lace yarn

With all the news about Russia these days I got to thinking again about Orenburg Lace.
Prices seem to be way down, which tells me things are rough for the knitters over there. $60 for a lace shawl makes spinning/knitting one seem like a waste of time - it is a little like the Merino jumpers I buy at Costco for $50.  I cannot knit one for that price, but the Costco jumpers are not like the jumpers I knit. You cannot knit a shawl for the price you can buy one from Orenburg.  On the other hand, today the right yarns are hard to find, so you may not be able to knit such shawls at any price. Unless you learn to spin good lace yarn!

Learning to spin good yarn is some effort but it is not impossible.

I have not bought one of those Orenburg, shawls, but I do not think the descriptions are quite accurate. First they claim that the 14 micron goat down is the finest animal product for spinning - not quite - the Guanco I get from Royal Fibers, is also 14 micron. And, 14 micron Merino is available, as is 14 micron cashmere. There are other very fine fibers available.

But, it is not how fine the fiber is, but what one does with it. I buy Rambouillet fleeces from Anna Harvey, (https://www.annagotwool.com/) and after sorting and grading, I get a pound or 2 of  80 count wool fiber out of each fleece. (Plus several pounds of lower spin count wool that can be spun as fine as 35 or 40 thousand yards per pound!) The better graded wool can be spun into singles at ~45,000 yards per pound.  It can be spun finer, but spinning finer is much slower and the thread is not as competent.  Thus, 2-ply lace yarn can be spun finer than 20,000 yards per pound at a "commercial rate".  (And, Anna's wool is spun into tons of such yarn in Italy for fine men's suits.)  My hand spinning is very ordinary by Italian commercial standards.

One can spin a single of Rambouillet and ply it with commercial silk, and have a lace yarn that is significantly finer than what is being used these days to produce commercial Orenburg lace.  And, I will cheerfully match the luster and softness of high grade Rambouillet against Orenburg down.  The Orenburg down yarns are very nice, but they are making marketing claims that are just puff and bluff.

A little research tells us that in the days when there was a lot of royalty around, (and more demand for fine lace) much of the fine Orenburg yarn was spun on "spinning wheels". Art tells us that many of those wheels were likely some kind of vertical charka. That is important because a spinning wheel or charka can put a lot more twist into a yarn, much faster than a supported spindle. I think that these days, Orenburg lace makers use supported spindles due to a combination of lack of capital, lack of work space, and a lack of training.  Now, there is no international community of hand spinners to keep a variety of fine spinning traditions and technologies alive. In the past, much hand spinning was devoted to spinning at the wool's spin count, and many people made the required tools These days, nobody is making spinning wheels designed to hand spin wool at its spin count. (The Russian spindles require less craftsmanship.) If my spinning wheel is damaged, there is nobody around that can repair or replace it. That community is gone.

If I did not have my super high speed spinning wheel, and wanted fine lace yarn, I would get a chakra, and mount it vertically to spin woolen singles. Then, I would use a standard flyer and bobbin wheel to ply the final yarn.  However, my flyer/bobbin wheel is fast enough to reasonably spin very high twist yarns quickly.

I estimate that the Orenburg down singles are  spun at ~ 25,000 ypp, are spun medium firm, and thereby require about 18 or 20 twists per inch. (That is what I put in my 11,200 ypp weaving warp.) While my 44,000 ypp knitting singles require ~ 24 tp.i., or about 30% more twist - that is a huge effort/cost for a craftsman using a supported spindle. A good rule of thumb is that for any spinning operation, the largest cost is energy to insert twist.  On the other hand, using a charkha or other high speed spinning wheel, such high twist yarns are much more feasible. If I were asked to produce that style of yarn, I would spin sorted/graded Rambouillet at its spin count (44,000 ypp), then I would ply the single with commercial silk to produce a lace yarn with a grist in the range of 30,000 ypp. I would  spin the wool at its spin count because there are real technical advantages to spinning wool at its spin count. There are useful reasons for why wool was graded by its spin count.  I do not know if goat down has a measurable spin count.

I do think we should have more spinners that can sit down and spin wool  at its spin count.  I also think we need better sorted and graded wool. Then people would not be so astonished by the Orenburg lace yarn, and its claims would be more closely examined for truthfulness. There would also be more good yarn around.

