Today I share an old film showing Norwegian crafts. There is weaving, spinning, and other historic crafts you don’t often see in films such as fingerloop braiding and naalbinding.
Of interest is the spinnin technique uses a hook in place of a distaff. It also shows the plying technique which Norman Kennedy speaks about, where the yarn is run through a hook in the ceiling.
So the facebook group on distaff spinning is called The Evangelical Church of Distaff Spinning. It’s not a religious group at all, but has got its name from the fact that when people try and love spinning with a distaff they want to tell everyone about it. Sometimes people will say “I’m a new convert to distaff spinning!”
Today I would like to share a fabulous post by Josefin Waltin:
Learning New Things – Medieval Style Spinning
She has also posted a great youtube video that includes some slow motion segments.
She has lots of fantastic (non-medieval) spinning videos and some great blog posts on a variety of spinning and not-spinning topics.
Sharing Saturday is where I like to share work by other spinners or living historians. Often I find something I’d like to share, but if you have something you’d like me to share then please let me know If it’s on the internet I’ll like to it, if not I’m happy to post it direct to my blog (with credit).
Today I thought I’d share how Jane dresses her distaff after she kindly posted step-by-step photos on the Historic Spinning facebook group. Many thanks to Jane Hunt for allowing me to share!
I hand comb the fibres with my mini combs.
Then I draw off the fibres by hand, not having a clamp means I can’t use a diz, but maybe one day.
Next I plank the sliver, a fancy term for breaking it into suitable lengths for my distaff.
Then I spread out each length into a thin layer about 10″ wide.
I pile up the layers, one on top of the other, to form a batt.
Then I lay my distaff along the long edge (the same direction that the fibres are going in) As you can see, this is my deluxe ‘from the hedgerow’ distaff!
I then roll the distaff up in the batt fairly snugly.
Finally I criss cross my linen tape down the distaff and tie in a bow at the bottom. I tie it tight enough for there to be some resistance to pull against, but not so tight I can’t draught the fibres comfortably. Hope this helps!
How do you dress your distaff? Please do share your methods, and let me know if you’d like me to post your method on my blog for another Sharing Saturday.
You can read about some other distaff dressing methods here.
I thought I’d add a new segment to my blog called ‘sharing Saturday’. When I first started researching I didn’t know many people at all who attempted to re-create the European medieval spinning methods with a distaff. Most people were just doing the drop-spindle technique. Now there are a whole bunch of people! So I thought I’d start sharing their work more.
On that note, I’d love to have people do guest blogs, so if you have anything you’d like me to share or have a blog post you’d like to post on my blog, let me know 😀
The first thing I share hasn’t got that much to do with medieval spinning but there is a medieval spinning related story behind it.
There is a thread on Ravelry called ‘Large cop, small spindle’ where people post pictures of their VERY full spindles. I was inspired so began working on my own entry—on my medieval spindle. Well, I was almost there, I had a HUGE cop on one of my spindles. So huge a lady at an event commented on it and I explained to her why I was spinning it. So I had it at the event. I’m not sure when the last time I saw it was but I haven’t unpacked it since coming home from the event, maybe I lost it there? I don’t mind the loss of the spindle but there was a LOT of thread spun on this spindle. I need to properly look through and sort my re-enactment gear, hopefully it is just hiding.
So when I was searching around on pinterest I came across the Spindleful board by Andrea Mielke Schroer and it made me happy to see all the spindles full of thread but also made me think of my old full spindle.
So I spun some modern wool on my spinner and made that nice and full instead, LOL
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