Tangles, Patience, and Fortitude.

No weaving per se this weekend, since the inaugural warp has been woven off the loom.  However, I did do lots of fiber work, of the preparatory kind: winding off skeins onto bobbins.  Since these were all skeins of silk organzine and tram, it was tricky going, but despite getting lots of tangles (lots, and lots.), I was still able to wind off a great deal of silk, and the losses I had with earlier attempts to wind off organzine or tram were not repeated.  There was loss, of course, but I ended up getting about 95% of each skein wound, compared to the 55% I was getting before. 

I keep returning to the idea of trying to reproduce the method I saw in Diderot's Encyclopédie called the 'Tour d'Espagne';  in which a rather solid, blocky base holds two springy poles which laterally stretch a skein.  One of the poles is very tall and has an eye through which the silk coming off the skein is threaded; from the eye the filament goes down again, under light tension, to the dévideuse who is presumably winding it onto a bobbin or a reel.  One curious thing is that the Tour d'Espagne doesn't rotate the way a swift does; it remains stationary.  I don't know what that would be like for dealing with tangles, but right away I see that if the yarn is held tightly in an arrangement that does not move, then the extra tangles that arise from the momentum of the swift rotating would simply not happen in an arrangement that does not move.  However, the rotation of the swift also allows air to circulate through the whirling skein, which I suspect assists with the unwinding - if I wind too slowly, the tangles are worse, but if I speed up very slightly, then the skein is rather aerated, is slightly 'aloft', and threads tangled beneath others can be freed up this way. 

Experience and doggedness and a deep unwillingness to waste precious thread conspired to make me work through almost all the tangles in the skeins yesterday.  I was astonished at how much thread you can still get from a horribly-tangled-looking skein.  When I got to the point of no return as I did last time, I simply kept going, and voila, I got another thousand or so yards of silk organzine out of the hell-skein.

There must have been procedures and techniques in place that would have at least minimized waste, back in the day.  I don't think that the entire silk industry was premised on a bunch of picky people sitting around slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y winding off tangled skeins.  Maybe it was a different world where it was possible to pay skein winders to deal with this. 

Minimizing handling and tangling during the washing and dyeing processes has helped, as has Tien's Tinkertoy Swift (especially wonderful for winding off tram, in a nice leisurely way).