Week 2 Lab Data Group 3 : Wool

Spinning

Our group started with spinning which allowed us to spend a nice portion of the class being able to learn and improve our spinning skills with focused attention before moving on to other fiber arts tasks. Our group had mixed feelings about their spinning experiences; after the first hour some of the words our group used to describe our spinning experience were: Hard. Difficult, Meditative, and Magic.

Despite our variety of experiences both in success and emotion we all could agree that time passed very fast — in the blink of an eye we found that one hour had passed by quite fast (though whether that was from the spinning or the attention required to learn a new skill we are unsure).

Some other experiential data that we observed was that making a thin spun wool was not only difficult to make but also hard to maintain at a consistent thickness. We concluded that lots of skill and experience would likely be required to reach a high quality of wool. It also took most of us a while to understand the concept of drafting the wool appropriately to spin.

Weaving

Our group moved on to weaving next. Some of us started with the tapestry loom without a heddle installed and tried to record some times to make one pass through, with our times ranging from 6:38 to 6:46 mins for one pass! This required a lot of attention and we can see why a heddle was an absolute need. The pass with a heddle took about 2 seconds for comparison. Many of us expected this to be our favorite part of the process but were disappointed with how tedious this experience felt especially for making a rug or something without a more creative design.

Carding

Carding was the last activity our group did and spent the least amount of time on. One of our most noted experience was how much strength it required to properly card the wool. We used two different types of combs ones that had more of a nail-like look and ones that were shorter. We found the short carding tools produced a better wool for spinning that was softer and easier to work with over the nail-like carding tools. We unfortunately didn’t spend much time on this station so we made less observations and produced less data.