The flip side to all of this is that I think the super fine Merino is produced by abusing the sheep, and the finest wool from well treated sheep has a spin count of about 80, meaning it can be reasonably spun into 44,000 ypp singles (20,000 ypp 2-ply, 1,248 yd/oz. or 44.1 yards per gram of 2-ply).  Long ago, I put some effort into spinning higher grist yarns, and decided that they had no practical advantages, and many functional disadvantages.  I decided that the best display of spinning skill was spinning wool perfectly, at its spin count.

The old hand spinners of Shetland did spin wool at its spin count. Shetland wool has a spin count of 56 to 60, so it was spun at about 33,000 ypp  meaning 2-ply Shetland lace yarn at ~14,000 ypp or better, and 3-ply Shetland lace yarn at ~ 9,000 ypp or better.  Shetland lace yarn was strong and lustrous. Shetland lace was one of the glories of the Victorian age. Sure it was spun and knit by Shetlanders, but Victorian ladies paid good money  to make it possible.  We do not see commercial lace yarn of that quality around much these days.   I have a bin of wool very much like Shetland next to the wheel that I have been using to spin weaving warp.  I can change whorls on my wheel, and be spinning 30,000 ypp singles in minutes.   Of course, spinning a useful amount of such singles in a reasonable length of time would involve a change in the fiber prep, but without changing the yarn prep, I could spin a 150 yards of 30,000 ypp singles in a hour. Shetland can be spun at its spin count either worsted or woolen.

These days, I spin fine wools (60 count and higher) woolen, and I spin fiber with a spin count of less than 40 as worsted. This is a real conversion from the rule: "Worsted is the best way to spin".  In part, it is a recognition that woolen spinning bends fibers sharply, and finer fibers can tolerate sharper bends better.  And, worsted spinning does not bend fibers as sharply, and thicker fibers do not tolerate being bent sharply.  In part, it recognition that most "fine" wool has short staples, and is hard to comb, and I do not believe that "carded" wool produces real worsted thread. This is not an iron clad rule as I have a couple of 40 gallon bins of combing "waste" that I am about to card and spin semi-worsted. It is the "shorts" that I combed out of some Romney fleece that produced many miles of worsted spun, 5-ply gansey yarn at 1,000 yards per pound..

Most of those miles of  gansey yarn from this fleece were spun before I accelerated the wheel. In those days my wheel ran at a little over 1,000 rpm. These days, it runs more than 3 times faster. Now, the wheel runs fast enough that I can reasonably make 10-ply (5x2) 1,000 ypp gansey yarn. The extra twist in the extra plies gives the yarn more strength, to compensate for the lower quality of the fiber.  Some might consider 2-ply 5,600 ypp yarn to be lace weight. No, it is just the basis of some rather coarse sailing gear.today

While sick, I usually spun inside with artificial light. For various reasons, they produced a flat light.  Today, I am back, spinning in the sunshine. The fiber is Anna Harvey's Rambouillet. It is a mixed bag of fleece left over from sorting for very fine fiber, so its spin count is only  in the low 70s, but it is brilliantly white. It sparkles! Spun woolen near its spin count it, dazzles.  As 2-ply lace yarn at ~ 18,000 yyp, it is brilliant. As 3-ply at ~ 12,000 ypp, it is brilliant, durable, and unbelievably soft.

Such yarns can be spun on supported spindles, but it is very tedious.  Each inch of the produced yarn requires between 70 and 110 twists (singles + ply twist).  High speed twist makes it much easier to draft these yarns.  Fine woolen yarns are better produced on a chakra, or a very high speed DRS controlled bobbin/flyer assembly.

Knitting is hard work, use good yarn to make the product worthwhile

Somebody said “Shetland wool”, and the first thing I thought of was jumper yarn as in: (https://www.thewoollythistle.com/collections/2-ply-jumper-weight-light-fingering/products/jamieson-smith-2-ply-jumper-weight-yarn-cones).  This turns out to be about the grist of yarn called for in Gladys Thompson’s patterns for Sheringham & Norfolk ganseys.  She lists Paton’s 4-ply Beehive fingering in the pattern, but the grist is about the same as the above.  The 4-ply Beehive is a little rounder, firmer yarn than the 2-ply jumper yarn, so the 2-ply Jumper has more fill and is warmer than the (no longer available) Beehive (unless the 4-ply is more tightly knit).  The 4-ply allows the pattern to pop and is usually cooler to wear. (These days, the only way have a yarn like the old Beehive is to spin it yourself or have it custom spun.)

