, olive oil is added, deemed the best grease for the task as it can be washed out easily later. (Even up-time, the preferred grease is oleic oil.) Either oil is added to each lock of wool in the hand as it is prepared for combing or carding (Davenport Spinning 39), or the comb is greased (with either olive oil or butter) and, if necessary, kept near a source of heat to keep the grease soft (Hunter 44). However, unless the wool was dyed in the fleece, requiring scouring beforehand, it should not need to be oiled; wool is best stored and shipped in the grease. (If it was stored too long, the yolk may have solidified, requiring olive oil anyway.)

The worsted slivers and the woolen rolags can now be spun. The spinster will hold a sliver or a rolag in her left hand; while she turns the drive wheel with her right hand, she moves her left hand back away from the spinning mechanism, permitting the fibers to be pulled between her thumb and fingers and to be twisted by the action of the wheel. Both sliver and rolag are fed end-first, the sliver from the end of the fibers, and the rolag from the end of the cylinder. As the spinster nears the end of sliver or rolag, she picks up another and its beginning meshes with the end of the first as she drafts.

Some spinsters prefer to join the worsted slivers end to end before actually spinning them, twisting (by hand) just enough to encourage them to hold together; the result can be rolled into a ball. Sliver, ball, or rolag can be kept ready near the wheel: in a bag or basket, or on a shelf.

Flax. Flax-spinning is a delicate process. The spinster dresses the distaff with an ounce or so of fiber. On the Continent, it is common for the strick, a bundle of parallel fibers, to be tied at one end and dropped onto a lantern distaff (cone-shaped) so that the fibers hang all around, then secured by a ribbon wound around. Less common on the Continent, but standard in England, is for the fibers to be layered accordion-fashion on a flat surface, forming a fan-shape; this arrangement is then positioned around a lantern distaff and secured with a ribbon (Davenport Spinning 83–88). The Dutch paintings of the time appear to show distaffs dressed by both methods.

When spinning flax, a spinster must apply both hands to the fiber, with the right hand supplying power to the wheel intermittently, as mentioned above. One hand controls supply of fibers near the distaff; the other hand drafts the fibers and then smooths them down, running up ahead of the twist. The smoothing fingers must be wet—water will do, but saliva is better (Davenport Spinning 82; Barber 49n); saliva predigests the flax enough that the individual fibers stick together better than they do with water. Moving the thumb between flax and lip produces a condition known as "flax mouth," with a bad taste for the spinster and foul breath for everyone she meets.

Tow, the shorter lengths separated out by hackling, may be spun, worsted fashion, or used unspun as stuffing in bedding, pillows, and other items.

The more humid the air, the finer the flax can be spun. Damp basements are a good location if extreme fineness of the yarn is a goal.

Cotton is tightly packed in bales; an up-time Indian bale is 400 pounds, and it is likely that this size dates back a very long time. The cotton lint must be loosened from the pack. A section is removed, placed on a flat surface, and either whipped (beaten with a springy stick that ends in several branchlets) or bowed (vibrated by a string snapped above the mass). The spinster will pull a slub free from the mass and spin it much the way worsted is spun, except that cotton is smoother than wool, with the cotton fibers slipping farther past each other more easily.

Cotton is a very short, weak fiber, and Indian cotton is shortest, coarsest, and weakest of all, being only 3/8 to 5/8 inch long (Peake 40), having a diameter of 25 micrometers (EB14d 226), and having a breaking strain of perhaps 46 grains (Peake 47). A drop spindle cannot be used to spin cotton, as the spindle weighs too much to be supported by the growing yarn. Even the flyer/bobbin may put too much strain on cotton yarn; on the Continent, cotton may be spun on a low wheel with a spindle. In England, as noted above, the great wheel continued in use much longer, used for cotton as well as for wool.

Differences in Commonalties.

In spinning, details matter. Spinsters learn what is appropriate for each fiber, and may well specialize in spinning yarn of only one.

Yarns must not be underspun, or they will part. Neither may they be overspun, or they will tangle unmercifully. Each individual fiber must go around 4 or 5 times (Elliott); cotton requires more twists per inch than worsted or line flax does. With the flyer/bobbin mechanism, the yarn must often be retarded from winding onto the bobbin for the drafted length to acquire sufficient spin. When the spinster arrests the feed, the bobbin's whorl will slip against the drive band, permitting the bobbin and the flyer to spin as one while the flyer imparts twist. Many up-time technology historians state that the flyer/bobbin sped up spinning because it winds yarn at the same time yarn is spun; this is not strictly accurate.

