SpinnySpinny

I’m nearly finished with the first bobbin of cotton/silk. It’s annoying but going fast enough. The silk is longer than the cotton so it takes less twist. Sometimes that means the silk won’t budge while there is still a blob of cotton wrapped up around it I’m trying to draft out. Or a big slub of silk surrounded by fine cotton yarn. It breaks far too often and I have a pile of junk bits of half-spun yarn I’ve tossed aside. Some slubs are ok but I have to stop and fix the really huge ones. These are generally silk. The idea with this yarn was to still be able to identify the two fibers, so there are large sections of mostly silk or mostly cotton and they do draft differently.

Long draw with smooth fibers like this is a little different from long draw with wool. Crimp tends to hold the fibers together so it takes far less twist to make it undraftable. Cotton will continue to draft even after it looks like solid yarn. It also drafts best with a slow constant tug rather than stop and start. This is the difference between static and dynamic friction and it’s why it’s harder to get something moving than to keep it going. See? I learned something in Engineering Mechanics.

The other thing about long draw is all that theory is nice but even absolutely perfect fiber is not going to get you perfect yarn. This is real life, folks, not a math problem. You can’t maintain constant tension or speed and the fiber certainly isn’t going to help you by providing constant drafting rate. Some little thing you can’t even see will cause the fiber to snag and suddenly you have a slub. It might pull out, it might not. I’ve had to deal with this problem in figuring out just what a “consistant” woolen yarn is. It certainly isn’t what I get with short draw, even discounting the fuzz. Very few people talk about this aspect of long draw.