Either way. I knit such yarns for such fabrics on ~1.65 mm, long needles. I use pointed needles for patterns full of cables (or lace) and blunt needles for plainer knitting.  Gauge is ~ 12 spi by ~20 rpi.  The pointy needles are 14” long, work well with either a knitting belt or a knitting sheath, the blunt needles are 18” long and long want a knitting sheath.  However, this is not really about needles or knitting sheaths, this is about yarn.

This is not an “I am so smart rant”!  It is a “knitting is hard work, and therefore it deserves good yarn rant”. I repeat, this is a “knitting is more work than spinning, so knitting deserves good yarn!" rant.  

Spinning yarn for a fine jumper (sweater) takes about 20 hours for jumper weight or 40 hours for a 4-ply like Beehive at ~ 2,500 ypp (same weight yarn, but the 2 yarns have different virtues.  Knitting is the issue; a slow knitter like myself takes 250 to 300 hours to knit such an object. I am well aware that a good commercial knitter can knit that many stitches in a week. However, the objects knit by the commercial knitter will not be as warm or as durable as what I knit. I do not even bother with any stitch pattern with the 2-ply jumper yarn – the patterns are hardly visible and do not have much effect on performance/wear ability.  With a tight, worsted spun 4-ply, and high ply twist (very durable) something like a “plough and furrow” pattern adds to the stretch of the fabric, thereby making the garment more comfortable and more durable. And, with that firm, round (4-ply) yarn, the stitches in the pattern really pop, making the pattern clearly visible. Also, for weaving, I usually have kilos of handspun 5,600 and 11,200 ypp singles, so if I get inspired, I can ply-up handspun yarn for such a jumper very quickly.  But, those are weaving singles, and they have a lot more twist than most singles used for knitting yarns – even sock yarns.  Those high twist singles need more ply twist than softer spun singles and do result in harsher knit fabrics. On the other hand, fabrics from high twist yarns last much longer. Twist holds yarns together, and (within reason) more twist means more durable.  Most modern commercial yarns for recreational knitters are spun and plied very softly – this results in a very soft fabric, but also a fragile fabric. If I am going to put in the time and effort to knit a fine object, I want it to last.

In fact, I am likely to knit something myself, precisely because I want the object to last – e.g., I only want to carry one pair of socks, and I want them to endure the entire hike, or I only want to take one sweater, and I want it to endure a voyage across the Pacific.  (Iron men in wooden boats need firm fabrics to buff off the rust and all that.)

My point is that there is much more to yarn than some scale from 0 (lace) to 6 (bulky). 

We were talking about Shetland Jumper yarn, and I love Shetland wool.  I think it is a great compromise. It is fine enough to be very warm for its weight, it takes dye well, it has significant luster, spun woolen it is soft, and spun worsted it has a nice silky feel. On the other hand, Merino and Rambouillet can be softer and warmer for the weight. Rommey and Cotswold can have more luster, a more silken feel to the worsted threads, and take dye better, and be more durable.  Shetland wool was used for Hillary’s ascent of Everest because it was an excellent compromise between warmth and durability.  These are properties you may not need, but they are worth knowing about as you select a yarn, because knitting is a lot of work, and you should select the correct yarn spun from the correct fiber. These days climbers on Everest do not use wool except for frame knit Merino sock liners and Merino long underwear.  When we were there, they used local, loosely spun and loosely knit socks, which were very harsh, (and not very warm).

However, what fiber would I choose for a “jumper” to wear sailing on – San Francisco Bay?  I chose Romney. It is strong, very lustrous, easy to spin worsted, and easy to knit into a weatherproof garment that will withstand heavy use for years and still look good. Certainly, Shetland would work, but Romney is a better compromise for the use.  What fiber did I choose for a fisherman’s sweater for my wife? Rambouillet – it is soft, and my wife is very gentile to her clothes, and she does not go out on boats much. 

