(Nimue)
The drop spindle is a bit of technology whose use goes way back into prehistory. Spinning wool was the start of how countless people through history have made clothes, and having warm clothes is essential for life in the northern parts of Europe.
As part of my time on Hadrian’s Wall, I spent a lot of time spinning. When I started I knew some theory and had tried a few things briefly many years ago. It took a while to get the hang of it, and to figure out the timing and the flow for feeding wool fibres to the turning thread. I’ve enjoyed it. The process has taught me about the value of clothing when you have to make the material in this way. A dress represents many hours of work.
As a joky aside, I find myself wondering if Celts fought naked to avoid damaging their precious trousers!
One visitor reflected on how grim she thought life must have been for the woman who had to spend all of their time spinning. I found myself comparing that to the lives of the people who worked in fabric making factories, and the lives of ordinary people now. The person who spins can also look after their children (and sheep!) talk, sing, tell stories and if they have any coordination, they can wander about. I cannot wander about. As a way of life, hand spinning is clearly far less horrible than factory work – which routinely killed and injured people pre 20th century.
It’s interesting to ask what progress means and looks like. We free ourselves from spinning into the convenience of having massive amounts of poor quality clothing, the production of which is compromising life on the planet. There have to be better ways.
Druid Life 
This takes me back in a gentle but quite forceful rush to a certain thread of my family, my paternal grandmother’s line, who two centuries ago were all employed in the cotton mills of Cumbria. Before them my ancestors were cottage workers, only one of whom we’ve been able to name and she only by her first name, three centuries ago. My instinct is that she and her ancestors might have worked in wool before cotton came along. Transferrable skills.
In the middle of the nineteenth century their industry collapsed when American supplies stopped coming, causing a cotton famine in northwest England, at the same time coincidentally as a different line of my family were emigrating to Liverpool to escape the Irish famine.
My cotton worker family moved altogether across the country, west to east, stopping for a single generation to work in the silk mills of Bradford where conditions were possibly the most terrible in the industrial world at that time, then they continued their movement east to the coast, at Hull, where they too used transferrable weaving skills and got jobs such as net makers for the fishing boats there. Apart from one bloke that is who became a blacksmith. They stayed over there and many of them are still around, except for my paternal grandmother who moved with her husband back across the country and settled in Wallasey, on the northwest coast, where in the next generation her son, my father, married my mother from the Irish line, and eventually I was born.
I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died before my time. but I believe she inherited some of the family knowledge and worked as a seamstress.
thank you so much for sharing this.
Sheep need to be seared to keep their Woolen Coats from growing out of control leaving them virtually Helpless.
So what did the Sheep do before Humans came along to take a hold of them to start Shearing off their Woolen Coats.
Look to their wild ancestors. Our sheep are human-created hybrids bred for their wool.
they do seem to be pretty good at leaving it in hedges! I’m fairly convinced they taught us how to spin, by this means.
Thought-provoking as always! Spinning, I’m told, can also be a meditative act, the repetition trance-inducing. In my experience factory work is not meditative. 😉 A friend of mine in college learned the drop-spindle, and her Master’s thesis was based on her building an ancient Greek-style hand loom and weaving a complete Greek chiton on it with her own drop-spun wool. Time-consuming is an understatement.
Not to suggest a return to that technology, but I agree with you. Between that way and our current way, and beyond them both, lie vast improvements, if we can be open to the vision of them.
wow, that’s an amazing thing to have done.