Spinning fine and fast in the old world

I have pointed to spinning fine and fast as a spinning standard.  So, how fine and did the old spinners spin?  How fine were the yarns produced in the arc of western culture?  We know the Old Kingdom Egyptian Pharaohs were buried in shrouds of very fine linen produced locally, and cotton of similar fineness imported from India. Thus, 4,500 years ago, very fine textiles were being spun and woven in two different regions of the world.  Two different regions at that time had talented and professional spinners and weavers with long traditions.

What then is the arc of fine textiles moving forward?

Looking at A Fifth-century B.C. Grave-Group from Karabournaki in the British Museum as described by Catherine Morgan ( 2015), we see photos of two fragments of animal fiber textile with more detail in the:
Appendix: a preliminary study of the textile
fragment on GR 1919, 11-19.8.
Joanne Cutler and Margarita Gleba
(Institute of Archaeology, University College
London)

And, I quote: 
The textile remains were examined with a hand lens
and a digital microscope (Dino-Lite). The fabric is
a weft-faced tabby (tabby is the simplest form of
weave, in which the weft thread passes alternately
over and under one warp thread) with a count of
11-12 threads per centimeter in the warp and 48-52
threads per centimeter in the weft. Although no visible
edges are preserved, all unbalanced tabbies of
this period found in Greece are weft-faced. The warp
threads are z-twisted and tightly spun (with a twist
angle of more than 45°), with a thread diameter of
0.25-0.3 mm. The weft threads have a thread diameter
of 0.22-0.33 mm (a very similar range to the
warp threads)98, although unlike the warp threads
they have no clearly discernible spin99. The fibre in
both thread systems is also very similar in appearance
(ca 20-30 μm in diameter) and very uniform.
Both wool and linen textiles of this type dating to
the first millennium B.C. are known in Greece100.
Preliminary SEM analysis indicates that the fibre
is of animal origin101.
The fineness of the thread used is consistent with
the majority of published Classical textile remains
from Greece (mostly from Attica), which have a
thread diameter of 0.2-0.3 mm102. Many of the Classical
textile fragments analysed are balanced tabbies
(with approximately the same number of threads of
similar thickness in both the warp and the weft).
However, a number are weft-faced tabbies, with weft
thread counts that, as at Karabournaki, can reach
ca 60 threads per centimeter103. A few fragments
from Kamatero, Kalyvia, Marousi and Kerameikos
have even higher counts (the fragments from Kamatero
and Kerameikos have up to 120 weft threads
per centimeter) and are woven with extremely fine
threads, some less than 0.1 mm in diameter. Nearly
all of the Classical textiles analysed are made of plant
fibre, mostly linen, although this probably reflects
differential preservation factors since most were
found in association with bronze objects which generally
favour the preservation of plant fibres. The
vast majority of these Classical textiles are woven
with single z-twisted fibres in both the warp and the
weft. The lack of obvious spin in the weft of the
Karabournaki textile is unusual, but it is also evident
in the extremely weft-faced Classical textile fragments
from Kamatero and Kalyvia104.
The Karabournaki textile is an important addition
to the current corpus of Classical textile remains.
It provides a comparandum from a northern
Greek context to compare with the more numerous
textiles from southern Greece and with the Vergina
textiles of the second half of the fourth century B.C.
(which include a purple textile in the tapestry technique,
and a balanced tabby, possibly cotton, with
ca 25 threads per centimeter)105.

This tells us that the Classic Greeks were spinning combed wool at grists of 10,000 ypp (20 m/gram) to  22,400 ypp (45 m/g) for fabrics. We see that some of the wool was as fine as wool from modern fine wool breeds e.g., 20 micron, and that it had been well graded and sorted. Tools for such spinning are more sophisticated that what are typically used by Classcial Greece period en-actors.  And, the spinning skills of the period were higher then typically seen in Classcial Greece period en-actors.

Moreover, the looms were more sophisticated.  Nobody can weave on a warp of 120 wool warp threads per cm with a simple 1-beam vertical weighted loom.  If you think otherwise, show me useful quantities of wool cloth that you have woven at 120 warp threads per cm from handspun! -  using low twist weft!!  They wove  "himations", a very large rectangle of fabric.  OK, not as large as a Roman toga, but not something that can be woven on a single beam loom using the threads described above. We know the Greeks traded around the world, and 2-beam looms for weaving fine fabrics were known in Egypt, India, and the Fertile  Crescent.  The Greeks had them also.  We know this by reverse engineering the fabric.  