Wool fibers have 2 ends; the butt and the tip. In the old days, worsted spinners, were careful to feed wool fibers into the spinning draft butt-end first. This gave worsted thread a very smooth surface, very uniform diameter, and exceptional luster. With mechanical wool processing starting circa 1850, endwise orientation became random. It was still called "worsted" but it was a different kind of thread.  It had much less luster, and it lost a good bit of its silken feel. This was most important for the weaving of very fine twills, that can be tailored into garments that make royalty seem radiant.  A long time ago, I did some experiments on orientation of fibers in worsted spun threads and decided that worsted threads with random end orientation was actually stronger under wet conditions. I talked this over with some spinners that I trusted, and since then threads that I expect to get wet are spun like commercial worsted yarns with random fiber end orientation. If I am thinking about something like lace that really needs maximum luster, I do make sure that all the yarns are spun butt-end first. 

In the evening, my wife and I often watch the news and a DVD. I often knit as we watch.  If I do the tricky parts in the morning’s light, I can have a fine (12 spi by 20 rpi) sweater in 3 months of watching TV, and my only cost is a half a kilo of fiber and some time spinning. (I can spin 5,600 ypp singles in front of the TV, but not 11,200  ypp.) Sure, I can (and do) buy frame knit Merino sweaters for $50 from Costco, but my hand spun/ hand knit sweater will last 20 times as long, and the sweaters I knit, do not mind being washed in water. (An advantage in a time of global warming when one expects snow and gets mud.) While the commercial Merino jumpers are softer, my worsted spun fabrics have a smoother, more silken feel, and the worsted spun yarns are more lustrous. In 4-ply, with a pattern, they are even rather dressy. Also, the knitting helps me remember what Rachel Maddow said. Knitting is like taking notes or doodling.

Gansey Needles Revisited

I went to 18”, pointy gansey needles because that was the conventional wisdom on what was used to  knit fine ganseys, and I wanted very fine ganseys. It took me a long time to learn to make them really useful. Folks sold “gansey kits” of yarn and needles, but the long pointy needles are not useful without a knitting sheath that can be fastened over the right buttock.  The physics are strongly against hand held “gansey” needles.  And, long steel pointy needles have issues - I had to get bigger knitting bags to hold 18” knitting needles.  I had to make point guards to keep them from sliding right through the fabric of my knitting bags. And, pointy needles cause more wear on knitting sheaths.  On the other hand, the spring action of these needles driven in a vertical motion by the weight of my right hand, was the very fastest and easiest way I knew how to knit.

However, for the last few years, I have been making better knitting sheaths that can attach to a strong belt below the right elbow.  These sheaths can comfortably take the stress of flexing the 3/32” spring steel that I like for knitting cold weather gear.

Now that I am using blunt needles, less needle motion is required, and I can get the required motion from 12” needles.  The motion is still driven by the weight of my hand, so it is a very fast, low effort way of knitting.  I use 6+1 needles for a gansey to fit my ample girth, so the weight of a set of needles remains the same, but they fit in a much smaller bag, and because they are blunt, I do not have to worry about them going through the bag.  Overall, 18” needles are faster because there are fewer needle changes.  With long needles, if you have some space to spread out without poking someone with your needles, you can use vertical or horizontal motions that change the working muscle, without changing the fabric (with practice).  And, 18” US3 needles is the only way I know how to do good tight weatherproof Aran (10-ply/500 ypp) fabrics.

 

(If you are doing brioche stitch or lots of bobbles, stick with pointy needles and a not too splitty yarn.)

These days, I often use finer sock needles, so I can get almost the same motion from 9” needles, but the needles are soft enough to flex sideways (or vertically) with just the effort from the base of my thumb, opening up additional styles of knitting small objects. Since, I now use the same needle adapters for straight needles and swaving pricks, in a small knitting bag, I have the tools for a good variety of knitting styles that quickly produce good uniform knitting, for when I need to get a knit object finished quickly without over working one set of muscles/joints. If you are going to knit seriously, you need different knitting techniques that use different muscles, but which produce identical fabric. The shorter needles also allow knitting in the car or plane or boat.  Long gansy needles (even blunt needles) are not well suited to knitting on public transportation.

One can make a good pair of fine, warm socks in a couple of days. If you can get someone else to drive, you can get much of the work done on the ride up to camp.  And yes, I still think the motion of the longer needles is smoother. But swaving works very well even on rather rough roads.

