Bret Devereaux

Hmm. I was hoping to get retting, drying, breaking, scutching hackling (flax), sorting, scouring, carding and combing (wool) AND spinning in this week's blog post, but I think I am going to leave spinning for next week and pair it with weaving.

If that’s a short post um... the hand spinner in me is boggling. For the record.

To be clear, the short post is the one that doesn't have spinning in it. But this isn't a 'how to' guide - that would be much longer (I read several to get a grasp on the processes). Mostly this is about pre-modern producers, and the bad news is that evidence and discussion...

Fiber prep in a lot of ways is spinning even more so than the actual putting twist in part. I agree that if you don’t have actual spinners doing site analysis, getting prep evidence can be difficult even in historical era sites.

So, the tricky bit is that ancient artwork prefers to show spinning rather than carding, combing, etc AND most of the preparation work involves tools which don't survive archaeologically.

But I am at the mercy of my secondary sources . Pre-spinning prep work often gets just cursory paragraphs. E.g. in Barber, Prehistorical Textiles (1992), spinning gets a 30 page chapter. Combing only gets the occasional mention; it doesn't even get its own subheading.