It is not just me. See for example ( https://www.academia.edu/13430688/_Aegean_Bronze_Age_Textile_Production_Techniques_-_Spinning_and_Weaving_2nd_Experimental_Archaeology_Workshop_in_Warsaw_15-19_June_2015_short_report ) 
They tried, and did not get the fabrics discussed above.  And they were not even using hand spun.  The kicker is the low twist weft - it is hard to handle in a single beam/ weft weight loom.


The loom on the urn?  Symbols in art persist for centuries after the technology has been superseded.  We teach the history of technology better than we teach current technology.  How many modern hand weavers cnd sit down and draw the mechanics of a modern Full Electronic High Speed Rapier Loom Machine with Mechanical Dobby?  Not many!  At Lambtown, 3 "dads" pointed to my spinning wheel and told their kids that I was using a "loom".  Artists do art for dads and their kids.

The timeline for textile technologies that has been shouted at me over and over is wrong.  Classic Greece had textile workers with great skill, and the tools to display those skills. In particular, they had good 2-beam looms.  These folks were not making the kind of coarse fabrics that can be made on the single beam loom w/ weft weights used by subsistence weavers in more recent times.  The Classic Greeks had talented professional spinners and weavers with traditions reaching back hundreds or thousands of years. 

I have said that "competent spinners" could spin wool at its spin count. I have said that "spinning fine and fast" was a skill highly  praised. I did not say everyone had to spin fine and fast. I did not say that everybody should learn to spin wool at its spin count.  

I  said that I like textiles made from yarns with fine singles.  I said, that judging by the fabrics and textiles in places like Target, Costco, and Needless Markup, others also like fabrics and textiles produced from fine yarns.  Catherine Morgan /Joanne Cutler and Margarita Gleba tell us that the Classic Greeks also liked fabrics and textiles produced from fine singles.

The Berkeley Potter's Guild

We go to their show every fall.  We might miss a "sit-down Thanksgiving", but we do not miss the Guild opening the Saturday after.

They were inspired this year. Very productive, with outstanding artistic quality and craftsmanship. Their best show in years. Certainly some of the potters have been distracted by things like child care for the last few years, but this show reminds us that they have great talent and great skill.

An artist cannot maintain such skill unless they put in a lot of hours. Only a professional can afford to put in those hours. And, the potters at BPG make a living making pottery.  They have the time to perfect their art and craft.

Now there are weavers that make a living by their weaving, but mostly they work with mill spun yarn.  However, a hand spinner can make yarns that mills cannot,and therefor hand weavers working with hand spun can make fabrics that hand weavers working with mill spun cannot.

When I started spinning, a lot of spinners told me that I could not spin 5-ply gansey yarn. They shouted that it had never been done. (Later, a few whispered to me, that they had actually done it.)  It took me 6 months from the time I got my wheel, until I had my first kilo of  gansey yarn, and it went pig tail on me as I tried to block it after dying it. This taught me not to trust the shouting crowd.

Hand spun gansey yarn from long wool is very different from modern mill spun gansey yarn. It does a better job of handling moisture and it is much more durable. One cannot estimate the performance of a sailor's sweater knit from hand-spun long wool from the performance of a sweater made of modern mill spun. To somebody doing historical research, this kind of thing is important.

Likewise, I expect that fabrics woven from handspun will be different from fabrics woven from mill spun. War en-actors frequently end up sleeping outdoors. The fabric used for the clothing can make this more or less comfortably. Fabrics woven from hand spun can make this more comfortable.  Fabrics woven from hand spun can make living in authentic older architecture more comfortable.

More on knitting for fishing

I keep coming back to the question of when seamen and fishermen started wearing knit upper body garments. I open the topic of "Traditions of Commercial Fishing in Great Britain", and folks bring up anecdotes about herring and salmon fishing in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. No!, I want to go back to when British fishermen were developing the skills, tools, ships, and systems that allowed them to “fish out” the waters around Britain by 1300 AD. When people talk about “traditional” fishing from the coast of England in the 19^th Century, they are talking about fishing in waters that had been fished out for 600 years. They are talking about the last embers of a long dead industry.

Read *Cod* by Mark Kurlansky (ISBN 0-08027-1326-2) very carefully.  Look at the bench ends from St. Nicolas' Chapel near Norfolk, England in the Victoria and Albert Museum  in London that were carved circa 1415. These bench ends depict English ships in the Icelandic Cod Fishery. They went to Iceland because they had fished out home waters. 

