The Village Spinsters - Part 1

As a multi-period group, our members portray a broad cross section of the medieval period. One thing that we all have in common though (and I dare say we have it in common with a large chunk of the human race) is that we all wear clothes. These days, it's very easy to acquire clothing, being able to go down to the local shopping centre and grab something pre-made from fabric that's mass produced on machinery.

But what would you do if you didn't have that luxury?

A few of our members decided to embark on an experiment to recreate, to the best of our ability, what the processes would have been before the sophisticated systems of today's textile industry existed. We aim primarily to explore what works, what doesn't and how different methods change the result. Secondarily, we wanted to create, as authentically as we can, yarns or threads that can (and will!) be used to make our clothing or accessories for re-enactment. I'm not going to hide anything about our processes; I don't think that helps anyone learn from what we're doing. We'll be documenting everything as best we can, but here are a few things to know before we get going, just so everyone understands us and our processes a bit better: *Lauren, Jarrah and I all live in the Metro Melbourne area in a town house. This means we only have a pathetic spit of garden, and most of that is taken up with bamboo. So a large portion (read: Practically all) of the process is done inside. *We're not rich, so where we cannot make or buy 100% historically accurate equipment, we have to make do with what we've got or what we can afford. I'm sure many others out there can relate. We just have to do the best we can! *We've never done this before! *We research as best we can, we'll probably make mistakes. What might be glaringly obvious to you, may not be so obvious to someone with no experience, so please be patient with us. If you have a better idea or information that you think would be helpful to us, please send us a message! We are always looking for more information, but we may just be looking in the wrong places.

Keeping all that in mind, let's get on with the experiment! To get us started I located some fleece. As this was our first try, I bought 1 kilogram of broad fibre Polwarth fleece, which was cheap enough I wasn't going to cry if things went wrong. Felting was definitely a fear, as we'd read many horror stories of wool felting during different stages. I bought the fleece through an

Australian Facebook group dedicated to connecting farmers and fibre-producing animal keepers to spinners, weavers and felters. The group is full of very supportive and knowledgeable people, plus it was really great to be able to talk directly to the person who had shorn the sheep our fleece came from.

As soon as we opened the bag of fleece, a very distinctly “sheepy” aroma filled our dining room. I highly recommend having some kind of seal-able container to store any fleece you don't clean straight away!

The fleece was unwashed, it still had very dirty ends, the locks of fleece were still very much in tact with the crimp still obvious. Picking it up and touching it we noticed it had a distinctly waxy feel and that the waxiness transferred to our hands very easily. The research we had done said that this was probably a combination of dirt, suint (sheep sweat, basically) and lanolin. I got a bit excited when I heard that, because lanolin has a lot of other applications. But first, we had to figure out how we were going to clean the fleece. A lot of the videos, blogs and books showed modern techniques using various highly processed products and detergents, which we couldn't replicate, so we ruled out those methods. A few suggested using vinegar and baking soda which sounded promising, but the baking soda proved to be a stumbling block as we couldn't find any evidence that confirmed it beyond reasonable doubt that it had been used (we have since found the evidence and will test another batch using this method later). Vinegar on its own can eat away at the wool fibres so we decided

against that too, for our first shot. All the methods we found seemed to have some element that was distinctly modern or had something that just wasn't feasible for us at the time, so we decided to try washing the fleece with no agent, just water.

One historian had a video online that showed they were able to extract the lanolin from a whole fleece simply by keeping the fleece submerged in hot water for a few hours. They then skimmed the lanolin off the top after everything cooled down. Lanolin has a melting point of only 35 degrees Celsius so it made sense. We decided to try something like that.

Using a stainless steel boiling pot, which we filled with water sitting at about 50 degrees (the hottest our tap gets) we put approximately 200 grams of our fleece into the pot and sat it on our electric stove at just below simmering. We made sure all the fleece had gotten completely wet and within minutes we could see the dirt coming off the fleece. We let it sit for about 4 hours, topping up the water level and gently swooshing (not stirring, because agitation can cause it to felt) it periodically.

While the fleece was in the pot, we got on with some other things. I wanted to see what some of the unwashed fleece would be like to spin, as I'd heard that some spinners do that, so maybe there were some people who spun before they washed in the medieval period. The main thing we wanted to get out of this little test was to know whether there were any benefits to doing the spinning first.

The answer: Yes. And no.

We tried it in two different ways. First, we tried spinning it straight from the bag it came in. We did nothing to it before we sat down to spin. I attached some fleece to my lead-line and started to tease out the fleece as I needed it. I found this method a bit tricky, mainly because while the individual locks of fleece didn't like being being prised open and teased apart, the locks didn't like sticking together. I was constantly losing locks off my lap as I working on spinning. The resulting yarn wasn't very attractive either! It was thicker than I'd hoped to spin, it was lumpy where parts of the locks didn't want to separate (likely because they were stuck together by dirt and impurities) and it still most definitely had that waxy feel to it. The second way we tried was to comb, or 'card,' the fleece before spinning. We were using a pair of carders for this. (Carders similar to the ones we use seem to have first been used in the late 13th century, likely in France, probably Flanders. However, our ones probably are finer than the ones produced then. Modern technology, a blessing and a curse.) As we carded the fleece, we noted how incredibly effective the carders were at breaking the locks up and separating and aligning the fibres. We ended up with a cloud of carded fleece that was approximately double the size of the raw locks we started with and it was so fluffy! We affectionately dubbed the carded fleece 'floof.' It was now very soft to touch, it compressed under our hands very gently and the waxy feeling was noticeably less waxy. Possibly the carding removed some of the oils and lanolin. Possibly the way the carding separates the fibres disperses the lanolin and oils differently. We're not really sure yet.

This second try at spinning provided visibly better results. The yarn turned out much more even, the floof was much easier to handle and the finished product didn't look as dirty (though it was still obvious not clean).

I wrapped those into balls, which we plan to have as display items, so if you're curious and at the same event as us, feel free to come see them and ask us about them! Now back to our pot of fleece.

We took it off the stove and drained the water into a bucket. My goodness the water looked funky! We set the bucket aside to cool because we could see there was a film of something on top and thought it might be lanolin, but with the water still very warm, it wouldn't be apparent what it was yet. So the bucket

went to the garage, where it's nice and cold. The fleece still looked a bit dirty so we refilled with warm water again and gave it another couple of hours.

We filled in some time with dinner, some spinning of some roving I already had and a couple of episodes of 'Secrets of the Castle' (as you do). When we came back to the fleece, it looked like it was about as clean as we were going to get it without using a cleaning agent and without agitating it. We drained it and lay the locks out on some wire racks to dry over night.

In the morning I noticed the locks weren't drying very well, so I put them out on the balcony, because it was sunny and I thought it would help. That was my biggest mistake in the process so far. Within an hour, one of the local pigeons had shown us how fond of the fleece it was by landing a nice big poo on it! Thankfully it was only

on a few of the locks. We'll rewash those with the next lot of fleece we experiment with. The rest that was untouched by the pigeon's wrath, I left to dry inside, by the window. I should have thought of that first!

I checked the water bucket before I left the house the next day, but it doesn't look like we had

any lanolin, much to my dismay. Or if we did, it wasn't in any collectable amount.

That's it for this blog, thanks for getting all the way through it, if you made it this far!

Next time I write, it will be about our spinning and another cleaning method we're trying out! Looking forward to your feedback :)