I demonstrated three types of spindle-spinning at an event recently (slightly over an hour of each one and then my arms would tell me it was time to change) and the different reactions from members of the public were quite fun.
1) Short suspension, low whorl (well, not much of a whorl at all, but weighted towards the bottom), with distaff - people mostly focused on what my hand was doing to the spindle. This one seemed fairly logical to onlookers.
2) Supported (tahkli), from the cloud - people mostly focused on the yarn in progress. They tended to watch for a little longer than with the first one.
3) Long suspension, top whorl, no distaff - people overwhelmingly asked "how does it keep spinning?". Like, over and over and over again. The fact that it was still spinning several feet away from my hands caught everyone. I would show them how I start it with my fingers and that's the only force and there are no other moving parts and it slows down eventually, and they would still ask what else made it go!
It was a very fun day. These were the three spindles I used, plus the lego one mentioned below. The white dog fur was on the tahkli.
Other notes from the day:
A) I had my other spindles on display and the lego+pencil spindle absolutely engaged people the most, much more than fancy carved ones did. I would highly recommend making something similar (colourful, cheap, robust, unexpected - it makes people want to reach out and they feel they can reach out) if you are spinning for the public outside of reenactment.
B) There were three of us for this part of the stall and we each used different tools (stick, spindles, modern saxony wheel; we didn't plan it this way, this is just who turned up!) which was very helpful when explaining some development of spinning and what each tool actually does. It would have been nice to have a demonstration of stages of fleece prep as well.