In the old days, I often knit while walking and hiking – I saw the old pictures of people knitting as they walked and thought it was “cool”. After I discovered knitting sheaths and knitting belts, I found that knitting sheaths were not very good while walking, and I decided that hand-held needles could not produce the quality of knitting that I could make with knitting sheaths/knitting belts.  Thus, I gave up on knitting-while-walking. If I am going to knit, I sit or stand in one place. Knitting with a knitting sheath while standing does work fairly well.  In Jane Austin’s time (and before), women often had knitting sheaths in the form of jewelry stitched to the gowns they wore to social assemblies, so they could knit lace while they stood together and talked. The first time I went to the V&A, such knitting sheaths were only labeled as “jewelry”.  It is worth noting that Jane Austin did not knit.

Swaving

Swaving was the last knitting technique that I learned.

One way or another, knitting is a process of using levers to move loops of yarn though other loops of yarn. There are 3 classes of levers. see for example  https://bvg8science.wikispaces.com/file/view/levers.jpg/420871352/476x417/levers.jpg .

I do not distinguish between the various forms of hand held needles.  Hand held DPN, circular needles, and SPN, all have the same physics, (e.g., they act as class 1 levers), and are thereby all the same to me.  Straight DPN used with a knitting belt are class 3 levers. That is very different.  Different techniques using straight needles and knitting sheaths may be class 3 levers or springs and may  have very different physics. In contrast, swaving uses curved needles (Long known as “pricks”) that are rotated in the knitting sheath, and the rotation moves the tip of the needle into the working stitch and slides the new stitch off of the left needle while the motion of the right/shuttle hand, moves the new stitch up the right needle. Still levers, but the axis of rotation, is the fulcrum, and the load is at the tip of the needle.  The process is elegantly fast and simple.  My adding effort to the pricks with the side of my hand, results in compound leverage. I cannot be sure if the "Terrible Knitters" used such compound leverage.

Swaving the foot of the second sock

Mostly the swaving process is driven by both hands and the fabric being moved forward and back, so the fabric pulls the working needle, rotating it and causing the tip of the needle to pop into the next stitch as the fabric is under tension.  (When I need more leverage for tight fabrics, and am using pricks with a small curvature, I give the prick additional “effort” with the side of my right hand.)  The length of the forward and back motion is determined by the curve of the working needle which determines the radius of curvature of the motion. The curve of the prick is chosen depending on the grist of the yarn and the desired knitting gauge. One prick at the V&A has a 90 degree bend and the motion of the tip has a radius of curvature of ~10 cm. I use a ~30 degree bend in my pricks, giving a radius of motion on the close order of 2 cm. With my added effort, the back and forth motion is a fraction of an inch.

I have many old sock needles (short DPN) that I curved to fit my hand better.  These do work with my goose wing knitting sheaths, as class 3 levers, but are not suited for swaving. Long iron or bronze gansey needles will develop a “’J” curve when they are being used for their spring action. Just because someone is using curved needles with a knitting sheath, does not mean they are swaving.  Swaving is about rotating the prick in the knitting sheath.

Swaving is best where one is knitting the same kind stitch repeatedly, i. e., plain knit fabric or garter stitch. It took me a long time to learn to do increases and decreases. I still resort to subterfuge to pickup stitches.  I believe that small changes in technique allow swaving to produce knit fabric with “Eastern”, “Western”, or “Mixed” mounts, but have not studied this.  I am sure that blunt needles tend to enforce a particular stitch mount – it is harder to produce twisted stitches with blunt needles.

That said, swaving is best way I know to make small finely knit items. I often knit the legs of my socks with straight needles (and a knitting sheath), and switch to swaving to quickly knit the the foot. Swaving is without equal for knitting fine gloves.  Certainly, knitting belts are justly famous for the fine Shetland lace, jumpers, and Fair Isle objects produced on them. And, you would not want to try and swave a table cloth or jumper. (Long “pricks” tend to bind, and not rotate properly.) Nor would you want to knit a fine ladies glove from fine (finer than 3,000 ypp ) thread using a knitting belt. (I have never had good luck using needles finer than ~1.5 mm with a knitting belt.) However, swaving makes very fine fabrics on small objects very feasible. Traditional spinners did spin wool into 3-ply yarn at 10,000 ypp .    Shetland wool can be easily hand spun into 2-ply yarn at 15,000 ypp, to say nothing of Merino, camel, guanaco, and silk. My father’s mother loved her fine camel gloves.

