A new way to make cordage :)

[Toddy]

About 8.40 to 9.00 into this video, which is all kind of interesting anyway.

I reckon I can do that with two spindles and a ring tied onto the washing pole, or door handle.......

 

[Brizzlebush]

Quite mesmerising to watch somebody with such skill create a beautiful object like that.

 

[Billy-o]

That is a very handsome basket. I would like one

 

[Robson Valley]

Like so many other plant fibers, I'll bet that the bamboo turns from cheese to bone when it dries. Working with fresh stuff must be a lot of fun with some very effective tools.

 

[Toddy]

I like basketry, and though bamboo like that doesn't grow here, our traditional bark or split timber baskets can be made the same way.
You're right @Robson Valley; the bamboo, and the bark/withies do the same and become firm and crisp, even if they are still flexible.

 

[Robson Valley]

Black Ash (Fraxinus nigra) logs need to sit and very gently decompose. Then, they can be beaten and sized into lathes to be woven into baskets of great strengths in all shapes and sizes. First Nations in Eastern Canada have a world renown reputation for that basket quality.

In the video, I see the fresh bamboo split radially and tangentially. Obviously, a clumsy beginner such as myself would make a mess but the experience would be time well wasted.

The tools are an aspect of carving that has interested me for decades. That was a good video for those.

 

[Toddy]

@Robson Valley
Our Ash can be used the same way, while oak is split and is beautiful and hardwearing.
Elm too, rare enough though that is now.

I think you are so right about the experience it all becomes mind/hand/eye knowledge, doesn't it ?

I saw the tools and thought that the folks here who keep their knives in such beautiful condition would be horrified ! but those are working tools, those are tools that themselves have become shaped liked the hands that use them.

 

[SaraR]

About 8.40 to 9.00 into this video, which is all kind of interesting anyway.

I reckon I can do that with two spindles and a ring tied onto the washing pole, or door handle.......

Interesting video!

I'm sure you could spin on a stick (rather than drop spindle) to make the singles, even if the fibre isn't behaving well enough for a spindle.

 

[Tony]

I do wish we had more decent bamboo in the UK

 

[Toddy]

Interesting video!

I'm sure you could spin on a stick (rather than drop spindle) to make the singles, even if the fibre isn't behaving well enough for a spindle.

I liked the shorter 'flyer' type thing he used. I wish we had seen more of it, more detail, etc.,
Spinning on a distaff as you suggest works fine though, but his plying, like us doing Navajo, needs two, that's why I thought about the drop spindles. I have loads of those since I used to teach and had a woodturner friend make me a batch to suit.

Usually I just make the cordage by hand, but my hands and wrists ache a bit much to do a lot of it. I thought this method might be a neat way around that

 

[SaraR]

I liked the shorter 'flyer' type thing he used. I wish we had seen more of it, more detail, etc.,
Spinning on a distaff as you suggest works fine though, but his plying, like us doing Navajo, needs two, that's why I thought about the drop spindles. I have loads of those since I used to teach and had a woodturner friend make me a batch to suit.

Usually I just make the cordage by hand, but my hands and wrists ache a bit much to do a lot of it. I thought this method might be a neat way around that

I didn't mean a distaff to hold the fibre, I meant a hand-held stick/spindle for spinning on rather than using a drop spindle of some sort, like they used to do before the drop spindle was invented. It's slower and I guess it might be less easy to produce a high-twist single, but that probably doesn't matter here.

I wonder if you could ply it on a drop spindle if you had one with big enough a whorl...

I've seen a few different versions hand cranked "twisters" for cord and rope making, but I too liked his contraptions.

 

[Toddy]

You can spin using the short distaff....it's quite common in northern India apparently
The fellow who taught me to do it said it was used for cotton. That's what I meant about using it for the cordage fibres. It's a bit like rolling it on your thigh but it's easier because you have the distaff to work with.

I've made a lot of cordage and rope over the years. Made a fair few mechanisms to do it too, but it's always fun to see something new, especially when it looks very practical. It's appreciated when I don't need a rope walk to make a decent length

 

[Robson Valley]

We have a wild "cotton grass" which grows in great profusion in standing ditch water along our local highway. Pencil-lead stems, each topped in autumn with a thumbnail-sized tuft of cotton. Fill a pillow case in 30 minutes?
Never found any evidence recorded of spinning technology here. Weaving, yes, all over the place.

 

[saxonaxe]

Watching that video and thinking about simple tools. In the early 1960's I was in the port of Acajutla in El Salvador where we were discharging cargo that we had loaded in Bremerhaven, Germany, some weeks previously.
The cargo handling company employed an elderly local man to act as Night Watchman on the ship's gangway. He came aboard when work finished at 16.00 hrs and went ashore at 08.00 hrs. I used to chat to him and listen to his stories of how he lost half his leg to a shark attack as as young man ( intriguing stuff to a teenager.. )
One day after a run ashore to the one horse town as it was in those days, I brought back a little green Parakeet..I'd seen it and felt sorry for it crammed in a box at the local street market. The old Watchman offered to make me a bird cage using the pile of old Bamboo matting that lay on deck waiting to be dumped at sea ( sorry Greta )
He pulled out strips of Bamboo from the matting which had been used to protect items in the cargo, and began to weave a cage in a very similar way to the Chinese basket maker in the video. I offered him the use of my Seaman's Knife but he declined and used the small machete which he always wore tucked in the back of his belt.

