Experiential, Qualitative Data
Throughout the experiment, I recorded the experiences, feelings, and instantaneous thoughts of my group members as we cycled through the different stations of the Wool lab. These stations were carding, spinning, and weaving wool, although not in that strict order. I’ve ordered what we found in the order that we did the stations, because this may be pertinent to how we felt while doing them (i.e. using the wool we just carded into roving to spin may encourage a sense of accomplishment).
Weaving Experiences
The feelings that my group-mates expressed during weaving was creativity and freedom. There was some acknowledgement of eye strain during the weaving process, but the overall consensus was a feeling of individualism in a relaxed, quiet manner. The tabletop loom had cotton strings that felt softer than wool, and less sticky.
Carding Experiences
Carding was some of my group mates’ favorite activity. The sheer labor put into shaping the wool felt powerful and almost like an answer to contradicting old myths of women’s work being dainty. Pushing and pulling hard to straighten hair forcefully was much more interesting to my fellow group mates.
Spinning Experiences
Spinning ultimately was the hardest activity of them all. The greatest issue was the boredom. My fellow classmates reported feeling time going forever, and a lack of interest in the wool. While we tried to spark conversation, we were often so focused on shaping a consistent string, that most speech was scattered. Over time, we started to hum or sing quietly while working on spinning. This also proved to be the most labor intensive, as reports of strained shoulders and pinching in the fingertips and knuckles were most common. However, interestingly enough, after we finished carding and started spinning again, the overall experience with experimenting with new wool was much more positive, and there was a greater feeling of accomplishment from spinning the roving that we just made from “raw” tangled sheep wool into new string. This was a great change from the boredom and lack of creativity in the spinning process.
Experimental, Quantitative Data
Carding Data
My group found that carding wool was tremendously hard when using the hand cards that weren’t broken in, and as a majority preferred to use the larger combs, which made it easier to gather material, although it left much more waste. An interesting future measurement could be the amount of waste produced by using combs rather than hand cards.
We counted the amount of fluffed, aligned wool roving produced through the 30 minutes of combing and carding.
| Time (hours) | Jacob sheep (hand carded wool roving) | Icelandic sheep (hand combed wool roving) | Total wool roving produced |
| 0.5 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| 0.5 | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| 0.5 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| 1 | 1 | 2 |
Spinning Data
My group tried to measure the lengths of the spun wool after the three and a half hours of spinning during lab. However, out of the four of us, only two of us were able to unwind the wool easily, using our hands and arms as spools to make it easier. The other two people in the group discovered that the spun wool had a tendency to tangle and turn into a mess when taken off the spindle, without using an object or their bodies as spools.
| Time Spinning (hours) | Length of spun wool (meters) |
| 3.5 | 17.65 |
| 3.5 | 23.4 |
0 thoughts on “Week 2 Lab Data Group 5 : Wool”