I was already swaving with blunt pricks when I was spinning fine, but my knitting in those days was still with “pointy” needles. I have not used straight, “blunt” needles to knit any yarns finer than 5,600 ypp. On the other hand, a review of the old 0.5 mm needles that I was using for fine knitting suggests that they are not really all that “pointy”.  If I were making them today, I would call them “blunt”.  Proficiency in swaving has very much informed my  knitting with straight needles.

Learning to swave was hard. I read what I could find, and I made field trips to places that had collections of traditional knitting tools. However, it is worth noting that museum curators tend not to understand knitting sheath technology. Note the Rutt did not bother to learn to use a knitting sheath.

Making tools for swaving started as extreme trial and error because there was so much diversity in the literature and artifacts in collections such as the V&A.  Once, I had worked out the physics of swaving, it was possible to reverse engineer mechanics that could work for the kinds of fabrics that I wanted.

Same have asked how I know it is “swaving”.  The gross physical motion is right, the tools are right, and the speed is right, and the product is right.  I am going to take it as right, until someone shows me a better way, or I work out a better way myself. I do not claim anything in this blog was or is correct, only that it was or is the best information that I had, or have . There are mistakes, but they are not intentional lies.

Introduction to gansey needles.

I had heard that for real gansey knitting one needed real gansey needles.  (Pointy steel needles 18” long.) I made myself gansey needles, and found them no help. I could not control the needles, and the result was holes in my wife’s leather couch. Gansey needles without a knitting sheath are no help at all.  (Slightly shorter pointy needles used with knitting belt, are a powerful tool kit.)

My first experience with a knitting sheath was when I took my coping saw and made a crude wood replica of a “Yorkshire goose wing” knitting sheath that I saw on the Internet. For needles, I used cheap aluminum DPN.  

I had been knitting Continental style, so I had to learn to throw.  Still I was very soon, very impressed with how much knitting power the knitting sheath gave me.  It sat on my hip, and pivoted giving me more leverage on the needle allowing me to knit faster and tighter.

I made dozens of different kinds of knitting sheaths and experimented with them. Each wanted it's own kind of needles and excelled at a particular kind of knitting.

The magic came when I made a knitting sheath that fastened on to my belt over my right buttock. Then I could stick the working needle in the sheath and arch the needle forward,  under my  right arm, resting my right forearm and wrist on it.  The weight of my arm pushes the needle down into the stich, my hand moves forward a fraction of an inch, I loop yarn over the needle tip, and my hand moves back and up allowing the needle to spring up out of the stitch, and pulling the new stitch onto the working needle. Note that  this motion is the result of flex and spring action in the needle, and thus, both the physics of the motion and the skill of the stitch formation is different from that used with the goose wing sheath and sock needles.  Knitting sheaths support a variety of distinctly different techniques.

I like the spring action of 18” long, AGW 10 (2.4 mm, 3/32” dia.) needles made from music wire (spring steel) for knitting yarns in the range of 1,000 ypp. When I saw patterns for other yarns or other needles, I often adapted the pattern for the needles I liked. This is an ongoing process, as I have come to love finer needles and yarns, I moved to adapting patterns to the gauge that I like. The finer needles are not as stiff, and likely  require a different technique. Over all, knitting sheaths support about a dozen distinct knitting techniques. Nevertheless, if one must knit a good seaman’s sweater as fast as possible, the right tool kit for the job is a good knitting sheath and a set of spring steel gansey  needles.

I used pointy gansey needles for years, and they were the fastest way I knew to knit  very warm objects for cold weather wear. These days, I use flat ended gansey needles.  Many of them are only 17” long, because they lost length when I ground the tapered points flat. Still they are faster than the pointy gansey needles. They are the fastest way I know how to knit warm gear for cold weather activities. I also have very  stiff US#3 needles for 

Knitting with the flat ended and pointy gansey needles are different motions and different skills. The pointy needle is inserted into the working stitch, and the motion is much larger than the motion for flat ended needles. The flat end of the working needle rests against the left needle, and is “popped” into the working stitch, where it is trapped by the leg of the stitch.  Thus, the motions of working needle are very vigorous and do not have to be as precise or as large as the movements for pointy needles.  Vigorous, but very small motions, which do not have to be very precise, can be very fast.