Different fibers are spun in different directions. Down-time, there were many names for the two directions, and neighboring spinsters often used the same word for opposite directions. Not until 1934 did an unknown American suggest the terms "S-spun," with the far end turned counterclockwise, and "Z-spun," with the far end turned clockwise (EB14b 622); these names are from the match of the visible slant of the helix with the slant of the middle stroke of the letter. Individual plant fibers have twists themselves; for tighter, more durable yarns, these fibers are spun in accordance with their innate twist. Flax is S-spun; hemp and cotton are Z-spun (Barber 66). Down-timers will not know of the innate twists of the individual fibers, good microscopes being necessary, but women learned, 3 or 4,000 years ago, that spinning this fiber this way gave more durable yarn with more luster, and passed the knowledge to their daughters. Animal fibers have no predilection, but, except for special effects in the eventual cloth, wool has always been Z-spun. No one knows why, but this tradition began long, long ago. With the spinning wheels described above, turning the drive wheel clockwise will produce Z-spun yarn, and turning it counterclockwise will produce S-spun yarn.

To measure the lengths of the new yarn, and to be able to see the length and inspect the quality of the yarn, the spinster winds the yarn off the bobbin into a hank. The niddy-noddy is the standard tool: a wooden rod a foot or so long with a shorter wooden cross-piece at each end; these cross-pieces are at right angles to each other—an artifical forearm. The yarn is hand-wound up, down, and around, to make a hank of known circumference, with the spinster counting as she goes. The hank is secured so that there is no strain on the yarn, and removed from the niddy-noddy.

Yarns must not be too thick, but each fiber is spun within its own range of fineness. Down-time, there may not have been specific measuring guides; while Master Weaver Ziegler wants the yarns he uses to be fine, he specifies no further (Hilts). Gauge systems may have come into use only with spinning machinery, size having been judged by the spinster's hand before that. Stating the diameter does not work; too many things affect that: the spinster, the stage in bleaching and dyeing, the loft of the yarn, even the color of the dye. Instead, the gauge is defined by the length of a certain weight, and expressed as the number of hanks of specified length in a specified weight. Woolen, worsted, linen, and cotton each have their own hank-lengths—in fact, woolen has several scattered around England and Scotland, and two more in the United States. The one most commonly used for woolen yarn is the Yorkshire count, the number of 256-yard hanks that weigh 1 pound. Other systems for woolens are usually called cut; these vary in both hank-length (200 or 300 yards) and weight (1 pound or 24 ounces). Unique to the U.S. is the run, which is expressed as the multiple of 1,600 yards needed to make 1 pound. The worsted count states the number of 560-yard hanks in 1 pound. Linen is measured by 300-yard leas in 1 pound, cotton 840-yard hanks in 1 pound—in England. On the Continent, cotton is gauged by the number of 1,000-meter hanks in a kilogram; this system is obviously no earlier than the late eighteenth century. With these systems, as with wire, the smaller the number, the thicker the yarn. In 1956, ASTM established the metric tex system, intended for all these fibers, which gives the weight of a specific length of yarn; 1 tex is 1 g/km.

Yarns straight from the spinning are called singles; except for some spun from line flax, they are not strong enough to be stretched over the loom as warp. Singles are plied (British: folded; industry: doubled): two or more singles are spun together, in the opposite direction from the original spin. That is, Z-spun woolen, worsted, and hemp are S-plied, like the yarn and strands of plain-laid rope; S-spun linen is Z-plied, like the yarn and strands of reverse-laid rope. (Spun yarns ply naturally in the direction opposite to the spin.) To ply singles, the spinster transfers the hanks of singles back to bobbins, sets the bobbins in a frame that permits them to spin easily, and uses her spinning wheel to spin the singles together, turning the wheel the opposite direction from that used for spinning those singles. Plying more than four together is difficult; each single is most easily controlled by being passed individually between two of her fingers.

Once plied, the gauge of the yarn changes. For plied woolen and worsted yarn, the gauge is now figured on the plied weight, with the number of plies indicated also. That is, four singles of 32s plied together become 4/8s. Plied cotton retains the gauge of the singles, with the number of plies indicated: either 4/32s or 32/4.

Plied yarns are wound into hanks, for measuring, quality inspection, and their transfer to bleachers and dyers.

Silk. Reeled silk is already a long string; unlike the shorter fibers, it does not need spinning to become one. However, reeled silk is not round in cross-section. Twisting the strand will round it, but the strand is many yards long (up-time, 10,000 yards). This twisting is called not spinning, but throwing.

After the hank of silk has been graded and lightly washed, it is placed on a swift, a rotating device that will hold the hank spread out, from which it is wound onto a bobbin. Up-time, it is wound from that bobbin onto another, being cleaned by its passage through a double knife—cleaning removes bumpy imperfections. Finally, it is thrown by being transferred from that last bobbin to another, with the two bobbins set at right angles to each other, and the silk going through a flyer set atop the source bobbin. The amount of twist, which varies according to the intended use of the silk, is set by the speeds of the bobbins. In Italy, throwing machines are water-powered, and the receiving bobbins oscillate so that the silk is wound evenly on them.

Down-time, the Italian silk workers are jealous of their methods, which have been little changed for about two centuries (Ponting 3). Italian machine-throwing methods were unknown elsewhere until 1717, when John Lombe, working in an Italian filature, made drawings of the machines and smuggled them to his family in Derby, England (Hooper 46). However, silk throwing without these Italian machines is known in seventeenth-century England; the Livery Company ...