An instructional video on spinning flax fibers using a handheld distaff, featuring traditional medieval tools and methods for historical fiber preparation and spinning. More for You.

Complete Guide to Support Spindle Spinning — A Beginner’s Journey. Posted: May 9, 2025 | Last updated: May 9, 2025. This collection of videos chronicles an expansive and deeply personal fiber ...

People have been spinning plant fibers, like flax, into thread for (at least) tens of thousands of years; the first people to do this that we know of were Neanderthals living in what’s now France.

Spinning methods. (a) Manual thigh-spinning [64]; (b) Spindle-and-whorl “supported spinning” [68]; (c) “drop spinning” [66]; (d) the experimental spindles and whorls, the 3D scans of the ...

Research published in PLOS ONE lays out a discovery that explores the history of the wheel. Researchers suggest that the12,000-year-old stones out of Israel could be examples of spindle whorls.

With a regular spinning wheel, you had to hold one end of the roving and carefully draw it farther from the spindle as you spun the wheel. The spinning jenny helped mechanize that part of the process.

Then they asked Yonit Kristal, a traditional craftsperson, to try spinning flax with them. “She was really surprised that they worked, because they weren’t perfectly round,” says Yashuv.

Perforated pebbles discovered in Israel may roll back the time of the wheel invention by thousands of years, according to a study in PLOS ONE.. Archeologists had traced the origins of the wheel to ...

After some practice, Crystal was able to successfully spin flax—and, with a bit more difficulty, spin wool—into yarn using the pebbles as spindle whorls. Illustrations representing various ...

The neutron star 4U 1820-30 is one of the fastest spinning bodies in the universe, spinning at 716 times a second and erupting like an atomic bomb, NASA's NICER telescope has found.

This article was originally published with the title “ A Separable Spindle For Spinning Wool ” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 63 No. 10 (September 1890), p. 146 doi:10.1038 ...