Summary of knitting sheath technique as I understand it today

 Time to upgrade socks

The right socks for the coming storm.

Blunt 9" US1 needles using commercial worsted weight yarn.

Anything that can be made, can be made better!  Anything that can be done, can be done better!

I believe in those two principles. I also believe that everything is a compromise. Doing something better, or making something better may not be worth the resources. "Good enough" may  be good enough! Knitting is a prime example.  Knitting is a group of compromises that I have not addressed in this blog since September 2016.

If I knit a fine weatherproof fisherman's sweater from a 5-ply "gansey"  yarn that I spin from raw fleece; scouring the fleece and spinning the yarn is only perhaps 3 days work, while the knitting takes 3 or 4 times as long as making the yarn. If want my sweater faster, I should focus on faster knitting.  I did.

The paths to faster knitting are thicker yarns, looser fabric, and - knitting faster. I like fine, firmly knit fabrics. If I want a cooler garment, I will knit it (firmly) from a thinner yarn. Thus, I focus on faster knitting.

To reprise, a long time ago, I learned to knit "American", on SPN; then friends said I could knit faster if I learned to knit "continental"; and, faster still if I moved on to circular needles. I wore out several sets of circular needles. I read about how fast the old professional knitters knit, and moved on to knitting belts and knitting sheaths. These were faster than circular needles, and allowed making fabrics that cannot be knit on hand-held needles - and specifically cannot be knit on circular needles.

Knitting belts remain as part of older knitting traditions that have survived to the present day, and we have a good understanding of the technology.  We know that knitting belts are best used with DPN.

Knitting sheaths did not survive as an active knitting tradition, so I had to reinvent the whole technology. At first, I thought that knitting sheaths were just an wooden (or metal or ivory or ceramic . . .) analogue of knitting belts. My early tries told me that knitting sheaths had real advantages.  They allow knitting very fast, producing very tight fabrics, and knitting with a minimum of effort in a very ergonomic manner.  These advantages were very apparent in my early, crude attempts.

Since knitting belts use DPN, I assumed that knitting sheaths also used DPN, and all of my early trials used DPN with various pointy ends.  I put a lot of effort into making pointy needles, and  making the pointy needles work with knitting sheaths was a lot more effort.  For years, the idea that knitting required pointy needles was fixed in my head.  Years after I started working with knitting sheaths, I started considering "swaving", where a curved needle is rotated into the working stitch. I thought, "Wow, this is something else!", and went into it with fewer preconceived notions.

I made curved, pointy, needles and they did not work. I made a lot of different shapes of bent pointy needles and none of them worked.  After much trial, and many errors, it became clear that blunt or even flat ended swaving needles worked very well.  Then, my knitting sheaths had to be redesigned to work with flat tipped needles.  None of this came fast. It was years of benchmarking and validating.

Swaving involves "popping" the working needle into the working stitch. Could I do the same thing with long straight needles? Yes!, but the knitting needle  needs to be blunt or flat ended. It turns out to be easier and faster than poking pointy needles into the working stitch. Are flat ended needles authentic?  Everybody that has acquired many old steel needles has come up with flat ended needles. Were they  were just old pieces of wire that had found their way into the knitting basket?  Now, I think that some (or many) of those flat ended needles survived from the days of knitting sheaths.  And, we have an account of  a professional knitter in the 1840s where in he makes a new knitting "needle" from a piece of wire in a few minutes by grinding it against a stone in the garden path.  I can tell you that it takes hours to grind a pointy DPN like that, but flat ended needles can be ground like that in a few minutes. No, it is pretty clear that those old knitting pins had flat ends.

The bottom line is that having made and used thousands of different needles and hundreds of different knitting sheaths, I have settled on knitting/swaving with blunt or flat ended needles.

Fisherman's sweater on blunt 12" US#1 needles from

handspun 4-ply (~1,000 ypp) with knitting sheath/needle adapter

(the curved needles are for swaving)

Sock on blunt 12" by 1.5mm blunt needles from

6-ply cabled worsted wool yarn (3x2) at ~ 1,700 ypp

Sock on blunt 9" US#0 needles from 

Paton's Classic Wool (204 meters/100 gr.)

"Needle" tips typical of what I have been making and using for knitting and swaving for the last few few years.