Spinning Experiments

For my birthday, I signed up for a new Fiber Club. Or should I say, Fibre Club, given that the packages are posted from my current fair city. In contrast to the Hello Yarn fiber club, which feeds my ever growing need for a fix of gorgeous handdyed wooliness, this one comes with assignments. And directions. And gorgeous handdyed wooliness. Win-win-win. It's a bit like online spinning school, I guess, but without any deadlines.

In any event, the first installment of Spintelligence was a pile of the softest BFL I've ever felt, and the instructions to spin a bunch of small samples of singles yarn, varying the ratios. The idea was to demonstrate how just changing the ratio on the wheel can affect your singles/yarn.

Let me back up, just in case anyone reading isn't familiar with the mechanics of spinning wheels. There are a number of different types of "drives" for spinning wheels - aka, different mechanisms to introduce twist into the fiber and then wind the resulting yarn on to the bobbin. But, no matter what sort of drive system you have, there are different ratios for adding twist, which alter how much twist enters the fiber per treadle stroke. The "ratio" refers to the number of times the flyer or bobbin moves (introducing twist) per single rotation of the drive wheel. On my wheel (which is a single-drive, Scotch tension system), the ratios are changed by shifting the drive band from one sized whorl to another.

You can see in the above picture that the drive band is going around the smallest whorl on this particular flyer assembly - that gives a higher ratio then the larger whorls.

So, armed with the BFL and two flyers with six ratios between them, I set off to do my Spinning Homework.

I set the brake tension and spun all the samples at that tension, with a short forward draw without smoothing, and just changed the ratio, going from 6:1 at the top of the picture to 17:1 at the bottom. The obvoius result of this was as follows: higher ratios mean thinner singles with the same drafting and tension. Eureka!

Ok, maybe not Eureka!, since this is what was supposed to happen. The only misstep was that the 9.25:1 single had a wpi of 32, while the 12:1 single had a wpi of 28. However, that could easily be due to operated error in measuring wpi. It could also be due to the fact that the 9.25:1 ratio is the smallest on my regular flyer, while the 12:1 is the largest on my high speed flyer, so changing the flyers may have altered the tension a bit.

As the ratios went up (and more twist was added per treadle), it became really hard to draft quickly enough to keep the single from getting overtwisted. The sample on the left is 7.5:1, middle is 12:1 and right is 17:1. You can see that, particularly in the 17:1 sample, there's a bit of overtwist that wasn't taken care of in the finishing process.

The second part of the assignment was to pick one of the yarns and spin up a bunch of it to knit a swatch. I picked the 7.5:1 sample as my favorite, and spun up about 8 grams of fiber into an unknown number of yards. I picked a US 3/3.25 mm needle for my swatch, by virtue of doubling over my spun yarn and seeing which hole it went through on my needle gauge.

I knit a bit in stockinette, with a garter border, then did a couple of cables, and then a bit of lace. I was pleasantly surprised at how little bias there was in the stockinette section - singles yarn is inherently unbalanced, since it's not plied, and you can end up with biased fabric in stockinette. For that reason, singles are usually best knit up in stitch patterns that combine knit and purl, or in lace.

The cables were, unsurprisingly, pretty flat and mushy, and the garter stitch wasn't too good. The lace looked pretty good, although I think I would go up a needle size to make it a bit more fluid - this needle size made for a slightly too stiff lace fabric.

The second installment of the club arrived Saturday morning, and I'm itching to get the currently-being-spun bobbin off the wheel so I can get to work on it. The assignment this time is another singles yarn, but this time in some gorgeous handdyed alpaca/merino from The Thylacine.

FF: Yarn #3

I'd like to introduce you to my five hour yarn:

Fiber: HYFC BFL in "Norway", previously seen on the blog in these mittens.
Spun/plied: 9.25:1/6:1, spun long draw from the fold.
Stats: 183 yds/4.4 oz (665 ypp) of lovely worsted-to-bulky squishtastic yarn

I was inspired by a number of the yarns in the HYFC Tour de Fleece team thread, and decided to do a 2-ply color progression with this fiber. I started by pulling the component color stretches apart, and ended up with six groups.

There was the red group, the orange group, royal blue, turquoise, light greyish blue and grey. I took each batch of fiber, split each chunk in half lengthwise, and made sure the two piles weighed the same (+/- 1 gr). Then I laid out the pieces for each group in the order I wanted to spin and started in on the first bobbin. After spinning the first little baggie of singles, I switched bobbins and spun up the same color group on the second bobbin.

I started with the grey, then went to light blue, turquoise, royal blue, red and finished up with the orange. One hour of Tour highlights one evening, and one viewing of Shrek 3 the next day, and the singles were all spun. I'd forgotten how much faster long draw is! It was also a relief to spin something thicker then the 60+ wpi singles I'd been doing for the previous two yarns...then it was time to ply. First the orange and red sections,

then the royal blue (my favorite!),

then the turquoise and finally the grey.

Plying took all of an hour. My obsessive fiber weighing paid off - most of the colors matched up really, really well, with a bit of bleed over to blend the transitions. I ended up with a few yards of singles left on one of the bobbins, but I just stopped there. No need to get silly about using it all, right?