Iceland was cold. It was a longer voyage. And, it belonged to the Hansa. A British ship caught fishing in Hansa waters was in trouble. Fishing Icelandic waters was the result of British fishermen being so good that they had taken all the fish closer to home. The St. Nicolas' Chapel bench ends tells us that those British fishermen were good enough to make a great success of the Icelandic Fishery, despite its great difficulty. The bench ends tell us that they had mastered the concept of the square-rigged ship. Thus, by 1415 they had all the tools, skills and systems to make square-rigged ships work in an open ocean environment. That is not when they started developing those systems, that when all of the systems were in such good working order that  they had already made a lot of money.  It likely took generations and generations of seamen and fishermen to develop those skills.

This was consistent with what was going in English maritime trade. From *A history of the administration of the royal navy and of merchant shipping in relation to the navy* by M. Oppenheim (1896) or *The Royal Navy* with Some Notes on the Costume of Sailors by Swinburne (1907).) we discover that the English navy and the English merchant trade developed together, and thus must have shared a large number of ship management skills and tools such as how to feed crews, how to keep crews warm, sleeping arrangements, as well as the obvious sailing and navigation skills and tools. The maritime trade overlapped with the fishing industry and they shared the same management skills and tools.

On page 342 of *The Royal Navy*, I note a reference to G. Chaucer (1343-1400), who spent several years as a special royal envoy to textile merchants in Flanders, and later Italy, prior to writing the referenced passage. Thus, Chaucer knew his fabrics and had spent time on ships, when in latter life, he wrote his great poetry. The term "falding" from which Chaucer's sailor's "sea-gowne" was made included knit fabrics. This is all consistent with the History Chapter in Priestman's (1921) *Principles of Woolen Spinning*.

Considering the trade and fishing record, we look to *A history of Newfoundland from the English, colonial, and foreign records* by Daniel Woodley Prowse (1895) to find discussion of Cabot's voyages derived from -- Spanish Archives. The last paragraph on page 15 and the first paragraph on page 16 are key to understanding the history of English fishing fleets. That is, from *Acts of Parliament* we understand that English fishing fleets actively and continuously fished these (Newfoundland) waters, but there is little mention in other histories. This is not unlike the situation where a history dismisses the discovery of the New World in 3 lines and gives Anne Boleyn a hundred pages. Fishing and knitting do not get much space in popular histories, and even less in academic histories.

*The Royal Navy* establishes that by G. Chaucer's time, English sailors had traditions of knit clothing to keep themselves warm. This is consistent with what we know about knitting on the Channel Islands. The Channel Islanders had been great fishermen, but by the end of the 11^th century they had fished out their waters and had turned to spinning and knitting for export as a source of income. By the end of the 12^th Century, the Channel Islands had become a knitting production center, in part because of the quality of their spinning. Soon, the Channel Island knitting industry out stripped local wool production and the Channel Islands turned to importing raw English wool. Somebody was buying a lot of "Guernseys" and "Jerseys".

Then, I look at other indications of sea faring. One such is the ceramic pots for transporting goods by sea made in in the7th and 8th centuries in what is now Southern Turkey. A large number of these pots, are found around old Irish monasteries. Thus, it was likely that there was extensive trade by sea between Ireland and the Eastern Mediterranean at that time. Remember that we have very early knitting with knitting needles from just south (Syria) and just East of the place where those those shipping pots were made.) Just east was the path of the Silk road. Just south was the route used by the Arab traders bringing goods from India to Europe. Southren Turkey was where goods from both trade routes were repackaged for transport by sea. Thus, there was a direct trade route by sea from Ireland to a place where we know there was knitting.) Ireland was likely knitting sailor's “sea-gownes” of some type by the 8th century. I have thought for a long time that The Origins of Knitted Fabrics by Braham Norwick made cogent argument that the Irish knew about knitting in the 8th century. He goes on to layout similar evidence for the knowledge of knitting in Scotland in the 8th to 9th century. Ireland as the Western Terminus of a sea trade route to Southern Turkey makes this more plausible.

Have you ever reefed a square rigged sail in a rain squall? ( As the ship rolls, you are bounced against the yard (spar). If the deck is moving a foot as the ship rolls, you are going to move a yard during that roll. Top-men (sailors working highest third of the rigging) get thrown around with 3 times the acceleration that the crew on deck experience. (Fortunately, tall ships tend to roll more slowly than your little motor boat.) And, top-men are up in the wind. If the deck is subject to 15 knot of wind, 90 feet above the deck, a sailor is likely subject to 30 or 45 knots of wind. If you try reefing square rigged sails in squall while wearing a woven garment, you will come away bruised and cold. If you have to reef several sails in a single watch, you will be very bruised and very cold and unable to work for a couple of days. However, if you are wearing a well knit Filey, the cables will have padded your chest and you will be able to go back on deck in 4 hours. And, working in the cold, until exhausted, getting 4 hours of rest, and going back into the cold was the life of a seaman. They did not have weathermen, they had seamen that could work in any weather. And, the seamen had their tightly knit woolen garments.

