#I still spin on spindles. They're just so portable

[garaksapprentice]

It seems fast because that estimate is, to my shame, incorrect. (Spoiler: I mistyped up there. It's a week for just the warp yarn, not for the whole fabric.)

That being said, I think knowing how I got to that number is a good exercise to familiarise people with the sheer mind-boggling nature of textile production pre-spinning jenny. So I'm going to run through the maths here.

Please bear in mind that these numbers are extremely wibbly. There is much back of the envelope maths, and a lot of fudging the numbers. There's just too many variables in textile work to do it any other way.

First: how fast are we spinning?

My metres-per-hour number is based on the self-reported speeds of re-enactment spindlers, who had recreated the in-hand method of spinning with a belt distaff. (I swear I had the paper and now I can't find it. Boo.) That's what we see all through medieval paintings and manuscripts, from the end of the Viking age all through the medieval, into the early modern, and even into the late 19th/early 20th century in some parts of Europe. That is, this style:

Their self-reported speeds were 100-150m per hour, when measured over at least sixty minutes of continuous spinning. I'm going to assume we're really good spinners and use the higher number.

Second: How much thread do we need?

Next we find the length of thread needed for a dress. I ballparked a relatively modest 3m of broadcloth (60" width fabric) for a single kirtle, since that's how much we tell people to buy when they want to make their own. You could get away with less if you're poor - say 2.5 m, maybe even 2m if you're short and skinny - but our encampment is a bunch of knights and their retinue. So really, 3m is the minimum for us.

Typical wool fabrics for the period seem to have been sett at around 30 ends per inch (epi) on the coarser end, which makes 1,800 warp threads in a 60" cloth. This is the coarser stuff, mind - the numbers go up fast if you use thinner yarn. But I love me, so I'm not doing the maths.

(These numbers are DEFINITELY fudged. Cloth can change quite a lot from loom state when it's finished and fulled. If anyone has done research on that with regard to recreating medieval textiles, I would love to read it.)

So 1,800 warp threads multiplied by 3m per thread (again, fudged - there's take-up when weaving, plus loom waste to consider; so 3m of cloth needs more than 3m of yarn in its length) gives us 5,400, which is 3.35 miles of thread. 5.4 km ÷ 150 m/h = 36 hours. Hey, we get an early Friday!

But that's only a little over half the thread we need. We need to calculate weft, too. Let's assume we're weaving a plain/tabby cloth (over one, under one, the whole way across - the simplest way to make cloth).

Generally when working out how much yarn you need for a plain weave, you assume 55% for the warp and 45% for the weft. This is too hard for my sad little brain, so I'm just going to double our warp number for 10.8 km of yarn, total (a touch over 6.7 miles). This will also help account for that take-up and loom waste I mentioned above.

So, to make enough fabric for one (1) fairly plain kirtle, in a somewhat coarse fabric, you would need to spin yarn for:

10,800 ÷ 150 = 72 hours.

For ONE dress. Not including the thread to sew it together, which will add another few hours.

Have I mentioned lately how much I like my e-spinner?

me: i'm adding realism to this medieval fantasy setting

what people think i mean: grime, gratuitous sexual assault and murder, misogyny, child marriage

what i actually mean: everyone reads out loud, women are spinning wool all the time, peasants marry at 20, people wear colors.