A nice warm soak in Soak, and that's all she wrote! I was going to use this for hats for the girls, but now I'm leaning towards a nice scarf, maybe on the bias so the stripes slant? Or maybe worked lengthwise so there are really long skinny stripes? Decisions, decisions...

(yum)

Fiber Friday: Yarn #2

TdF yarn #2: Hello Yarn Fiber club BFL in "Insect Wings"
Spun/plied at 12:1, short forward draw (worsted), 3 ply.
Stats: 2 big skeins of 3-ply, at 255 and 254 yds respectively (score!), and one mini-skein of 2-ply from leftovers, about 30 yds. 9.8 oz of fiber total.

So with this fiber, I wanted to spin two matching skeins of 3-ply for socks. I split the 10 oz of fiber I had (double dose FTW!) into three equal weight piles. For the first ply, I split the entire length of top in half and spun each half on to separate bobbins.

The second bump I split in fourths, and spun two strips on to each of two bobbins (in the middle).

The final bump got split into eigths and spun 4 pieces on to each bobbin (bobbins 1 and 1' on top row, bobbins 2 and 2' in middle, bobbins 3 and 3' on bottom row).

And then there was the plying...

I loved the colors in the original fiber, but as I was plying, I was a bit concerned. It looked really...orange. And orange is not exactly one of my most favoritist colors. However, after a soak in warm water and a bit of time on the back porch drying,

I fell in love.

Perfect autumn colors for some gorgeous socks. Sometime in the future. Maybe that should be my Vuelta project?

I've been having fun making collages of my spinning pictures and pictures of the girls. Here's one with the berries I mentioned last week:

And it includes a wee teaser for next week's finished yarn!

Fiber Friday: Yarn #1

Well, clearly the Tour de Fleece coupled with summer vacation is enough to completely wipe out any motivation I have for blogging. Sorry about that! But rest assured that I have a) enough new handspun yarn to last for at least three weeks of Fibery Fridays, with more to come, b) some knitting progress and c) lots and lots of berries.

The first of my finished TdF yarns.
Fiber: Wensleydale, dyed by Adrian in the Mollusc colorway, a fiber club offering from August or September of 2007
Spun: I was going for laceweight singles, so I used the regular flyer for my Lendrum at 7.5:1.
Stats: two skeins, coming in at 467 yds/4.7 oz and 465 yds/4.1 oz - 1590 and 1815 ypp respectively. ANywhere from 35-50 wpi.

This top was an extra batch I ordered when I received my original fiber club offering, and I had visions of spinning it all up for a BSJ for some lucky baby. However, I'd never spun a longwool before, so it sat in the stash for a long time. I decided that part of my challenge was going to be spinning up the earliest fibers from my stash, and this is definitely one of those. This time around though, the colors spoke to me more for a big lacy shawl, so laceweight singles were on the menu.

The fiber was actually really easy to spin, once I stopped being scared of it. The top was much narrower then I've seen before with other wools (merino, shetland, etc), and needed a bit of predrafting after it's long hibernation, but after that it spun easily. I did notice my hands were a lot farther apart then they are for shorter fibers, but it wasn't too hard to adapt to the staple length.

I finished the skeins with a fulling bath. I was really worried that I'd added to much twist because the yarn before finishing was waaaaaaay overtwisted. However, three times through a hot/cold bath tamed that, and they ended up balanced. Yippee! The finished yarn has an absolutely gorgeous halo, and is super soft. The colors blended in the singles in such a way so that there's really nice transitions between the colors. I can't wait to knit this up, but I need to find a good 950 yd shawl pattern. Anyone have any suggestions?

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Now for knitting (and keeping with the color theme): I've been working a bit on my Aran Necklace Camisole in the past couple of days as my spinning mojo has gotten a bit burnt out.

It's coming along, and I'm now working on the front gussets, and should be getting the front done over the weekend. The yarn (Jo Sharp Soho DK) is still pissing the crap out of me - umpteen-plied splitty cotton yarn is not my friend - and I'm pretty sure I'm going to run out before the top is really finished, but I like the color, and I'm hoping it will be long enough not to show off my oh-so-lovely mom midriff. Stay tuned.

Tour de Fleece, Week 1

After a week of fairly intense spinning, I'm sad to say that I don't have any finished yarn. At least not any that's 100% finished (skeined, washed, dried). What I do have is this:

And this,

That's 8 oz of Mollusc Wensleydale (last seen as this) spun up into laceweight singles. I finished on Wednesday, so I'm letting it sit on the bobbins for a few days before I give it a bath to try and tame some of the energy.

I'm now 1/3 into 10 oz of HYFC BFL in Insect Wings. These are totally not my colors (holy bright Batman!), but I'm really enjoying spinning this and loving the colors on the bobbin.

I'm going to try and get two matching skeins of 3-ply from this. I started by splitting the fiber into three bunches by weight. The first slug (in picture) was split in half lengthwise and spun one onto each bobbin. The second batch is getting split into fourths and spun two lengths/bobbin. Don't know what I'm going to do with the third ply yet. So that's well under way.

I'm hoping to be able to post a couple of finished yarns maybe by the middle of next week. Spin on!