SpinnySpinny

Much to my amazement, the cotton/silk fit on the high-speed bobbin. Barely. I plied until the first single bobbin ran empty and I had 30g of yarn. Just enough, and I couldn’t get much more on there. I didn’t boil this one because of the silk. When I get some time, I should look into more about that to see just how far I can go without damaging it. The chemistry of the water is involved, too. But it’s not critical so I’m not going to worry about it now. I did wash it well and the water turned nasty brown from the cotton.

I’m going to also use the cotton for something else, I want to do the cotton two-ply with the same fiber to make a complementary skein: warp and weft. I think I might even use that for my cotton swatch. I had some practice plain single so I plied it with the leftover cotton/silk to see what I got. I tried an experiment with the Insanely Fast Flyer, one of my yarn-guide clips is loose and tends to slip when I don’t want it to. So instead of stopping to move it to fill the bobbin, I tried tugging on the yarn. It works, sorta. It does move the clip and I can continue plying at full speed (a frightening thing at 44:1) but sometimes the yarn breaks. Generally a single breaks in my hand, so I am snagging it in the process. An interesting idea to look at later, but not now. One day I might actually get some replacement clips, I’ve been trying to get some through my local shop with no success. I still have one that works and I might be able to doctor up the other with a pair of pliers if I tried. I know the wheelmaker intends this for teeny tiny delicate yarns but there are other things that also require high twist.

As for that little sample, it’s a tiny skein and I was curious about how much was there so I counted it: 100 meters! Yikes, that’s fine. I took it to sock-knitting-chocolate-eating night over at Carolina Homespun and everyone was duly impressed. Judith MacKenzie McCuin, who is in town for some workshops, thought it amusing I considered it throwaway sample yarn. (My friends know me so well they joke about it.) Actually, I do toss a lot of yarn. Usually because I’m so frustrated with it I can’t imagine it being any good for anything. Or it’s such a small amount and I really need that bobbin. Lately I’ve been trying to at least ply some of the random singles I’ve got around and get them to good homes. I sent a package a while back to a primary school teacher and some for a charity art project. I have some I think I might give to a few of the folks I know knit for charity. I’ve had this idea that after I’m done with the COE work I’ll card up the growing odds and ends pile and spin some basic yarn for Afghans for Afghans. I’m feeling guilty I haven’t been able to do much work for them lately and the office is literally two blocks away. I got back into knitting when I first came to San Francisco by doing hats with donated yarn.

Yesterday was Fiber Extravaganza, I went to go hang out with a friend I haven’t been able to see in a while and we did fiber stuff. Lots of fiber stuff. I finally learned some Peruvian weaving I want to use for one of my swatches and did a few things on the amazing electric drum carder. And a most excellent dinner, even. I like hanging out with my fiber friends. Everybody else is at our regional annual conference going on this weekend a few hours south of here.

Some of the stuff I’m working on really needs a drum carder. I wasn’t happy with blending the fiber for two of the spindle skeins with the equipment I have: one had too much variation in texture and color than I wanted to deal with on combs and the remaining llama down isn’t making nice rolags like the first batch. I still have the really short tow flax to card, if I’m not able to get down there for another visit I’ll just have to do it by hand and I’m not thrilled at that.

The second cotton/silk bobbin continues, I’m more than half finished now. I have a ball of trash from broken yarn collecting, I thought maybe it was just I would get better at spinning it after the first bobbin but it’s still breaking just as much. I’m trying to get a nice thick and thin mix of both fibers to contrast the colors and textures and it’s actually very difficult to get a good thick and thin yarn on purpose. If it weren’t for this short staple silk I happen to have, I would have never tried to blend combed silk and cotton. The staple lengths are usually very different. I think a uniform blend would be interesting also, but not even the fancy electric drum carder I used yesterday could do it. As nice as it is, it’s pretty mundane as fancy electric drum carders go.

I should finish the cotton/silk in a day or two and then comes the plying. That will take at least another two days. I have to think about how I want to handle it because I don’t know if it will all fit on the small high-speed bobbins. But it will take much, much longer to ply on the other flyer. Supposedly it’s ok to have two lengths in a skein if it’s because it doesn’t fit the equipment. I don’t know how much that is actually true other than for the small supported spindle or maybe something done on a charka. I’ll have to think about that.

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.

I’ve spent several days updating and adding various COE topics. I still have a good bit of writing to complete so it’s best I get on with it. I spent all afternoon today researching the properties of protein fibers. This is pretty dull stuff; I will assume that if you care to know, you can find the COE index page on your own. I’ve got another misfit yarn but I don’t have it written up yet.

After many false starts, I’ve found something I like with the new cotton/silk blend. I’m still not thrilled with it but it’s working, I like it best as a fine slubby two-ply. It’s a little tedious to spin but nothing like the previous attempt with the noil. This is something I might actually be enticed to use, although I’m not likely to want to spin any meaningful amount of it. A castle wheel is just lousy for long draw and I’m doing my best to get it over with.

Some people might say that spinning tiny yarn is hardly getting it over with, but that’s me. I just don’t like big yarns. And a big cotton yarn is hardly practical. I would get this COE spinning done a lot faster if I made all the “at the discretion of the spinner” yarns big honkin’ things, but then I’d be embarrassed to admit that I made some of them. I can’t do everything in Corriedale and make it all look like lopi. Or Colinette Point 5. I’m already doing more textured yarns than I personally like because I don’t have a drum carder to do all this blending.

The cotton is in to boil, I had a bit of a problem there when one of my bobbins ran empty while plying but it’s all better now. Spin up more and then paste the whole mess back together and continue. Novelty yarns are great for hiding things like that. It isn’t even a good splice.

Much to my amazement, I skeined it off and the plying is almost perfectly balanced. Not what I would expect from thick and thin single plus the weird plying to get the eyelash blobs in there. Skeining it with the bobbin on the other side of the room helps even things out, but that still won’t fix too much or too little twist. I did a sample, but it’s hard to keep it even when you are also fooling with the yarn in the process.

Since this is partly naturally green cotton, not only am I boiling it but I am boiling it a good long time. I don’t even know how long, I’ll go fish it out when I feel like it. It took a while to even get it to sink in the water. I added some baking soda because I didn’t want to deal with boiling soapy water. (I wanted an alkaline solution.) Then it gets washed. Boiling cotton removes the waxy coating of the fibers, you don’t have to if you don’t want to but you are supposed to if you are going to dye the yarn. I don’t dye enough cotton to know what difference it makes. But with colored cottons, boiling makes the color darker. It’s supposed to make white cotton more white also, but it sure gets a bunch of nasty stuff out. The water is a nasty brown color.