Women have long been engaged in needlework. As soon as people realized that clothes can be made not only from the leaves and skins of dead animals, they began to invent various devices that could help to obtain a long thread for making the canvas. Then a spindle appeared. What? What does this strange item look like? Now not many know it ...
Legends and fairy tales
Strange as it may seem, fairy tales and ancient legends tell about what a spindle is. According to one of these legends, with the help of a spindle, the Great Spinner spun our Universe, dissolving the Great Chaos and weaving it into tangles-planets. Perhaps the spindle is a special item, magical. About the spinning devices that our great-great-grandmothers worked, it is mentioned in a huge number of fairy tales, epics, poems, stories. Pushkin’s lines devoted to the nanny Arina Rodionovna (“or you doze off under the buzz of your spindle”), perhaps, remember everything from school.
Spindle - why is it?
Mankind has invented a lot of devices for spinning yarn in its history. But the spindle and the spinning wheel have a long history, even at the beginning of the twentieth century in remote villages women used them to get threads. It spins, winding a thin thread around itself, which the spinner pulls from a tow wound on a spinning wheel. A thin torch burns, a spinning wheel sits behind a spinning wheel, pulls a thread, wound it on a buzzing spindle, sings a song or tells a tale to children. However, today you can also see a needlewoman spinning yarn from wool or synthetic fiber for her work.
There is nothing strange in the fact that the spindle is somewhat reminiscent of a magic wand. It spins, bewitching and outlining circles. Handmade from strong wood, such as birch, it was an assistant in the work, so it should be convenient, suitable in size for future yarn, for female fingers that rotate or stop its running.
How is the spindle made?
But what is a spindle ? How was it done? Of what? The meaning of the word "spindle", if we look at the dictionaries, is an object for spinning yarn. It is an elongated length, and this is thirty centimeters, an object of cylindrical shape, which has a thin sharp top and a thickened bottom, ensuring uniform torsion of the spindle. Such a spinning device was made of solid wood, the species was selected as deciduous, since coniferous wood was dirty with tar and spoiled the thread. The tree was sawn, chopped into dies, which were dried in a furnace, and then only processed, turning into a necessary tool for a needlewoman. It is somewhat reminiscent of a children's toy - yule, it also spins in one place. The torsion of the spin is regulated with the help of fingers - for a thin tail, it stops the spinning spindle or sets the movement again.
With the fingers of the other hand, the woman pulls out thin tow fibers, twists (used to say "knots") the thread and wraps it around a rotating spindle. A photo of the spin can be seen below. By the way, many artists were fascinated by the woman behind the spinning wheel, because it was an image-symbol of Life itself.
Art and life
The image of a woman with a spindle in her hands is a legend. According to archaeological finds, spinning using spindles has more than 20,000 years. For many centuries, this device for spinning a thread has not lost its universal meaning, because if you go through museums of art, you can see a huge number of paintings depicting a spin with a veteran. These images will be both fabulous and real. Museums of everyday life almost without fail have a spindle in their expositions . Photos of women spinning appeared with the development of photography, although many artists painted their heroines behind a spinning wheel centuries ago. The spindle was the most common household item, but at the same time it was considered a talisman that protects the spin and its work from evil spirits. Other girls didn’t part with their lieutenant, even when they went to work in the field, considering it protection from evil spirits.
Symbol of life
The answer to the question of how such a spindle cannot but touch the philosophical side. Just as a thread is wound on a spindle, so the life of everything that exists on Earth is woven into the thread of the Universe. And if we turn to etymology, the word denoting a device for winding threads during spinning, in all nationalities, has its roots in the concept of “rotate” or “rotate” - here you can easily find a thing in common with the life cycle of our planet and the Universe as a whole. In Russian, the beginning of the word "spindle" is understandable in itself - the verb "twirl" will be the same root word in morphological analysis and semantic load. The concept of "spindle" exists not only in the strand. If you ask a biologist about what a spindle is, he will talk about the process of cell division, when a partition arises between the separated parts, called the "spindle of division." Like it or not, a spindle is a symbol of life.
The spindle is a very primitive, but at the same time complex subject. The image of the spindle is ambiguous, meaning a device for spinning yarn and a way of the Universe.