Spinning

To make a metal up or bowl by beating sheet of the metal into the desired shape is a skill demanding much practice and much time, both to develop the skill and to produce an individual item. Spinning is a recently developed technique that allows a ductile metal (such as gold, silver or brass) to be made into cups, bowls or similar shapes much faster and more easily.

Process

A sheet of the metal is fixed to a device similar to a potter's wheel and while it is spun the metal is lifted and shaped using wooden or metal tools, much as a potter can raise and shape clay with their hands. Where a set of identical items are to be made, a pair of profiles wlll be produced, one defining the inner shape and the other the outer. Bringing these together on wither side of the metal shapes it into the desired form.
To produce a basic bowl or cup shape is easy, and many of the whitesmiths of Morton disdain this new process for deskilling their trade (for a key stage in their qualification was the raising of a pair of identical cups. The yellowsmiths are a more pragmatic bunch for their wares are sold in larger quantities and this is a tremendous saver of labour for them. A skilled spinner can narrow the vessel produced to produce a necked flask, though a similar effect can be obtained by producing a pair of bowls and soldering them together.

Development

Like some of the best inventions, once seen in operation spinning is viewed as obvious. The similarities of throwing a pot are so close that in hindsight it is difficult to believe that it has never been done before, but the available evidence point to the technique having been developed by Caddick Orma Cadu some 20 years ago. The technique has spread rapidly among the yellowsmiths and is now becoming established among the whitesmiths. Of the Anvilmen only the blacksmiths have not adopted it to sme extent - and this is because of the stiffness of the metals they deal with.
By making circularly symmetric vessels much easier to produce the introduction of spinning has lead to a great increase in the decoration applied to such vessels, and it is now the intricacy of the decoration that it the point of judging a good piece from an averge one.