You cannot understand a seaman's clothing unless you understand his work and environment.

Moreover, life at sea in a ship without an engine is very different from life at sea in a ship with an engine. Don't believe me? Ask Capt Douglas on the Shenandoah, 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdtallships/4188347110/in/photostream

(Somehow, in this picture he looks older than he did in 1979)  See also

(http://www.theblackdogtallships.com/ ) 

the only tall ship left without an engine. And, even on the Shenandoah, most sail management can be done from on deck. Crew on the Shenandoah do not have to brave the roll of the ship and wind of the upper rigging for routine sail management.

I knit ganseys, and wore them fishing and sailing to see how they functioned. I was very surprised to discover how differently the various stitch patterns performed. This is most notable when when the fabric is knit very tightly. And yes, some patterns of ganseys are better for some jobs, and other patterns of ganseys are better for other jobs. If the sailor is heaving a capstan, he needs padding (cables) across the chest. If he is carrying his boat and/or spars on his shoulders up and down the beach, then he needs padding on the top of his shoulders. A deck worker hoisting 300 pound dories on and off the rolling, heaving deck, needs as much padding as he can get, because eventually one of those dories is going to swing over and hit him. If the fisherman is going to be rowing, he needs extra ease in the shoulders. One could give ease for rowing by knitting loosely, but then the garment would not be as warm, so one gives ease with moss or seed stitch. Some of the dory fishermen on the Banks survived weeks of being in an open boat, so we know their garments were very warm and tightly knit. Some rowed thousands of miles so we know they had ease. On the other hand a whaler in the Azors or South Pacific does not need such warmth.

Some English ports tended to specialize in particular kinds of fishing. This was reasonable, because good fishing takes a lot of very specialized knowledge that changes fairly rapidly. It takes a good deal of continuous effort to keep track of where fish are being found. The different fisheries were found in different climates – cod in Iceland, whales around the Azores, and herring in the Baltic. Thus, the different kinds of fishermen needed different weights of clothing. Thus, ganseys worn by fishermen doing a particular job in a particular fishery are going to wear similar ganseys, because those fishermen all need a similar level of warmth and padding.

And, skills and jobs were passed from father to son. A port that produced a large number of top-men, would have mothers, wives, and sisters that knew how to knit the kind of garments that would protect and help top-men survive and be successful. With the right kind of gansey, a young seaman was likely to live to marry and have his own son. With a poorly knit gansey, a young seamen was likely to perish of the cold. Thus, good knitting enabled good seamanship.

If the fisherman is standing in a barrel of straw (to stay warm while fishing from deck of the ship) then the stitch pattern does not have to go to the bottom of the sweater. This tells us that some of the sweater traditions go back before ~1500 AD when fishermen moved from fishing from barrels on the deck to fishing from dories.

Ah, but were those fishermen's and sailors garments knit? I keep being told ( by folks that do not fish or sail) that woven fabrics, or felted fabrics was just as good - and cheaper. (And , those folks assert, “They did not have knitting that early!”

Three hundred years later, similar knit garments served the crews of the Endurance and the Star of Alaska. Such garments served the fishermen of Digby fishing out of Nova Scotia. These three groups from around 1900, all had access to woven and felted materials, and yet they all turned to tightly knit wool fabrics. Why? Because tight knit wool solved the problems of cold, wet, and durability better than woven fabrics. Or, rather a combination of tight knit wool and woven fabrics solves the problems. Woven and felted fabrics alone were not enough to solve the problems. The Endurance, the Star of Alaska, and the Digby fishermen all needed to add tightly knit wool – just like the fishermen that fished out the waters around England and the Channel Islands in the 11^th Century.

 A boat owned by my friend, Al Dring.  

I cannot seem to find a picture of Al from the days when he was captain of the Alma.

Photo ©2004 Michael Slater    May 29 2004

http://www.boatingsf.com/photopage.php?photo=184&boat=28

Knit like a Professional

For a very long time, knitting was a honored profession, with its guilds, tools, and skills. Guild members traded knowledge and the trained their employees and apprentices, but there were no programs to teach knitting to the public. England had old, broad, and deep traditions of contract and commercial knitting rather than guilds per se. Guild members did not write books about knitting for sale to the public. Nevertheless, in Jane Austin’s time, ladies knit and there was no stigma to knitting very well or to using the tools of a professional knitter. In Jane Austin’s day, many ladies did knit like a professional.

