Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVII

It did mean that Lucia was in the village more, because she no longer looked after the flock with her younger brother and sister. It did not mean, however, that there was less work for her to do. In addition to the ever-present spinning, there was more food to cook, the garden to care for, sewing and darning of damaged clothing for her father and brother, as well as the wool to clean and card.

The villagers made something of a holiday of the shearing. And Agustin was surprised at how fast that went. Shearing, however, he learned, was not the biggest job. Even docking and culling the lambs was not as big a job as cleaning the wool turned out to be. There was, though, plenty of meat for several weeks after the shepherds decided which lambs to cull.

Washing the wool, at least in this village, took almost every hand that was available. And because he and Luis were somewhat extraneous to the machine project at the moment, they decided to help. Luis, it turned out, had his eye on Lucia's cousin, Beatriz, because of her cheerful, loving nature. Agustin had to admit that Beatriz was better looking than Lucia, but she was also a bit flighty for his taste.

So they both wound up putting the wool in cold water, which was then warmed until the grease and dirt loosened, then lifting out the heavy, wet, smelly stuff to drain and rinse. Throughout it all, the women chattered and made sure that no one poked and prodded the wool too much, as it would then stick together and become unusable. After rinsing, the wool was laid to dry in clean, grassy areas, where the breezes would dry it as quickly as possible.

Lucia explained that the wool would be turned several times a day, and that it would take about four days to dry completely. Surprisingly, they did not sell the finer grades of wool, not this year. This year, Don Alfonso had pre-purchased all of it, so that the machine team would have wool to experiment with. Rather a lot of wool to experiment with, Agustin thought. And too soon to be doing much experimentation, at that.

"If you want to make spinning faster," Lucia grumbled, "find a better way to loosen the wool and get all the hairs lined up in the same direction."

It seemed that if women weren't actively spinning wool, they were preparing it for spinning. Even after washing and removing most of the grease from a fleece, wool was just naturally clumpy. It grew in tangled locks, which had to be separated and made smooth before the wool could be spun into thread.

Carding and spinning were laborious, repetitive tasks, although not particularly difficult. Or so Agustin thought, until Lucia tried to teach him to use the carding combs she was wielding. In spite of Luis' laughter about it, Agustin felt that the machine would never work unless the men building it understood the process of making thread. Which, of course, none of them did.

So, Lucia not-so-patiently showed him how she loosened and carded the fibers with a set of carding combs, then removed the straightened fibers and rolled them into what looked like a sausage. After that, the wool was ready to be spun, either on her hand spindle or a wheel.

"Why do you roll it that way? Why not just leave it flat?"

Lucia shrugged. "It is the way I was taught. I've never tried it any other way. Besides it would take up too much room in my basket and might tangle again."

At Agustin's urging, Lucia sat at one of the treadle wheels he and the others had built from a drawing and began to spin the flat mass of fiber. After a false start or two, it only took a few minutes to spin. Of course, it only took her minutes to spin one of the sausage shapes, as she pointed out.

"But was this faster? At all?" he asked.

"Perhaps. But it would only make a real difference if the mass of wool was larger, I think. No. Not larger. Longer. And, maybe, thinner." Lucia used her hands to try and describe what she meant. "With these, I must stop the wheel, pick up another, attach it, then start the wheel again. With a longer, thinner, ah… I don't have the words. But if the wool was like a rope, long and thin, instead of a flat square…" She looked at him. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I think so. And I think I read something about that, in all the papers. Let me think for a while."

It was often easier to understand Lucia's gestures than the stuff they received from Don Carlos. Rumor had it that the papers and notes they got from Don Carlos were sent to the de Aguilera family from Germany. Judging from the shape the papers were sometimes in, Agustin thought they might have been sent from even farther away. By now they were sending questions back along the route, wherever it lead. Agustin wasn't involved in that part. The questions went from him to Miguel to Master Munos. Agustin was increasingly concerned that the important questions weren't making it all the way to wherever the source of the information was.

The words were often unfamiliar, which frustrated everyone, as they would then have to ask for explanations. Still, every packet from Don Carlos gave them more information. The big breakthrough, though, finally came. The man in Germany-if that was where he was-had started tracking down the various names of the inventors, and come across more detailed information and drawings. Still not enough, but it helped.

The spinning machine was stalled. It should work. It was supposed to work. As they looked at each part of the operation, it even seemed to work. But the thread it produced was clumpy and came apart with even gentle tugs. Miguel, nearly howling with anger, had stomped away this morning, cursing all the way. Munos, who was being pressured by Don Carlos, wasn't in any better a mood, and had left for Zamora to explain the delays. With those two gone, Agustin and Luis had time to experiment with a better way to card the wool.

They started, much to Lucia's dismay, by tearing apart a set of carding combs to see how they were made. "Any idiot can see how they're made!" she said. But, better to check, anyway.

Agustin and Luis were a bit embarrassed to have to admit that she was right. The carding combs were just bent pins, stuck through leather, which was then nailed to a flat piece of wood. After a handle was added to the flat piece, the carding comb was complete. But it, combined with some of the drawings they'd recently received, did give them an idea.

It took some time to find enough leather to cover a large and a smaller wooden drum. It took longer than that to make the tiny pins to insert through the leather, bend them at the correct angle, and secure them to the drum. And more time to construct a frame to hold them.

It wasn't an exact duplicate of the "drum carder" in the drawing. For one thing, in order to take advantage of one type of motive power they had available, Agustin and Luis positioned the drums differently. The drums were laid on their sides, supported in the air by a pole that ran through the center of each drum. The drums were held up with a spacer, so that they could harness one of the bellwethers to a shaft that would turn the drum. The shaft was about five feet long and the large drum about three feet across with a radius of half that. A small boy was initially used to walk the bellwether around in a circle, but that same small boy eventually attached a turnip to a stick and hung it in front of the sheep. The sheep kept chasing the turnip, although he never caught it. As bellwethers were used to walking all day, leading the vast flocks throughout Spain, the sheep took no harm.

The smaller drum turned at a faster pace, of course, and quite a large amount of wool could be gradually placed on it. The teeth from the larger drum picked up and straightened the wool as it came off the smaller drum. Taking the wool off of the larger drum proved to be somewhat problematical in the beginning, but they eventually contrived a tool for that.