I sat on the main hatch watching and by late evening it was finished, a beautiful delicate but strong dome shaped cage about 18 inches high, it even had a little door on Bamboo ring hinges. Just Bamboo, a machete and great skill. It was a present he said for all the breakfasts I had scrounged for him off the Ship's Cook in the mornings before he went ashore.

I let the Parakeet go at Panama when we sailed back through the Canal bound for Brownsville Texas, as he didn't have a US entry permit...

 

[Toddy]

We have a wild "cotton grass" which grows in great profusion in standing ditch water along our local highway. Pencil-lead stems, each topped in autumn with a thumbnail-sized tuft of cotton. Fill a pillow case in 30 minutes?
Never found any evidence recorded of spinning technology here. Weaving, yes, all over the place.

The thing I point out to folks is that most of the tools we use to make cord/yarn/fabric, are in themselves biodegradable, and at the end of the day they're just wee sticks.

When at University our Viking lecturer brought in the complete finds from a boat burial from our western isles. The boys went for the sword, the girls for the beads, etc., and I picked up a wee stick, not more than a handspan long. Thin like a chopstick and gently curved.
The lecturer looked at me and said, "You know what that is ", and my classmates kind of screwed up their faces at something so uninteresting.

That wee stick was a pin beater. The lady in the grave had used it so long that it had curved to fit her hand, the patina on it was that of constant use and wear. It was so much a part of her daily life that they'd put it into the grave with her, with her daily used tool and her jewellery.
But, unless one knew what it was, what it was used for, it was just a wee stick, and so easily overlooked as unimportant.

Very few cultures have no way to make cordage of some kind. Often it's just sticks though......that folks know how to use

 

[Toddy]

Watching that video and thinking about simple tools. In the early 1960's I was in the port of Acajutla in El Salvador where we were discharging cargo that we had loaded in Bremerhaven, Germany, some weeks previously.
The cargo handling company employed an elderly local man to act as Night Watchman on the ship's gangway. He came aboard when work finished at 16.00 hrs and went ashore at 08.00 hrs. I used to chat to him and listen to his stories of how he lost half his leg to a shark attack as as young man ( intriguing stuff to a teenager.. )
One day after a run ashore to the one horse town as it was in those days, I brought back a little green Parakeet..I'd seen it and felt sorry for it crammed in a box at the local street market. The old Watchman offered to make me a bird cage using the pile of old Bamboo matting that lay on deck waiting to be dumped at sea ( sorry Greta )
He pulled out strips of Bamboo from the matting which had been used to protect items in the cargo, and began to weave a cage in a very similar way to the Chinese basket maker in the video. I offered him the use of my Seaman's Knife but he declined and used the small machete which he always wore tucked in the back of his belt.

I sat on the main hatch watching and by late evening it was finished, a beautiful delicate but strong dome shaped cage about 18 inches high, it even had a little door on Bamboo ring hinges. Just Bamboo, a machete and great skill. It was a present he said for all the breakfasts I had scrounged for him off the Ship's Cook in the mornings before he went ashore.

I let the Parakeet go at Panama when we sailed back through the Canal bound for Brownsville Texas, as he didn't have a US entry permit...

You have brilliant memories

I love watching people make. I really do. I love to just absorb and appreciate the whole process. I couldn't spend half an hour on a tropical beach doing nothing, but fill my hands with something to make and I'm a happy lady

 

[Robson Valley]

I was on the edge of a community of artisan weavers for a few years. I went to wool sales for raw fleece and cleaned them up, the job that everybody else was quite willing to pay for. I enjoyed attempts at spinning and always had a great time, messing with the local lichens as dye sources.

I don't believe for a minute that everybody did everything. Instead, everybody had a specialty that they were both good and very fast at.

I must ask around about cotton grass spinning. The concept had to be right in their faces.

 

[Toddy]

I don't think everybody did 'everything', but I believe that most knew how almost everything was done
I believe too that most people were/are very capable, if they put their mind to it.

We have bog cotton here. Tiny wee white tufts of very short staple. It takes a lot of picking (ask me how I know ? ) to get enough to make any yarn at all.
I've done it, and compared to picking the seeds out of the boll and processing and spinning cotton, it takes at least twenty times as long per yard of yarn. Seriously it does.
On the other hand, it does grow here, and we actually have artefacts of the stuff. Not a lot, but enough for the archaeobotanists to say that this is what it is.

Fact is that you can make cordage out of pretty much anything linear.
Whether it's good cordage, or worth the effort depends very much upon the resources available and the necessity to make cord/yarn.

I made string out of rushes today, couple of metres of rope out of the withered stems of the flag iris too.
Just because I could

It's kind of addictive this yarn and rope making