Knitting as profession unraveled around 1820 as the government of Cornwall established schools of industry to teach the poor to knit. Suddenly there was a flood of lower quality knitting in Great Britain that depressed the price of all knit woolens and no professional knitters could make a decent living. To be a professional knitter in Great Britain was to be poor.

Victorian society ladies liked to knit, but they did not want to be mistaken for the poor. Thus, they avoided everything that would make them look like a professional knitter. Everything associated with professional knitting was taboo in high society. First and foremost they avoided knitting sheaths. Knitting sheaths were the tool and mark of the professional knitter. Then, ladies knit loosely to remind everyone that their family was rich enough to have central heat, and plenty of coal. They knit slowly. Their knitting was conspicuous consumption. They demonstrated that they could afford to spend all day knitting and accomplish little. And, they wrote books to instruct young ladies that they also must knit loosely, slowly, and avoid knitting sheaths.

We do not have the instruction materials from the early knitting guilds or the instruction, or notes from groups meeting after farm work to sing and knit for pence, or materials from the schools of industry where they taught the poor how to knit fast and tight with a knitting sheath. What we have are the knitting books written by Victorian ladies that make knitting sheaths taboo.

Let us get over that Victorian taboo on professional knitting skills and tools.

Good knitters should use the best tools available. Sometimes, and for some purposes, the very best tool for knitting is a knitting sheath. Knitting sheaths are part of a tool kit that allows one to knit better. For hundreds of years, the best knitters used knitting sheaths. They had good reasons. It is time for the best knitters to once again use the best tools.

I see five virtues for modern knitters in knitting sheaths:

• First and foremost, knitting sheaths can help protect the hands and wrists of aging knitters from repetitive stress.
• Second, knitting sheaths can help knitters knit faster and longer at one session so they have fewer WIP that do not get finished. This helps avoid the second sock syndrome. (Some knitters tell me that they knit for pleasure, and do not want to knit faster. They do not have to knit faster, but if we can show them how to have that same pleasant rhythm at twice the speed, they may enjoy having more FO for the same knitting time.
• Third, knitting sheaths help manage fine needles allowing more intricate patterns and fine lace much easier. In this category, I would include Fair Isle. You would just not believe how much easier a knitting sheath makes Fair Isle and the other two-yarn techniques. A knitting sheath also makes the fancy gansey and Bavarian stitches easier.
• Fourth, it allows the production of firmer fabrics. When I was just starting to learn about knitting sheaths, I walked in to a LYS owed by a famous knitting designer. I had a large swatch that I had knit from Patons Classic (Merino), and I had a question about knitting technique. The knitting instructor in the shop, took the swatch and looked at me in astonishment, her eyes went big, and her mouth dropped open, and she was silent for half a minute. I thought she was going to berate me for brining such cheap yarn into her very high end shop. Instead, she asked, “ How did you ever knit anything so wonderful?” I used a knitting sheath. I took a sweater in to a guild meeting a while back, and a master knitter that has been to thousands of “Show and tell”, came up afterword and stood over it, fingering it and looking at it for perhaps 5 minutes. Her husband is a master weaver. His reaction was, “That might make me take up knitting.” It was not some wonderful fiber, it was just Frangipani 5-ply, the least expensive of the modern gansey yarns.
  I mostly knit coarse wools fit for sailors. With finer (softer) fibers, a knitting sheath will help one knit something fit for a queen. Look at the knit fabrics in a very expensive department store – they are finer and firmer than standard for modern hand knit. Nobody knits that finely (except for socks) and tightly these days because it takes too long and is too hard on the wrists. Why do people like knitting socks? – One reason is because they like the fabrics produced on fine needles. However, they do not knit sweaters out of those fine fabrics because it would take too long and be too hard on the wrists. A knitting sheath changes that.
• Finally, knitting sheaths provide a connection to the heritage of knitting. That is as true today as it was in the days when Mary Thomas was writing.
  People are going to say that I have a shop on Etsy, and discount what I say. However, I like fabrics that are firmer that what has been taught to hand knitters for the last hundred years, and almost everyone else that I talk to also likes firmer fabrics. This is acknowledged by a great many hand knitters that brag about how tight they knit. Take a nice firm fabric to a knitting guild show and tell and see what happens.
  

Honestly now, do you really like your hand knit fabrics better than the knit fabrics in the clothes in fine department stores? If the department store fabrics are one bit better, get a knitting sheath, and knit like a professional.

The time for knitting like a Victorian lady is over.