The most interesting thing about learning to use a spinning wheel is that noticing that all historical or fantasy movies that have spinning wheels in them show the wheel being used in all sorts of bizarro wrong ways around, even backwards. In a lot of movies, they decided the yarn must come out of the drive band. They don't even know what it *looks* like to use a wheel.

Nobody's used wheels for so many generations that even historical reenactment experts for movies never seem to have a clue where to start with them. Spinning wheel enthusiasts had to figure out the process from scratch in the 1960s, because it hadn't been passed down. It's always a little spooky to see old skills get culturally lost.

Like knapping. I wonder why poor people in rural parts of Europe didn't keep knapping stone knives-- just to be cheap-- after metal-working became common. Shouldn't it have kept on being useful to improvise one to fix a meal, or when you can't be bothered to go into town and buy an expensive bronze one from the smith? Instead, knapping became such a forgotten skill that people didn't even recognize stone arrowheads they found in fields as having been made by human hands. Folk thought those arrowheads came from lightning or elves.