By: Sophia Jazaeri, Annie Wiener, and Talia Loevy-Reyes
This week we were lucky enough to go to Get Bentz Farm, where we received a warm welcome from Theresa and Maddy and the farm’s three enthusiastic dogs, Ranch, Pepper, and Theo. The goal was to take a more ethnoarchaeological approach and see local scale fiber production before we began to learn the processes involved in making yarn. Get Bentz houses many Icelandic sheep, with thick wool coats that we were prepared to manufacture with.
Theresa led us through her process of carding and spinning the wool—both with machines and manually, while Maddy took us to look at their dye plants and helped us dye pre-spun yarn. Each group rotated to these stations, so we could all participate in the processes that produce fibers! While at Get Bentz, Theresa was also kind enough to show us one of the tenets of animal husbandry: admiring and snuggling lambs. After an extended sheep-break, we continued to process the wool with a new appreciation of the animal that grew it!
Spinning
Fig 1 (above): A student using the drop-spindle to spin icelandic wool into yarn.
At the spinning station, Theresa taught us all how to do basic drop-spindle spinning of wool into yarn. We learned how she did it on a top-weighted spindle (a spindle with the center of gravity/weight on the top), and then we all practiced on bottom-weighted spindles (a spindle with the center of gravity/weight on the bottom). We learned that the baseline strategy for spinning is to spin the drop-spindle in the clockwise direction while feeding it new wool from the roving, which we would throw over our non-dominant arm. Through this, we learned about the grabbiness of wool. While there is not a specific set of requirements wool needs to meet to be ‘grabby’ that we learned about, this term helped us understand when wool was catching on itself and properly spinning versus when it was falling apart.
Spinning was particularly frustrating for the majority of the class. It’s a deceptively simple task that requires an extraordinary amount of focus and muscle memory to perfect. Even those who could manage to get a good amount of yarn struggled with the consistency of the yarn, and could not get an even distribution of weight across the yarn. We discussed extensively the social aspect of spinning and how people would often take hikes and walks while having long conversations and simultaneously masterfully spinning up large amounts of yarn that could later be washed and plyed and used for weaving.
We also got to work with a couple different types of wool. Namely, after working with the icelandic wool for a while, Theresa brought out a type of wool called “Jacobs” that had a yellowy color and felt coarser/rougher than the other wool. We were able to merge it with the yarn on our spindles without much trouble though, and, through this, we learned about how one might be able to make multi-coloured or multi-textured yarn.
Overall, the class spun various amounts of ‘yarn’ of varying qualities and lengths. There was a wide range of speeds of spinning, with one student spinning 3g of yarn over the course of an hour and a half, and another spinning as much as 32.1g of yarn over the same time period.
Dyeing
Fig 2 (above): The three student-dyed yarns (left-to-right woad, madder, weld) drying out after being dyed overnight.
At the dying station, Maddy took us through a variety of their plants. They have extensive resources that they have used to give Theresa’s wool color—from gathered mushrooms, to black-eyed susans recovering from winter and almost ready to dye wool a pale sage. Each of the three groups got a different type of dye so we could produce a larger variety of color and understand the nuances of each product. Thus, we used weld to produce a pale yellow, woad seeds for a hypothetical blue, and madder root to produce red.
| yellow (weld) | 2:1 |
| blue (woad) | 2:1 |
| red (madder | 1:1 |
Fig 3 (above): the ratio of yarn to dye to produce ideal pigmentation
Maddy did perhaps the most difficult part for us: growing and collecting the dyes, and from there, we took our measurements and put the dye and water in a pot. The yarn would unravel at a sudden temperature shift, so we let it gradually warm with the dye concoction. As we watched it warm on a hot plate, Maddy told us about the inverse relationship between time and temperature. The longer time you let the yarn soak with the dye, the less warmth you need. Maddy told us about a friend who left dye atop a compost pile for weeks to use that warmth, and still others that leave dye in the sun for weeks during the summer. We left the yarn soaking overnight to ensure its pigmentation. The next day, we then carefully washed out excess dye in the archaeology lab before we were able to see our final products.
While we got bright colors for both the weld and madder root, our woad yarn was a rather muted greenish brown—perhaps due to the fact that we used seeds instead of the traditional leaves due to seasonal issues. The madder created a lovely coral-like pink, and the weld a vivid yellow (although this group learned the dangers of over stirring a pot of dye and yarn and spent a great effort picking weld from their yarn. All and all, we were able to produce vivid, naturally dyed products, and we are thankful to Maddy for showing us a more traditional non-synthetic route!
Carding
Fig 4 (above): A student using hand carders to brush the wool fibers into the correct directions.
Before we were able to spin and dye our wool, it first had to be carded. We had the choice between two different kinds of carders, though we were shown other carders that are only possible with more modern technology. There were hand carders, which looked like dog brushes with thin wire bristles, and wool combs which had two rows of longer, sharper metal spikes (luckily none of us pricked our fingers). Carding takes place after sheep have been sheared and the wool has been washed. The goal of carding wool is to brush the fibers in the same direction so that it can be spun into yarn. Both styles of carders brush and untangle the wool fibers, though we quickly learned that they do so in different ways.
Through trial and error we found that putting too much wool on the dog-brush style carders made it much more difficult to comb through the wool than if we added the wool little-by-little. The combs, with their much longer nails could handle wool stacked higher, although their smaller surface area, with only two rows of spikes instead of many, meant that they could not card much more wool at a time than the other style of carder. We also learned the different techniques that each style of carder required. The flat, paddle shaped carders were overlapped, held level, and pulled apart to brush through the wool. The combs were not interlocked in the same way, and instead each side was used to comb through the wool sticking out from the base of the comb. Different people preferred different styles of carders and thought that one worked better than the other.
Conclusion
Our experiences carding, spinning, and dying wool gave us a taste of the much longer and more complicated process of the process of producing yarn and later, textiles. The process of obtaining and processing all of the material required to weave, as we will be doing next, is years long. We saw a glimpse of this at Get Betz Farm, where we got to hold bottle-fed sheep and see the sheep whose wool we were working with. We were also able to walk through the plot of land where the dye plants are grown and see a small part of the life-cycle of the garden. Seeing the intricacies of the different steps in the process of working with wool has given us a new perspective on the work that goes into making textiles. Next week, we will deepen this perspective as we tackle weaving.
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