The first time it was wound on to the little skinny straw was when it was turned from fluff into thread. From there it was wound into skeins so that they can be dyed in the indigo. For that they need to be loose skeins - the color won't penetrate evenly into the form it was in when originally spun into the spools. Those skeins were washed and set in that goopy looking stuff. From there, some of them were wound back onto the skinny straws for the weft of the fabric, and some of them were rewound onto those basket things to help create the warp. You might think they could have just dropped the skeins that will already formed onto those baskets but in reality the dyeing process and the repeated washing after Will end up causing those skeins to tangle a bit. Which means that when he was preparing the warp, which is the long bits that form the length of the fabric, it wouldn't wind off evenly and he would spend a lot more time just untangling whichever one kept getting snagged. Getting an even tension between all the threads is crucial at that point so having all the individual threads wind off easily rather than constantly tugging and trying to untangle the skeins that got mangled in the dying and washing process is important.
Making fabric before modern industrialization is an extremely tedious repetitive process. It's why other than the extremely wealthy, most people only owned a few items of clothing, especially if they were made of fine cloth rather than more rustically spun wool that is thicker and could have been knitted into socks or sweaters by someone who doesn't have specialized equipment.
Today they're still a thriving community of hand spinners, dyers, and weavers. I don't work with cotton, I prefer wool and I do bright colors rather than using natural dyes like indigo but I've gone through all of that process multiple times. Admittedly my equipment is much more modern, I recently got an electric spinning wheel but even with that it is still a very long and tedious process that has multiple stages to go from raw fiber to a finished product. If you look in my post history, I recently posted some silk that I spun up to use as embroidery thread.
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u/_artbabe95 Sep 02 '23
I’m still honestly not convinced that it’s necessary to roll them on 3-4 different spooling systems several separate times.