a thoughtful reveal, too

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

"Well your skirt is hand embroidered. Chain stitch it looks like. Probably Pakistani work. Someone did that, didn't they?"

"Oh...Well, I guess so..."

And you can see this whole new dimension of the world opening up before them because they saw me executing a tidy backstitch. Hand sewing used to be all there was, for a couple THOUSAND years. But not only do people not know it exists they think it's dead, that it's something out of the Past.

If I take a SPINDLE into public with me... same thing. With yet wilder Awe. It's kinda neat to see people discover something all over again.

They've never thought about where cloth comes from because they've never had to; it just exists. When you tell them you're making string out of fluff to weave on a loom? By hand?

You're basically their great great ancestor's ghost come to life for a moment. Like the opposite of walking over one's grave.

See, we accidentally snuck into a craftfair the year 3D printers were just becoming common, because we got lost from the alpaca show on the other side of the event center and just kept walking.

Mom had semi-recently picked up spinning, and was fidgeting/practicing with her drop spindle as she walked around, checking out all the printers and occasional other crafts and enjoying the new fiber she’d picked up at the alpaca show. I was maybe 12 and used to her doing this so I was more entranced by the idea of 3D models and moving renders to real space, but my dad asked someone there “what’s the coolest thing you’ve seen today,” probably looking for a good way to keep mine and my brother’s attention for a few minutes, and.

Well.

Being able to spin on the move was also just, really necessary. The sheer amount of thread needed even to keep up with a low status family's textile needs meant that women (sometimes men too, depending on the culture, but I'm most familiar with Europe and spinning was almost entirely women's work there) were spinning pretty much constantly when they weren't doing things that took both hands.

Hell, that's part of why the distaffs was so prevalent: they let you keep a good amount of prepared fleece on hand, neat and tidy, in a way that you can easily pick up and put down on a moment's notice. There's a good amount of manuscript and other images from the medieval period showing women with belt distaves spinning, or with the distaff tucked into their belt while they do other chores like feeding chickens. Here's a woman in the Luttrell Psalter (1325-1340) doing just that: