A Fisherman Knits

First conceptual project

2012-01-16T09:09:00.000-08:00

The start of the first conceptual project: A Jersey

The yarn is 6-ply sport weight. The construction is cabled 3 X 2-ply. Two plies are always gray Cotswold. This gives a "silver sheen" to fabric. Then, two plies are white and two plies are brown. The brown accentuates the silver sheen. Two plies are fine wool and two plies are "Shetland". When the Shetland is white, then the brown is Rambouillet. When the white is Cormo then the brown is Jacob (very like Shetland). Thus, there are always 4 plies of high luster wool in the yarn and 2 plies of finer, lower luster wool to contrast. Each yarn ball is ~ 2 oz. All plies are spun worsted. About half of the plies are already spun.

The sweater will be knit in round, on 2.38 mm gansey needles. The fabric is smooth and dense but elastic. Garment will be a basic blouse, Plan 1 from Knitting in the Old Way.

Thunder and lighting

2012-01-11T15:20:00.000-08:00

Alden Amos has "FIXED" my wheel. Now it is 10 to 15% faster, with measured flier speed in the range of 2,500 rpm, the disagreeable vibration at 1,600 rpm is gone, and it is like WOW! This flier reduces the effort to spin 250 yards of 11,000 ypp worsted single per hour from "moderate" to "easy". Treadle effort is less. All from a new flyer/bobbin assembly. Production of threads in the 40,000 - 50,000 ypp range is 4 or 5 times faster than I could mange with the stock Ashford DD flier.

We did not even touch the Mother of All. We are still using standard Ashford flier bearnings. Alden made three bobbins for this flier, with DRS set for grists of 6,000, 11,000 and 50,000 ypp. The price and wait was reasonable for such custom work.

Flier/bobbin as made by Alden.

If I had this flier early on, I would not have spent so much time messing with drive bands. Note that it was not the bearings that were the problem, it was the aerodynamics of the flier. If you are going to spin at 1,000 rpm, you do not need to mess with all of this stuff (e.g., aerodynamics & drivebands), but it will take you all morning to spin 560 yards of 11,000 ypp worsted single.

Single wound off of a bobbin I made this morning.

It is something of a pain in the neck,

because it is a bit finer than the rest of the singles for this project.

The tachometer tells me the flier hit speed of 3,800 rpm while spinning this.

I out sourced the flier, because I cannot do dynamic balancing. I can make a flier that will run at 1,000 rpm. I cannot make a flier that runs this smooth, at these speeds. Flier/bobbin assemblies made by other wheel makers may be prettier and have fancier bearings, but they do not have the specific differential rotation speed (DRS) that I wanted. Alden Amos is the only wheel maker that I know, who really understands DRS.

Every design has compromises, and every designer weights those compromises differently. Out of long experience with what people do to their spinning equipment, Alden's designs are conservative. Alden's designs always work, and they endure.

Another video of spinning

2012-01-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

Spinning a thicker, thread that can be seen more easily by the camera:

This is a Merdian Jacob fiber from a fleece I got in 2010. I did a bunch of 2-ply jumper weight, and I am just spinning a bit more of what was on the bobbin, because it is thick enough to show on the camera.

The flier looks like it is going slowly, but that is a strobe effect from the camera shutter speed. Actual flier speed is in the range of 400 to 500 rpm.

DRS is 1.05 with a 5/8" bobbin core.

Again, this is spinning slowly for the camera. Normally, I would be running the flier at more than 1,600 rpm

How I spin; A video

2012-01-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

Here is a better video of how I spin. From over my left shoulder:

And from over my right shoulder:

The fiber is an indifferent prep of Shetland that somebody gave me, and I fixed. The grist is in the 11,000 ypp range, and the flier rpm is ~500. Twist is in the range of 12 tpi. Twist and to a lesser extent, grist is set by the DRS (~1.017 with a bobbin core of ~5/8") of the flier/bobbin assembly. Thus, I can switch bobbins, and bingo, I have right twist for 14,000 or 25,000, or 50,000 ypp. All I have to do is make sure the grist is right for the twist. If I need other grists, I make other bobbins as in the last post.

The main thing is that this is a continuous process that produces a true worsted single. Note the use of a distaff. The distaff is necessary to keep the fibers just behind the drafting zone aligned and parallel. The fibers are fully aligned as the twist enters them. Of course, these video sequences are much slower than I normally spin, but you can see there is minimal hand motion, so that my hands can keep up when spinning much faster. This technique is a very fast way to produce a true worsted yarn.

These singles will get cabled up into 8-ply (fingering) for a sweater. I insert some slubs so you can see the progress of the single. In the second video, the twisted single is invisible at this resolution. Sorry about that.

First new tools of 2012

2012-01-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

I started off the year by making some new bobbins:

The one in the flier is for singles in the range of 11,000 ypp (20s) and the one on top is for finer singles (20,000 + ypp, 40s; these numbers have changed as I use different fibers, different fiber prep, and made better measurements). These bobbins are a little lighter and the wider whorls allowing slippage for spinning finer yarns than the DRS would suggest. On the other hand, that slippage slows everything down, particularly as speed increases and the aerodynamics of the flier start to consume significant power. I do need a more aerodynamic flier. (The oil finish is drying on one right now!)

They look small, but they will both hold a little over an ounce of singles. An ounce of 20s is 700 yards. An ounce of 40s is 1,400 yards. Thus, I have no problem winding off full hanks of 560 yards from these bobbins.

The physical flier ratio is 22:1.

They took about half a day to make. I bored 5/8" maple dowel with a 9/16" hole on their axis by holding them in the wood lathe. I enlarged the axis boring at each end by 3/8" x 7/16" to hold the brass bushing bearings. For the ends, I cut a 2" square piece of 3/4" maple stock, trimed the corners to ease the start of turning, and on the drill press, bored a 5/8" hole through the center. On the band saw, I cut the ends apart, one ~ 1/4" thick and the other ~1/2" thick. I glued the ends on the core. A couple of hours later, on the wool lathe, I rough turned the thin end, and then the thick end. Then I finish turned the thin end, making sure it cleared the flier. Then I finish turned the whorl using the scrapers that I made last year and posted below.
The bushing bearings were inserted, and held in place with a dab of silicon adhesive. A bit of sanding, some Danish oil, and they got left on the rack to dry while I made dinner for my wife.

Normally, I would let the core/ends-blank glue-up dry overnight, but this time, I got away with only ~ 2 hour set time.

Favorite tools of 2011

2012-01-01T12:36:00.000-08:00

We went to Yellowstone last summer and saw everything. There was a lot of walking to the geyser basins and waiting, waiting, and waiting for the geysers to erupt. I was knitting boot socks from hand spun Romney. I had the whole knitting bag with me but one knitting sheath became the choice :

As I look at pictures of sailing this fall, there it is, always with 9" long, 2.38 mm steel DPN. I will say that on some of those sailing trips, the needles got doused with sea water, and rusted. Everything was wet for a couple of days. Still a bit of crocus cloth brought the needles back to perfect conditions in minutes.

There was a lot of sampling of series of yarns. Many of these were done on a very light weight knitting sheaths tucked into an elastic pant waist band:

This one was made from redwood. The redwood is much too soft to support the small steel needles, and hence needs a hardwood adapter, maple in this case. Moreover, the redwood is too weak to hold interchangeable adapters tightly, and thus the adapter must be glued, and it is not interchangeable. Just the tool to knit yarn hot off the plying bobbin.

And the winner:

My Ashford flier with standard high speed whorl (22:1) and a bobbin with a 5/8" core and DRS of 1.017 for spinning singles in the range of 10,000 ypp. This has been a good setup for spinning singles in the 9,000 to 15,000 ypp range. It is simple, inexpensive, and it works! This rig will spin 11,200 ypp singles, faster, easier, and more consistently than any of the mass produced spinning assemblies. Only Alden Amos' flier assemblies are faster.

How Fast Can Someone Comb Wool?

2011-12-31T15:39:00.000-08:00

These days, I comb Jacob at around a half a pound per hour. It is slower than Cotswold, but is similar to Shetland that many people comb these days. Even a pound per hour is much slower than professional wool combers prior to 1850, but it is about as fast as I can go at this time. I could make myself bigger combs and work faster, but for the small amount of wool that I handle, it is not worth it.

My method is to start with clean oiled fleece, and give it a pass through the drum carder to make sure everything has been opened up and the oil distributed.

Then, I lash 3 or 4 ounces onto a large, single-pitch comb mounted on my combing bench, and use a 6” wide 2-pitch to comb off. Then, I mount the 2-pitch (with the wool on it) on the pad, and comb off onto a pair of 4” wide 5-pitch combs. Then, each 5-pitch gets combed off onto another 5-pitch, which, when full, is mounted on the comb pad, and combed onto another 5-pitch. Then, those combs are mounted on the comb pad, and their beards drawn off into short planks. If I work quickly, it only takes 6 or 7 minutes to get from carded fiber to 2 planks of an ounce (sometimes closer to 2 oz) each. (~3 hours hours to plank a sweater's worth of wool). The planks are arranged in a large bin.

When the bin is full, it is turned out on a table and the planks arranged for uniformity of fiber. The planks can be stored for a while

The planks get lashed onto 5-pitch combs, combed off, and then combed back (two complete transfers). This takes 3 or 4 minutes for between 1 and 2 oz. (22.5 oz /hr).

Then the beard is drafted off using a diz, and wound on the distaff. Total time to comb a sweater's worth, right on the close order of 6 hours.

However, I suggest that the final combed and drafted fiber be used within a couple of weeks. That is, every few days, I take a few planks out of their bin, and final comb/draft them into slivers for the next few days of spinning.

For long wool, I skip the carding. The Romeny that I did last spring went faster, while the Rambouillet, Jacob and Shetland goes slower.

To achieve a reasonable rate, I had to make myself larger combs. On cold days, I warm the combs. I also use a spray bottle of water. See Peter Teal’s book for instructions.

To get here, I had to time myself, and look for ways to speed up the process.

So, this lady said,"I've been wool combing for 5 years, I have five sets of combs, but I do not know if I have ever combed enough wool for a sweater." My reply was, "If you have been wool combing for 5 years, then you should have combed about 5 tons of wool. Me? I spent more than a hundred hours learning to card, and maybe 20 hours of making better tools and less than 20 hours of real wool combing. I have big bins of wool to show for that effort. In my book, just having combs in the closet does not count as time spent wool combing. Nor, does having a spinning wheel sit in the living room count as spinning time.

Sampling Cable plied yarn

2011-12-31T12:19:00.000-08:00

This post is so important to me that I am going to Shout!

If you are spinning fine singles, it is worth doing a series of exercises in plying/cabling. If you have the singles on hand, it is easy to run up samples of 6, 8, 9, and 12-ply cabled yarns, and knit them into fabric to find the fabrics that you like.

I like my 2.38 mm needles. These days, I make the yarns that I like to knit on that size needles. Knit on them, 6-ply cabled from 10,000 ypp singles makes a nice, skin-soft fabric. It is warm, and elastic. 8-ply (1,200 ypp) makes a nice outer wear sweater. It is a thin yarn, it knits into a thin fabric - that is remarkably warm, and has wonderful drape. This is not for sweaters that hang like bags. It is for sweater designs that are worth all the work.

You are going to say, "Nothing is worth that much work to knit". Look at your favorite knit wear (tee shirts, underwear, polo shirts, rugby shirts, and even sweat shirts), they are all knit from yarns with very fine plies. If people wanted fabrics from yarns with coarser plies, then textile makers would use coarser yarns, (it would be much cheaper for them!) But no!, as a rule, for actually wearing, people like fabrics made from yarns with fine plies.

I like quick and easy as much as the next fellow. However, I find fine plies for the clothes I wear, worth the effort.

It is not very impressive, but here is a photo of the first swatch that I did from 6-ply fingering Rambouillet (1,300 ypp):

#1 needles on a swatch from hand spun 6-ply, 1,500 ypp yarn.

That bit of "nothing" was the confirmation of year's work. It was a proof of concept; fine plies work. On the other hand it was the beginning of more work. Fine plies ARE more work. Fine plies make good worsted worthwhile - that means I do enough worsted combing to get good (and fast) at the combing process. However, the fabrics are wonderful.

When I started all this it took forever to comb a pound of wool. However, I made some combs that help me comb faster, and now, it takes me an hour to comb a pound of wool. Anybody that cannot comb a pound of wool in an hour, is not trying.

I have said that it is not worth while for me to have fancy socks because I wear them out, and it is not worth while for me to have nice mittens because I lose them. Well, it is worth while for me to have socks and mittens knit from yarns with fine plies because such fabrics are worth the extra effort.

Such fine ply yarns have become my standard yarn construction. Here you see 2-ply Cotswold, Rambouillet, and Jacob waiting their turn to be cabled up into 6 and 8-ply knitting yarns. The needle is 2.38 mm.

A Milestone: Competence in Spinning

2011-12-04T11:45:00.000-08:00

In the early going, I read that "spin count" was the fineness that a competent spinner could spin a particular wool. I then set my definition of a competent spinner to "being able to spin wool at its spin count."

Today, I can spin the common fleece at their spin count with reasonable confidence and ease. In short, now I am a spinner.

Learning to spin has been an obsession over the last year. Learning to spin disrupted my life. It was worse than learning calculus. With calculus, there were very good texts and very good teachers to show the way. Every physics, chemistry, and math grad student could do calculus, and were happy to parade their expertise in their role as teaching assistants. However, try finding a spinning course where the objectives of the course include spinning singles at 50,000 ypp. I do not know how many hand spinners can spin fine wool at its spin count, but it is not something that gets mentioned in course descriptions at fiber shows.

Everyone who reads this blog knows that I like yarns plied up out of 10,000 ypp singles. What I have not talked about it that 30,000 ypp (Shetland) singles are remarkably strong and elastic. Unless you have handled such singles, they are like nothing you have handled. As 2-ply they (@15,000 ypp) they are as strong as the cashmere plied with silk yarns used for Russian lace, but they are more elastic. If you want drape and flow, go with 2 plies of wool. The elasticity of the fine wool singles makes such lace wonderful. It is not something that we understand anymore. It is not a property that can be seen when the lace is mounted in a museum case. It is something that you feel when you wear the lace. These hand spun yarns are much thinner, stronger, and more elastic than the commercial lace yarns. However Shetland is not as soft and does not have the softness of the cashmere/silk lace yarn. If you want just soft, go with the cashmere plied with silk.

Other wools can run a bit softer than Shetland, including Rambouillet and Cormo. These can be spun fine and plied into nice soft lace yarns. The finest Shetland is about as soft as very good Merino. However, the Shetland is easier to spin very fine. I think any competent spinner can spin the yarn for a nice wedding ring shawl. Since you only need a couple of ounces of fiber, so you can buy the best fiber and still have an inexpensive project.

The idea of lace is all very interesting, but the real point of learning to spin fine was to be able to spin thicker yarns better. For that alone, it was worth learning to spin fine.

It has also give me a very different view of how wonderful wool yarn can be.

Seduced by the Soft Side

2011-11-17T09:00:00.001-08:00

Now that I can spin finer and faster, softer wools are more attractive. I acquired a couple of Rambouillet fleece. Spun semi-worsted at just over 16 hanks per pound (~9,000 ypp) and cabled into a 6-ply fingering (1,300 ypp @ 40 wpi), it is is perhaps the nicest knitting yarn I have ever worked with.

The fine plies give it strength and durability despite the fine, skin-soft fiber. Knit on #1 needles at 9.5 spi, the fabric is thin, light in weight, but very elastic, and very warm. The elasticity was something of surprise. It is far, and away, the nicest fabric that I have ever knit.

Relaxed, the fabric is nearly weatherproof. Stretched, it opens up and ventilates, making it very good for active winter sports. It is like Helio, only more so.

Estimated time for me to spin/ply enough for a Jersey is ~50 hours, which does not count fiber prep. You can buy nice Rambouillet roving for half the price of Jacob or Shetland. Rambouillet is finer than Shetland and much longer than Merino, so it is nice to spin. And, there is a lot of it around. Rambouillet is similar in fineness and length to Cormo, but this season Cormo is in fashion, so Rambouillet is a bargain. The thin yarn means that you need less wool. ( Less than 1.5 lb compared to ~ 2.5 lb for sweater designs using commercial worsted weight wool, but this sweater will be warmer.) Well, yes thin yarn means there is more spinning and knitting - but is that really so bad? I mean we like spinning and knitting soft fibers - right? My estimated total time for a Jersey is on the order of 150 hours.

And, it is just in time, as I hear that Wingham's has stopped producing gansey yarn due to equipment failure. It was one of the best yarns on the market and it will be missed.

WPI

2011-11-11T11:06:00.000-08:00

There is a long standing convention in the textile industry on wraps per inch (wpi). Pack to refusal! They wind the thread into a slot or gap and they pack to refusal. (It is a gentle and careful packing that does not deform the yarn.) This results in an accurate and precise number that can be related to yards per pound (ypp).

Knitters on the other hand, when making wpi measurements wind their "wpi" loosely, (well not too loosely), and they get a number that is "fuzzy". See for example http://www.yarnfwd.com/tension.html or http://www.hatchtown.com/tools/misc-tools/wpi-wraps-per-inch. It is a more modern method, but it will not give a precise and accurate number. And, it does not differentiate between worsted, woolen, and cotton/silk It is a different culture. Then, they call the textile guys, "wrong" for using the old, precise method. The only thing the fuzzy method is good for is putting the yarn in a Craft Yarn Council category. And, that does not provide a lot of useful information. Particularly for somebody like me who is likely to be spinning fine yarns. Trying to wrap 20,000 ypp singles (35s) loosely, but not too loosely, is an exercise in futility. However, with the right gauge one can pack to refusal, and get a precise number.

So here is a solution. Use a gap gauge, wrap the yarn around it, and pack to refusal. Then, for worsted add 10% and take the square of the number. That will be a good estimate of the yards per pound. For Woolens, add 16% and take the square of the number and you will have a good estimate for the ypp. For silk and cotton add 7%, take the square of the number and you will have a good estimate for the ypp. That is useful information.

Divide the number of wraps per inch packed to refusal by 2, and you will have a good estimate of the number that is defined as "wpi" by the Craft Yarn Council and used by American knitters as "wpi.

If you have the yards per pound, take the square root and divide by 2, and you will have the knitters' wpi. Or, you can take the square root of yards per pound, subtract 10 percent (16% for woolen, 7% for silk and cotton) and you will have the wraps per inch, which is the reciprocal of the thickness of the yarn. This gives the diameter of the yarn. This tells you something useful about the your yarn or thread.

In Judith MacKenzie 's the intentional spinner, she does not tell how to do wpi, but when we look at her projects we see that she says a semi woolen yarn at 2475 ypp has 27 to 30 wpi; 1460 ypp has 18-20 wpi ; 300 ypp has 5 - 6 wpi. She does not even try to get a number more precise than a range of 10%. Shannon Okey's Spin to Knit, on page 57 says that if want to know more about grist, see Alden Amos's Big Book of Hand Spinning. Well, Alden says, "Pack to refusal!" Then Okey contradicts Alden on page on her page 126 by saying one can just wrap the yarn around a ruler. No, that is not "pack to refusal".

This having two different measures in related fields, with the same name causes some confusion. For example, yarn, that I say is 100 wpi, most knitters would call 50 wpi, and then they would say I do not know what I am taking about. Well that is yarn spun at 22 hanks per pound or 12,000+ ypp. I work with those kinds of threads every day. Do they? Measuring the yarn as 100 wpi tells me something useful about the yarn. Measuring it as 50 wpi tell me that it is "lace weight", and I knew that without picking up a ruler.

Alden Amos gets it correct in his Big Book of Handspinning. I just wish that Alden had put in corrections for yarn construction and yarn fiber. Then the wrap per inch number in the table on his page 383 would be 7% to 16% less. Peter Teal in Hand Woolcombing and Spinning gets it correct, and his Appendix III is the best conversion table. (However, he only addresses worsted yarns, and grist is stated in spin count.) Better is scanned at http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/books/pea_fa_2.pdf.

Oil it!

2011-11-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

Few people,(including myself), oil their spinning wheel often enough.

It does not have to be much - a fraction of a drop is enough, but it needs to often.

Better or Authentic??!

2011-11-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

I look to history to find ways to make better textiles.

In the days when hand knitting was a profession, there were a great many talented professional hand knitters with the elan that separates the talented professional from the merely competent amateur. I looked to this group and learned about knitting sheaths as an approach to producing better textiles. Modern amateur knitters and historians suggested that such knitting was not "authentic." Since then, some of these folk have gone on to write extensively about the history of knitting sheaths. Good for them! However, their writing would have more authenticity if they would become more proficient in the use of the various knitting sheath technologies.

Prior to the spinning jenny, there were a great many talented professional hand spinners with the elan that separates the talented professional from the merely competent amateur. Competition drove some of them to produce better products. In contrast, today we have very few talented professional hand spinners. If modern hand spinners were producing yarns that really satisfied me, I would not have been plowing history looking for better yarns, now would I? Some of the amateur spinners that made denigrating comments about the historical use of knitting sheaths, are now saying that my hand spinning of better yarns is not historically accurate.

I really do not care. The yarns are fabulous! The virtues of yarns worsted spun from spun long wool with fine plies have been long and widely documented. Cotswold wool came into prominence in Roman times and from the nature of the wool we can guess that they were spinning the same kind of yarns that I am now spinning. The truth is that the talented professional hand spinners had customers that wanted better yarns and who were willing to pay for them. I expect talented professional spinners produced a range of better yarns for different uses. I say that the right yarn for the job is the right yarn for the job, and a talented spinner with elan will find, and make, the right yarn for that job.

And while I am on the topic, Shetland spun into fine worsted plies is the right yarn for other jobs. Warmer than the Cotswold, I am spinning this week, but still very durable. Start with lace yarn and keep plying. The fiber is thinner so you can spin thicker plies and still have drape.

My feeling is that over the last 40 years, few hand spinners had the skill to spin such yarns or the elan to see the possibilities inherent in such yarns. When those experienced spinners see a new spinner producing yarns they did not think could be produced by hand, they respond by saying it is not authentically historic - just as they did when I brought up knitting sheaths. If modern knitting had been adequate for my wants, I would not have been plowing history looking for a better way to knit. Likewise, modern hand spinning was not adequate for my wants so I went to history to find a better way.

apology

2011-11-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

It would seem that I owe everybody an apology.

When I am doing a lot of knitting, I use hand lotion. My favorite kinds are Udderly SMOOTH, Bert's Bees Hand salve, and Bag Balm.These hand lotions contain mixes of lanolin, olive oil, bees wax, petrolatum, plus blending agents. A project knit over several days is like to see more than one kind, of hand lotion used on it, and possibly all three. The net effect was that all of my knit objects were made of dense yarns, and those dense yarns were impregnated with hydrophobic materials.

When I finish knitting an object, I wash the object with soap and warm water. This is a sink of suds and enough scrubbing to full the wool. It is not gentle. However, it seems that the washing has not been aggressive enough to remove all of the hand lotion from the core of the yarn. Thus, my knitting is impregnated with lanolin and other hydrophobic materials from the get go. It is why water does not wet my knitting. Even when the hydrophobic materials were washed off the surface of the yarns, a few days of wear would bring the lanolin and etc out of the core of the yarn, and the yarn would be water repellent again.

However, this does not change the fact, that more loosely knit (and oiled) fabrics are not weatherproof. A rain drop hits them and breaks into tiny droplets that go right through a loosely knit garment. In contrast, when a rain drop hits a tightly knit garment, the raindrop breaks into tiny droplets that are stopped by the tight knitting. When I did comparisons between objects knit on small needles similar objects knit on big (i.e., http://www.craftyarncouncil.com/ recommended ) needles, both were were knit using the same mix of hand lotions, thus both were equally oiled. It is jut that I already moved to knitting with hand lotions before I started working with finer needles.

Tighter is warmer was and is a valid result.

Connecting the Dots

2011-11-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Yorkshire textile industry went from local for local consumption to industrial scale for export in the period circa 1350 to 1370. This is the period and region when and where the term "hank" (skein of 560 yards) came into English. We can assume that the industrialization of the (wool sorting, combing, spinning, and weaving) industries included the count system. The count system specified wool fineness in hanks per pound that could be spun from the wool by a competent spinner. The yarns from those wools were specified in hanks per pound. With a common technical language the weavers, spinners, combers, wool sorters, wool growers, and all of the associated middle men and factors could specify needs, and products. Thus, 16 count refers to a coarse wool, and 16s refers to a single spun so that a hank weighs one once. Then, "20s" refers to singles spun to 20 hanks per pound.

Prior to 1350, it is hard to know what Yorkshire spinners were spinning. However, by 1375, a lot of Yorkshire spinners were spinning worsted 16s, 20s, 40s, and etc. These were standard yarns used by weavers to make cloth that was being produced by the ship load. There were pack trains of such singles being carried across Yorkshire. We know that some of these singles were dyed and plied, i.e., were not going to weavers.

The period of 1350 to 1375 is also the period during which the English navy was established, and had its first winter engagements with the (new) French navy. It was also the beginning of British fishing in Icelandic waters. Thus, there was an increased demand for warmer clothing for sailors and fishermen.

The implication is that fine worsted singles were plied up to knitting yarns. This makes sense. In those days wool was valuable. They wanted as much warmth as possible from the least weight of wool. The way to do that is to work with yarns that have very fine plies. If the sailor-boys were cold, it was easy to produce warmer garments by plying up thicker yarns from the fine plies that were being produced for the very large weaving industry, and then knitting the thicker yarns.

Hand spin worsted 16s (8,960 ypp) and ply them up into 3-ply (2,700 ypp), knit it on fine needles, and it will be warmer than modern mill spun sport weight (1,000 ypp) knit on # 4 needles. Weird but true! The fabric knit from the modern mill spun will look thicker and warmer, but the eye is deceived. On the other hand, that hand spun, worsted spun, 3-ply is going to be very thin. It will as thin as what we call "lace-weight". My point is that those old hand spun Shetland shawls knit from "lace-weight" on "knitting pins" were warmer than a shawl that a modern knitter would knit from modern mill spun sport weight on the recommended needles. Modern mill spun gansey yarn (5-ply worsted sport weight) knit on #1 needles is warmer than hand spun 3-ply (worsted, 2,700 ypp). The other side of this is that when I ply my hand spun worsted 20s up into a 16 wpi yarn, it is much denser, stronger, and warmer than any modern mill spun 16 wpi knitting yarn. When that hand spun, fine ply, 16 wpi is knit on fine needles, it is much warmer than any modern mill spun knitting yarn knit on any needles.

Yes, the pre-mill-spun knit fabrics did tend to be made from thin yarns made from fine plies - because that was what worked. If I need a warm sweater, I will spin fine singles and ply up to what ever yarn thickness I need, because a few extra hours of spinning will bring greater warmth and years of durability. I can do this because I can easily spin 16s. or 20s or even 24s. So could the old spinners. It is what they did, all day, day after day.

When mill spun made yarn cheap, we lost our professional hand spinners in the period of a generation. Yes, there were still hand spinners around the world, supplying family and local markets. However, hand spinning on a large scale was gone, and with it went a variety of skills and tools.

Some of these tools and skills are still known by a few, but are ignored by most hand spinners. Consider differential rotation speed (DRS). DRS is well documented in Amos's "Big Book of Handspinning", and yet DRS is ignored and even denied by a great many spinners. Peter Teal was an engineer, who wrote an important book on Wool Combing and Worsted Spinning. However, he never understood DRS. Abby Franquemont wrote a well respected book on spinning, but judging from her posts on Ravelry, she does not understand DRS.

How do I know DRS works? Because I use it to spin worsted 20s and 30s quickly and easily. Certainly, 20s, 30s and even 235s can be spun using a spindle or ST wheel or an Irish Tension/German Tension wheel, but not as quickly and easily. The only tool that comes close to DRS is Great Wheel with a Miner's Head, and there quality problems tend to intrude at speed. The DD system with a precise DRS solution is likely to be 30% faster. The other tool required for such spinning is a distaff.

Fifth grade physics

2011-10-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

Let us consider the world of Peter Teal - Hand Woolcombing and Spinning. PT puts a lot of effort into combing, planking, and drawing off a uniform sliver of parallel wool fibers, then he put a lot more effort into drafting them "inch worm". If he had just thought about his fifth grade physics, he would have realized that there is an easier way. A way that was long utilized and memorialized in art. It is the art of the distaff.

Wool is long, flexible fibers with little scales on them which tend to catch on other wool fibers. If you have a short, neat sliver of parallel fibers of wool, and pull fibers out of one end, then the scales on those fibers will catch other fibers, and pull the other fibers out of parallel, and into "disarray". With the fibers at the drafting tip of the sliver in disarray, then the spinner must resort to inch worm drafting to pull them straight and parallel again.

The fifth grade physics approach is to avoid the disarray by anchoring the upstream end of the fibers by attaching the far end of the sliver to a distaff. Then the entire sliver is under tension, and the tension holds all fibers straight and parallel. Near the drafting triangle, the drafting hand maintains a taper from the main sliver to the drafting triangle so that the upper end of all of the draftable fibers are in contact with more fibers than the drafting end of those fibers. Thus, there is more friction at the sliver end of those fibers and the process of drafting tends to hold those fibers straight and parallel. The reason that the distaff was call "the rock" is because the spinner was always pulling against the distaff.

When the drafting process inherently aligns the fibers, then the drafting can be a continuous process. As a continuous process, it can be very fast. With a distaff, one can draft worsted style singles as fast or faster as long draw woolen spinning. Further more, if all the fibers in the drafting triangle are aligned, then the spinner can allow twist to run up into the drafting triangle and still have worsted yarn.

I started spinning about 3 years ago. Prior to that I was reading about spinning, and watching spinners. I read the modern literature on hand spinning, and I go to spinning guild meetings and fiber shows. And I spin.

Merino, spun "worsted" as 20s, and made up into 2-ply. The grist of the above 2-ply yarn is ~5,000 ypp or just over 10 meters per gram. The yarn is very soft, very stretchy, and silky smooth. It is not something Peter Teal could have spun because he did use a distaff. With a distaff, it is easy.

I trashed the first few video clips I shot of this process because I was intending to spin 9,000 ypp and I was spinning 11,000 ypp and the camera could not pick up the fine thread. Over the last few weeks, I have had to relearn how to spin thicker singles, i.e., the 5,600 ypp and 9,000 that were the base of all my yarns. Now, I am redesigning my yarns because with finer plies, I can make nicer yarns, and finer is nicer. It is softer, smoother, stronger, and more durable. Nicer!

Here is the setup (with the new distaff.) I am putting a lot of time in on distaff design, not because it is hard, but because distaffs are so important.

And here is the spinning. As you can see, the single is worsted and the process is long draw. The pinch from my left hand (on camera) prevents twist from running into the draft triangle which goes off to the right of the frame.

Double Flier Spinning Wheels

2011-10-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Han Chinese (2,000 years ago) had treadle powered, double spindle spinning wheels so that a cotton spinner could spin with both hands. In 1598, the British Parliament passed a law requiring spinning schools to teach their students how to spin with both hands and to have double flier spinning wheels so the students could practice the art. It was one way to spin faster in a world without spinning mills.

Now, I have one! Well, I do, if a pile of worm eaten oak counts?

She is broke, and has had major repairs at least twice in her life - done at a level of craftsmanship that is much lower than the original wheel. The poor quality of the rather extensive repair distracts from the fact that the wheel was originally rather fine. At one time, she did a good bit of spinning because both of the flier/bobbin assemblies are worn, and the axle of the replaced bobbin is very worn.

The wheel diameter is ~15". Wheel to bobbin ratio is ~ 1:10. DRS is ~ 1.2, however, in the original bobbin, the whorl is very deep and narrow, so that actual DRS would depend on the width of the cord. The drive wheel has two grooves, and the flier/bobbin assemblies were offset, so that each could have their own DD drive band and each flier/bobbin assembly has its own tension adjustment screw. The hecks were set only 1/8th inch apart. The bobbins are captive in the fliers, and the orifices are ~3/16th inch.

ETA 10/28 (not captive, just lots and lots of gunk in the way.)
ETA 10/30 Made in Germany circa 1900.

Handspun 10-ply Aran yarn

2011-10-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

It can be done.

10-ply,. 700 yards per pound. 16 wpi. That right!

If you take the singles that were hand spun worsted for weaving at 16 hanks per pound from Shetland wool, and ply them up as 5 X 2-ply you get a yarn that the same thickness as the Yorkshire gansey yarn, but is 30% denser and thus much warmer. The first small skein is being blocked now,

and will go to the Guild meeting for show and tell.

I figure ~100 hours to spin the yarn for a Aran fisherman's sweater and a 100 hours to knit. A wife could do an Aran in 3 months just working on it 2 or 3 hours per day. It would be much much warmer than a gansey made of Yorkshire 5-ply @ 1000 ypp ( 50 hours to spin and 80 hours to knit) . Well worth the extra effort if your man is fishing the North Sea.

The little square wooden thing is a "plying comb". It helps to organize the singles and makes producing 5-ply yarn much easier, and the yarn more consistent. I like historians - even long dead ones : ). They tell me about the the tools I need to do the job right.

The first skein off the wheel this morning was 5-ply @ 1,800 ypp. Interesting, but not much practical value that I can see.

The process that I now like is to spin 16 or 18 hank/ lb singles and make 2-ply. (Come on, you spin for fun. Spinning fine means more fun per pound. And, it means fabrics that are lighter, more durable, and warmer.) The 2-ply is stronger more stable, and easier to handle. Then, 2 X 2-ply is light fingering, 3 X 2-ply is sport and 4 X 2-ply is worsted weight. Of these the 3X 2-ply is the winner for most knitting. The more plies make it more consistent, warmer, and more durable than the 2 or 3-ply worsted weight that is more common. More plies allow the fabric to be softer and more flexible than the 5-ply of similar grist and twist.

Anything that can be done, can be done better

2011-10-20T18:01:00.000-07:00

The spindle with removable whorl got shown to a Portuguese historian. She will be starting extensive travels in the near future. We played with the spindle for a while (we were at the LYS) and decided it (with a distaff) was as fast as any of the traveling wheels in the store. So, I gave it to her. I believe in giving nice gifts to the people that write history.

Thus, I needed a new spindle. Mark II:

It is 15 grams lighter than the Mark I.

It did not work! The weight or dynamics were wrong and it wobbled too much. Put that puppy on a diet.

Thinned, with a deeper groove and a heavier nut, it works. It wants a distaff. And, it wants to spin much finer than I was trying to spin the blue Romney above. Details matter.

The Sum of All

2011-10-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

It is possible to hand spin worsted yarn using a "long-draw" technique. ( Not what you have been told before, now is it? )

It requires special tools. One must have a DD wheel with the appropriate differential rotation speed (DRS) and bobbin core size to insert the correct twist and to take-up at the correct rate. It requires well combed top on a well designed distaff.

It only works at fairly high grist (9,000 ypp and up depending on fiber), and it only works for spinning at a brisk pace.

The process involves the drafting hand teasing fiber out of the sliver attached to the distaff. The fibers are kept under some tension as they stream into the drafting hand where they are spread to form the base of the drafting triangle. The tip of the drafting triagle is a narrow ribbon of fibers feeding between the forefinger and thumb of the pinching hand. The drafting hand and pinching hand are moved together and apart for precise control of the grist, The pinching hand keeps enough pressure on the tip of the drafting triangle to keep the twist from traveling up into the drafting triangle, but not so much pressure as to stop the continuous stream of fibers through the "pinch". The thumb and forefinger of the pinching hand move back and forth to facilitate movement of the fibers through the pinch.

With lower grist singles, it is not possible to stop the twist from moving up into the drafting zone. Without a distaff, it is not possible to get the fibers aligned as they enter the drafting zone.

I had though the technique possible shortly after I started working with controlled DRS systems, however, I had not been able to make it work. The addition of a distaff was required to actually make the concept work.

The process is very fast.

Pictures and details to come.

Spindles and spindle whorls

2011-10-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

A while back, I thought about spindles. I went around and played with a bunch of them. I went into the shop and made a few. My conclusion was that they were toys. I concluded that modern spindle designs were not really tools for serious worsted thread production.

I was missing two technologies that are essential to the system. One is the distaff. The other is a removable whorl. We find whorls made of fired clay, metal and stone around the world, and we tend to assume that that entire spindle was lost, all at once, and then the wooden shaft rotted away, leaving the whorl for us to find.

However, looking at accounts of spinners in the Highlands, they put a whorl on the spindle, start spinning, and as the copp builds, they take the whorl off, put it in their pocket, and let the copp act as the whorl. This allows them to produce longer continuous threads. This is a tool for serious worsted thread production.

And, it is easy to lose a whorl out of their pocket.

I have come up with a spindle design that I like much better than any other that I have tried.

I start with a spindle shaft about 12 inches long. It has a spiral groove for the thread (because hooks catch on everything and a half-hitch causes the thread to lose 40% of the thread's tensile strength. If you design the spindle assuming the use of a half-hitch, then you reduce the length of the thread that can be spun on that spindle by 40%.) The groove is made with a small knife and a rasp.

I go to the hardware store and I buy 2 threaded nuts, one big, and one small. I thin the spindle down, leaving a bulge at the bottom. The bulge is large enough that the threads of the large nut will catch on it and tapered enough that I can thread the small nut on it. Threaded nuts for bolts are very cheap. You can afford to buy a few in the event that your "spindle whorl" falls out of your pocket.

I "screw" the large nut on the bottom of the spindle and start spinning.

As my copp grows, I take the heavy nut off and put the small nut on.

When the copp gets large enough to stabilize the spindle, I take the nut off and put it in my pocket where it can fall out.

The metal nuts have enough weight to spin well. Their concentrated weight means that the spindle tends to spin fast - much faster than with modern disk-whorl designs. So fast, that you can not draft fast enough to keep up with it -- unless you are spinning fairly fine and have a distaff to help you draft faster. This is not a spindle for beginners.

Here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp78jcvJizA) and here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4lzA_aBHCI), even after their copp has grown, the fixed whorl tends to slow the RPM of the spindle, limiting how fast they can spin, and the weight of the whorl limits how fine and long a thread they can spin. However, it is not hard to find pictures of Peruvian spinners using removable whorls and distaves. See for example http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/SpindleWhorls.html

ETA: Last night, Will Taylor told me that many South American spinners use machine nuts as spindle whorl weights.

Distaff

2011-10-13T16:04:00.000-07:00

I did not learn to use a distaff when spinning wool. Then, I read a post in the blog, A stitch in time, and she pointed out that all the old pictures of spinners have distaves. So, I tried it.

It works. OK, that is part of my Niddy poked into a hole in my Traddy, but it works!

For worsted spinning, it is like having 3 hands. The drafting hand can keep some tension between the distaff and the drafting zone to keep the fibers aligned. This is sort of like continuous pre-drafting. While a wrist distaff or wrapping the roving around the drafting arm can store fiber and help keep it orderly and out of the way, these methods do not aid in the drafting process like a real distaff. A good distaff aids in the drafting process.

Those old timers had a lot spinning to do, and a short time to do it. They knew how to spin a high-quality thread as fast as possible. They used a distaff

I swear that I have not seen modern spinners using real distaves, but then a few days ago I would have sworn it was not in the books either. However, there it is, in the first paragraph of Chapter 7 in Amos. He did not write “Use a distaff when spinning linen.” No, he wrote, “Use a distaff.”

The problem that I had with the distaff was that my grist rose from my intended 9,000 ypp to 14,000 ypp. I have to retrain my drafting hand -- or change my yarn design.

What works best? Actually a wooden yard stick stuck in my waist band worked fairly well, and is fairly typical of what we see in Classic Greek art. However, it is a bit awkward for sitting at a spinning wheel. For a spinning wheel, Amos suggests a free standing distaff. However, I like to spin in my window corner beside the breakfast table - not much floor space there. Thus, my solution is a distaff attached to my wheel.

How good is it? Well I am spending all day making a better one. It is a technology with huge promise.

Russian Distaves

It is like knitting sheaths. They made them because they work very well.

PS. It is not pretty but the Mark II distaff is very, very functional:

Spinning in Public

2011-10-09T09:13:00.000-07:00

I like the idea, but I cannot do it.

When I spin in public, I slow down and my grist goes all over the place. At Lambtown, I spun for HOURS and produced a grand total of 350 yards of single, some of which was thin and some of which was fat, and all of which was poor quality. Intended grist for the day was ~9,000 ypp, actual average grist was less than 5,400. OK, there was poor light where I was sitting and other factors, but a week later in a spinning group, with the same intended grist, my actual grist was less than 8,000 ypp.

My hat is off to the folks that can spin their intended grist in public. I have given up trying to spin project quality singles in public. In the future, I will take some of that Blue Romney that I have, and not worry about what I am actually spinning.

quick kniddy noddy

2011-09-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

Not a love token

but it works, it fits in the spinning bag,

and it was not much effort.

Note that the ends are different. If I ever need to make another, I will know which shapes work better.

DRS, fineness, and vibration

2011-09-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

Vibration in a DD system raises the effective DRS, making it more difficult to spin at the fineness expected from the calculated DRS.

Surprise! If you want to spin fine, you need a smooth-running spinning wheel.

After a year of use, my Traddy had some wear, and hence more vibration. And, I swear, I oiled it every 4 hours using good oil. On the other hand, I ran it long and fast. Nice thing about a Traddy is that new bearings are inexpensive. A few new bearings and everything is back to fast and smooth.

Plying from a center-pull cake

2011-09-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

With improvised cake holders, the singles twist. Better is:

Lambtown

2011-09-22T20:06:00.000-07:00

I will be at Lambtown in Dixon, Ca this year. I will be helping around the Merdian Jacob booth.

I am in the wood shop this week, so the Traddy will be tricked out. The "F-word" may be heard as in, "That is f^&*hair!!"

DRS Revisited

2011-09-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

I have been plying yarn for my Shetland gansey. Some of the singles were spun last winter before I built the Hot Rod and some after.

Running the singles through my fingers, I am impressed by the consistent fineness of the singles spun using the Ashford high speed whorl and bobbins with whorls that provide the proper DRS (differential rotation speed) for the grist of yarn being spun. While the Hot Rod certainly allows me to spin faster, singles spun on it tend to drift in thickness. For example, singles that I intend to be ~9,000 ypp end up with portions being closer to 7,000 ypp or 11,000 ypp. I think this is because with the small whorls, a small change in anything changes the DRS. While the standard Ashford high speed whorl is twice as large, so the same change in that system makes only half as much change in its DRS.

Anyway, I am going to move toward larger whorls so that I have better control of my DRS. I have not decided if I am going to do that by putting an accelerator wheel on the Traddy or if I will buy a 30 inch wheel.

Most of last week, I had the Ashford Lace Flier (ST) on the wheel. First and foremost, I do not think that there is any question that a good bumpless driveband (per Amos) delivers more power than the Ashford Turbo driveband (clear stretchy plastic). 2) Fluorocarbon leader material (fishing line) makes very good brake band material for spinning very fine yarns.

As long as we are talking about spinning fine, see the Bothwell Spining results at http://www.bothwellspinin.com/spinin/files/LongestThreadResults_2011l.pdf The winners are spinning singles up in the range of 100,000 ypp or 176 hanks/ lb. The winner, Jan Zandbelt, currently uses a Louet Julia, but in 2007, he used a Majacraft Suzie with 1 gram of brake tension and custom made ultra-light weight spinning bobbins. Of course, that contradicts my thoughts about DD being better for spinning fine. Or, does it?

I do not spin that fine. I do not try to spin that fine. I do not need singles finer than about 27,000 ypp. I aim to spin my finest singles at ~90% of their spinning count. Thus, Polwarth has a spinning count of ~ 62, so I would aim to spin it at ~ 31,000 ypp. Zandbelt spins it at 88,400 ypp.

Does that invalidate everything that I say? I want yarns that knit up into fabrics that I like, and I want to produce those yarns with a minimum of effort. Zandbelt wants thin yarn for contests. He says that "Patience" is important. We have different goals.

However, I am arrogant enough to think that if I wanted to spin Polwarth into a yarn that was too fragile for any practical use, I could. I would approach the problem by making up a DD spinning bobbin with a DRS of 1.01 and a bobbin core diameter of 0.625". I think that for that low a DRS, I would use the regular Ashford DD flier whorl, which gives me a bobbin whorl diameter of 1.73". We are talking a bobbin speed of 1,200 RPM. My bobbin has not gone that slow in ages. It would take all weekend to spin 10 grams. "Patience" is right.

The hot rod spinning wheel revisited

2011-09-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

In May, I wrote about how I had upgraded my Ashford Traditional spinning wheel.
Since then I have spun a lot of singles in the 5,600 to 9,000 ypp range on it and I have some thoughts.

The DRS (differential rotation speed) between the flier and the bobbin controls the twist. The accumulated twist changes as the diameter of the copp wound onto the bobbin changes. Thus, when I have accumulated a layer of yarn that is ~ 3/8" thick on the bobbin, I wind off. This is a pain in the neck. I use my wood lathe as a bobbin winder to wind off the bobbin. (It is very fast, and is always handy there in the middle of the workshop.) Without a good wind off approach (or using very long bobbins) using DRS to control twist is not practical.

There has been more wear on the bearings and axles than I expected. I oil frequently, but I use a high belt tension, and there is a lot of wear. Thus, the machine is getting noisy.

Over the last few days, I swapped it back to standard Ashford double drive and spun a while. Currently the Ashford Lace Flier is on the wheel. The Ashford Lace Flier is 30:1 ST, but compared to the 40:1 DD, the ST lace flier is much slower. Spinning on the Ashford Lace Flier is a very pleasant pastime, but it is SLOW!

With a larger drive wheel (30"), I could use a lower belt tension and with less noise and wear. : )

Carding and Spinning Oil

2011-09-13T14:50:00.000-07:00

I just posted that fleece needs to be clean before it can be processed. That is true, it needs to be clean so that it drops all of the grit that was on it.

It also needs oil for carding and spinning. I use olive oil at a rate of between 1% and 2% by weight. That is, if I have 4 ounces (112 gram) of clean wool to card/ spin, I add a couple of grams (~ less than 1/2teaspoon) of olive oil.

I have it in one of those oil misters that are sold in gourmet shops, and clean samples of wool going into the carder for the first time gets a squirt on each side. Everything goes through the carder several times. Bats that feel dry either get carded together with bats that seem to have extra oil them, or dry bats get an extra squirt.

Big bins of wool get weighted amounts of oil, so that amount is more precise. Then they get mixed, sit in a warm place for a day, and get mixed again. As the bats get blended the oil is evenly distributed through the wool.

"Vegetable oil" will oxidize, get sticky, and turn your fiber into a spinner's torment. Do not go there. Mineral oil is hard to clean off the yarn. Either use the right oil, or do not oil.

Clean wool with a tiny amount of olive oil on it is the easy way to card, comb, and spin.

Spinning and knitting in the Grease

2011-09-13T14:17:00.000-07:00

One of the great romantic fables of spinning and knitting is that fisherman's sweaters spun and knit in the "grease" are warmer and more weatherproof.

The best fisherman's sweaters were scoured, spun, and knit. Many were also dyed, which provided several advantages, but for a good dye job, the wool had to be scoured.

Unscoured wool has a film of waxy material on it, that holds grit. The variable amounts of grit held in that waxy material makes consistent spinning difficult. The grit on the fiber causes wear on the spinning equipment. Inconsistent spinning, produces a variable yarn, which is impossible to knit into a consistently tight fabric. Clean wool is easier to card. Grease wool is impossible to comb, and combing is a part of producing the worsted style yarns for high quality fisherman/seaman sweaters. And, lets put it this way, "The scouring process kills lots of germs." Besides, "Clean wool smells better when you do get rained on!"

Then, the grit trapped in the yarn as it is spun, is a constant source of wear, reducing the durability of the garment. Grease wool/yarn/fabrics also attracts moths. Clean wool lasts longer.

Some low lanolin wools such as Shetland and Jacob, can be rinsed, and spun with success but the quality of the yarn, and hence the quality of the knitting is not as high as when clean wool is used. Some talk about spinning the long wools in the grease. It is possible, but you still have the grit. While it is possible to spin beautiful yarns from grease wool, it is easier to spin better yarn from clean wool. See Alden Amos Big Book of Hand spinning pg 44 - 45. Judith MacKenzie McCuin in the Intentional spinner ( pg 28) first says ". . . wool must be washed or scoured before it can be processed efficiently." Then, she waffles to talk about washing wool without removing its natural oils. I do not waffle. As long as that waxy layer is on the fibers, grit will stick to it, and will get trapped in the yarn as it is spun. Thus, if you leave the natural oils on the fibers, grit will be there to spoil your spinning.

Scoured wool can be "reoiled", to be weatherproof. Jan at Frangipani recommends using a drop of baby oil in the rinse water. This is fast, inexpensive, and effective. I put one drop of lavender oil into my bottles of baby oil for a little extra moth protection. Dyed wool can be reoiled to be even more weatherproof. Perhaps the best way to "oil" a sweater for serious outdoor wear is to fry bacon over a camp fire. The combination of wood smoke and bacon fat does a very good job of oiling a sweater.

Wool can be scoured by letting it sit in cold water for a few days (fermented suint method), rinsing, and then treating with lye soap (followed by a careful rinse). Or, the Romans cleaned their wool in aged urine (followed by a careful rinse!) If you can get to a modern market, then modern soaps and detergents make cleaning wool easy. (Umm, if you use Simple Green, make sure it is diluted and mixed before the wool goes in.)

The investment of time and effort in scouring wool pays off in faster and better spinning.

The first three rules of fast and easy spinning are:
Fiber preparation!
Fiber preparation!
Fiber preparation!

A day of fiber preparation can save 3 days of spinning (if you are spinning fine.)

If you can heat a cauldron of wool to over 120 F, you can skim the "wool fat" off to reoil the wool, after it is all knit. Then, it will smell all "sheepy" and everybody will think that you spun it in the grease, when in fact you spun it the easy way. (Or, you can just buy a little bit of "wool fat" from iriss http://www.iriss.co.uk/product.php?xProd=309&xSec=27.)

How it was done

2011-09-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

I look at old knitting sheaths, and I ask, why did they do it like that?

For example look at this photo of various knitting sheaths (http://knittingsexandgod.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-on-spinning.html) and note that a number of the knitting sheaths on the right hand side were made of two pieces of wood. One carved, the other one turned and inserted into the carved piece with tenon joint.

Certainly many of the older "love toke" knitting sheaths were carved from single piece of wood. Many of my early sheaths were carved from a single piece of wood and I went to a lot of effort to turn the needle adapter.

However, last week, my wife had a new red wood fence put around the back yard and the work men left me a lot of little pieces of red wood. It is a nice light weight, attractive wood, that is very easy to work. So I made some knitting sheaths.

They are both designed to tuck into the elastic waist band of sweat pants or shorts. They work very well with 7.5 inch #1 DPN. The soft wood is strong enough when the tenon joint is glued. If you use a friction joint so that that needle adapters are interchangeable, then the softer wood tends to crack at the joint.

Mostly, I have been using 9" needles with spring action for sock knitting for the year or so, but these little knitting sheaths do not provide enough resistance to support the spring action, so these little knitting sheaths need a different motion. That is OK, the motion is driven by the shoulder muscles, and there is still no stress on the hand. It is almost as fast as the spring action. Made from red wood, the knitting sheaths are light and handy, and the shorter needles are better for knitting bags and travel. I find it worth while to keep this technique in practice.

When you are making knitting sheaths, this is a concept that you may want to consider as the soft wood makes fabrication fast and easy, and they seem to last. The needle adapter in the top photo was turned from a bit of ash limb that I had to prune off to make way for the fence. Turning green wood, can be a very fast and easy process.

The bobbins that I make are not as robust as the plywood bobbins that I get from Ashford. Mine show a disconcerting attraction to concrete floors. Thus, I have had several opportunities to think about making bobbins.

These are DD spinning bobbins, that provide a 40:1 ratio on my Ashford Traditional, with a DRS of ~1.01, and a core diameter of 0.625" they are optimized for spinning 16 hanks per pound. The singles on those bobbins is a Shetland - Jacob blend spun to ~9,000 ypp.

I have moved to making the cores and whorls from one piece of black walnut stock. As you can see, there have been trials along the way.

I make the end disks from cherry. And, I like bronze bearing insets better than the Ashford Delrin bearing insets. The Delrin is far and away the better bearing material and they are lighter. However, the Ashford bearing inserts have little spacing collars, and with my small core diameter and small whorls, I just do not have enough clearance for the spacing collars on the Delrin bearings.

My current process for making a spinning bobbin is to bore a straight hole through the core blank. I use the ends of that hole center the blank as I turn the core/whorl. The bobbin core blank needs to be straight and smooth to fit the holes that will be bored in bobbin-end blanks.

I scribe a ~3" circle on some 3/4" cherry stock, drill a 1/16" hole through the center of the circle and cut the blank on the band saw. I use a spur drive on the wood lathe to turn the blank round and part it into 2 pieces. Each bobbin end piece goes into the lath chuck and I bore the center of the blank to fit the bobbin core blank. I glue the bobbin ends on to the core. I turn the final shape of the bobbin ends and the whorl on the wood lathe. The bronze bearings are held in place with a dab of E 6000 industrial adhesive.

Re: anonymice

2011-09-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

Scientists ask questions, and then seek the answers. Time and budget are always a constraint. One cannot ask all possible questions, and one cannot seek all possible answers. Some questions require data that provides a high level confidence, while lower quality data is acceptable for other questions. Technology is even more focused. Good technology must meet the criteria of: faster, better, & cheaper.

In 1999, I asked the question, "How did the fishermen on the banks stay warm" The bulk of the answer is that they (or their knitter) used DPN and knitting sheaths to knit substantially weatherproof woolen fabrics. These fabrics were used in single and multiple layers with woven wool and other woven fabrics. However, the real magic was in hand knit fabrics with stitch patterns that increased the warmth of the fabric. The question is as much technology as science. I understood this by early 2007, see http://gansey.blogspot.com/2007/03/real-ganseys-are-real-warm.html Work since then is just refining the technology, as in:

An inexpensive, but very functional knitting sheath

designed to be tucked into an elastic pant waist

And it is not like we are starting from scratch. We have a lot of information about ships, climate, fishing, physiology, textile performance, textile industry economics and so forth. It is more like we have a "blue print" of an industrial machine and the blue print has some holes in it. We need to go back and reverse engineer the missing parts so everything works together.

I have documented that such fabrics are weatherproof (i.e., will support a pool of water on them for an extended period of time.) I have worn these garments skiing, sailing, climbing, mountaineering, and working in freezing rain. Such garments are exceptionally warm even when compared with the best from modern sporting goods companies such as Columbia, Patagonia, Marmot, and LL Bean. If the skeptic does not believe, then the proper thing to do is say, " I want to test those garments." Yes, we can make arrangements for that. We can even set up a little workshop where we knit while sailing. (An advanced skill, as most people get sea sick. A good part of the skill is to watch the horizon, rather than your knitting.)

I knit such fabrics with DPN and knitting sheaths. There is no question that the process is technically and ergonomically feasible. This is well documented in the literature. There is no need to post data on a topic that is well documented. (I had to get up an experience curve to understand the technology, and I collected data as I climbed that curve. Having data does not make that data new or useful.)

The process is slower than knitting looser fabrics, and thus the fabrics are more expensive. However, even today, warmer garments tend to be more expensive, and thus tight knitting economically feasible.

I have documented on this blog, fabrics can be easily produced with a knitting sheath and DPN. For example I knit a good gansey in 10 days, and I am a fat old man with palsy. If the skeptic does not believe that I knit that fast, then we can arrange to sit down together for a knitting session. The skeptic can touch and feel the produced fabric at the same time. I will even let the skeptic stare at a pool of water sitting on a swatch of fabric. The skeptic can put on a gansey, lie on the floor, and I will pour water on the gansey, and she can note that she stays dry. We can do the knitting workshop in a campground near some very cold river and the skeptic can spend the day in the cold river while wearing the gansey (15 minutes with gansey on/ 15 minutes with gansey off). (If we pick a good cold river or a bathtub full of ice cubes, that activity will last about 17 minutes.)

Such weatherproof fabrics are difficult to produce in large quantity with SPN or circular needles because these do not provide the required leverage for packing the yarns together. Certainly a gansey or two can be done on circs, but if you have 8 brothers and need to produce 9 ganseys (dad) per year, your wrists will get sore. Again the ergonomics were established in the 1930s, so there is really no need for me to dwell on that.

What is left is technical issues of what kind of needles are best and what shapes of knitting sheaths work for different kinds of knitting. There is less of this in the literature. I mean, we have lots of shapes of knitting sheaths, but we do not know if they were different shapes with the same use or different shapes with different uses. The truth is different shapes for different uses. There were at least 11 different knitting techniques that used a knitting sheath. This is a part of what I talk about in class, and if you want to know more - take the class. I have shared photographs of the knitting sheaths and needles that worked, and have written of ones that did not work. I have provided enough data that anybody with even a passing interest can try the process without a large investment in time or effort. Anybody with any interest can knit their own swatches and in 4 hours, be pouring water on their own swatches and timing how long it takes for the water to drain through. The way to test another knitting technique is to try it! You do not go looking for peer review articles on Russian Knitting, you sit down and try it, to see if it works for you!

I certainly have notebooks of data that I have not shared. Every good researcher does. (The only exception that I can think of in an EPA directed Human Health Risk Assessment.) However, I am not going to transcribe the data just because somebody wants to look at it. If they have a specific question, they can ask the question. If they just want to fish, I have given enough information that they can knit their own outfit(s) and go fish. I have a great pile of Shetland to spin.

People come to me saying that they are a researcher, and thus that I should give them my data, but they are not bringing me any data. They are what Al Dring calls, "Sponges". A researcher can find all of the above references. If they do not have the library skills to find the references, then they are lying about being a researcher. On the other hand, there are many people out there with good information, and they share it. I am so grateful to those people. If the helpful people need help finding a particular source, I will help.

I am perfectly willing to answer honest questions. However, I do not tolerate dishonest questions. And, when someone asks a question, I am as likely to show them how to find the answer themselves, as I am to just tell them the answer.

Venting again

2011-09-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

The other thing that cannot be worked out from swatches is venting.

The very tightly knit fabrics produce a garment that is very warm. If you knit a fabric that is suitable for 30F then as a snug sweater, then it will be too warm at 60F . However, by providing some ease at the neck, shoulders, cuffs, and hem/welt, there will be a flow of air under the garment and out the neck. When the body/skin is cooler, the flow is less and the skin warms. When the skin is warmer, the flow increases so that the wearer stays comfortable. When the ease is right, the flow of air under the garment is self-regulating, and the wearer stays comfortable over a range of temperatures. Knit to fit.

We have heard layer, layer, layer for cold weather and have forgotten that there might be other ways of staying comfortable. For example, layering does not really work in the upper rigging of a sail boat, because where do you stow the clothes you are putting on and taking off? Self -venting sweaters inform us as to how the sailors stayed comfortable without making extra trips down to the deck to change their layers of clothing.

Thus, one can have a ski sweater that is comfortable for skiing the steep chutes at the top of the mountain, and yet, it starts ventilating as one steps into the beer line while everyone else is still taking their layers off.

Likewise, it can be worn below decks, and there is no delay while looking for additional clothing when going on deck. (As in, "All hands on deck to shorten sail")

Looking at Knitting in the Old Way by Gibson-Roberst and Robson, this kind of venting works best with "Boat necklines" but also works with others, particularly including Button-neck closures. (You will need a much tighter fabric than G-R & R contemplate.) Turtle necks can actually be made vent by knitting the neck in a thinner yarn or on larger needles to produce a looser fabric that allows more air to pass through it.

With this extra ease, a jersey can be worn under these self venting sweaters. This stops the venting. Such a layering requires exceptional cold to be comfortable. This combination can make shorts and bare feet comfortable even on rather cool days. Other sailors stare at me, but what do I care?

The "anonymice" want to chew on the notebooks.

2011-09-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

None of this was about science. It was about technology. This is the kind of technical development that most companies do, and which they keep private as trade secrets. Go to your cell phone company, and ask to see the data on how they developed their last model. Then, see what kind of a reception you get. I am a nice guy. : )

Just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of the knitting is in the wearing. No pile of numbers can inform you as to just how warm a hand knit garment can be. The only thing that can give you the gut feeling of how warm a hand knit garment can be is to wear an ordinary knit garment in the rain until you are cold, (and I mean the kind of cold that hurts,) then while still in that cold rain, then put on a good tightly knit gansey. In a few minutes, you will understand just how warm hand knit wool can be. Numbers cannot tell you this. However, it is easy to make your own samples to touch and feel.

You can prove the effects with some cheapo metal #1 DPN and some tightly spun gansey yarn or MacAuslands. You whittle/drill a knitting sheath or stick - crude works - directions are in this blog. Total investment less than $10. Videos of the knitting process are in this blog.

Then, you knit some swatches. Do you like the firmer fabric? - that is all that counts.

Early swatches

I started by knitting tiny swatches, from 800 - 1,000 ypp yarns, very tightly on # 1 circs, and blowing air through them. Yes, they blocked air flow and thus should be warm, but I did not see any practical way to knit such fabrics. Knitting them with circs was too hard on my wrists. The early data was crap because the fabrics were crap. It only told me that tighter was warmer, and that the relationship was not linear. As I knit tighter and tighter, suddenly the fabric was much warmer. The curve relating fabric density to warmth has a sharp bend in it.

I spent months trying various combinations of long DPN to knit tighter fabrics, and mostly just poked holes in my wife's living room furniture. It was months before I figured out how to use a knitting sheath. Then, the fabrics were much better.

Second Generation Swatches

Blowing air through and pouring water on the Second Generation Swatches gave me the courage to knit some sweaters at those gauges and in those patterns. The interesting thing to come out the second generation was that some stitch patterns were much warmer than other stitch patterns. This caused me to think incorrectly that the cable patterns were somehow connected with additional warmth. This was clearly one point where I got things wrong.

I knit the first real gansey from the old Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool. (The production of this yarn has been moved to China, and it is now very different!) In those days it was 5 finely spun plies, loosely plied to together. I knit the sweater on gansey needles with a knitting sheath in about 30 days while I was taking time off to rest my wrists from too much computer work. This is the warmest garment that I have ever knit. It is good for skiing on cold days and taking naps in the snow. It was knit in white, worn and tested, then dyed blue to see if blue sweaters were warmer. They are. Note that this is an odd yarn. You are not going to be able to replicate anything like this gansey because this kind of yarn is simply not available. On the other hand, this is a very important data point for the hand spinner because it tells us that yarn structure is very important in the warmth of the fabric, and that yarn plies can rearrange themselves within the fabric structure to fill in gaps. Such rearrangement is not possible with more tightly plied yarns. Thus, there is more than one way to make a very warm fabric.

The second gansey was knit from MacAusland's three ply (Aran weight). It was knit on #3 steel DPN. This I call my "gardening gansey" and has been worn until it is going thread bare and no longer has as much warmth as it had that first year. Then it was worn while I pruned my mother's apple orchard in a week of freezing rain and wind. The only other guys out that week we the power company's emergency linemen repairing the power lines that kept icing up and blowing down. I still did not understand how special a tightly knit sweater could be.

One cold rainy day, I put a couple of ordinary fisherman's sweaters that we hand purchased in Canada and the two sweaters that I had knit tightly in my backpack and I went went for a long walk. I would put on one of the commercial sweaters, and in 15 minutes, I was cold, wet, and freezing. I would put one of my sweaters on, and in 15 minutes, I was warm, dry and comfortable. This was an Epiphany! Numbers based on swatches did not hint at the warmth of the entire garment. These inter-garment comparisons have been done over and over, as they are the only way to get a measure of the truth about how warm a particular garment construction is.

Moreover air flow through the fabric is a minor part of the effect. The critical point is getting the fabric tight enough to block drops of liquid water. Fabrics that block the movement of liquid water through the fabric are much warmer than fabrics that do not. This is true even when it is not raining because the body produces a lot of water vapor that tends to condense on the outer surface of clothing in cold weather. Convention knit fabrics are so loose that these droplets tend to be redistributed back toward the skin with any motion of the fabric. Then the droplets wet the skin or under garments (often linen or cotton, which wicks the water against the skin), the water absorbs its heat of vaporization from the skin (cooling the skin), and the water vapor moves outward through the fabric, condenses on the outer surface of the clothing, and is transported back to the skin again. Thus, the liters of water released by the body each day can transport huge amounts of heat away from the skin because the water recirculates through the clothing system.

Laying a gansey on a table, pouring a bottle of water on it, and having no water leak through to the table is more dramatic that any notebook full of numbers. It says, this sweater is different from any sweater you have ever worn. There are photographs in this blog of sweaters on the patio, with water on them. Yes, those sweaters are different from anything that you know. They are weatherproof. However, seeing that a sweater is weatherproof still does not convey how warm the garment is. One problem is that we do not have words for the "warmth of garments" in common English, and most people do not have experience with the technical units (i.e., R value, suits).

It turns out to be very easy to knit stuff that is way too warm for ordinary use. The only people that need gear that warm are professionals - crab fishermen on the Bering Sea, electrical linemen working during an ice storm, guys installing tire chains, and so forth. Most recreational sailors, hikers, skiers, & bikers do not venture out in really bad weather.

This is hand knitting. A dab of hand lotion changes the tension and hence the warmth of the fabric. Different batches of yarn are blended from different kinds of wool and thus generate different insulation values. Nothing is standard. On the other hand the skill of the knitter allows the production of consistently warm objects.

The vagaries of hand knitting are not big deal if you just want to knit a fabric that is warm enough to keep a sailor warm. You simply test your own materials and knitting technique. If you knit a garment that fits rather snugly, and you knit it tight enough that you can lay the swatch (or the garment) on the floor, pour a bottle of water on it, and 20 minutes later the floor is still dry, then that (swatch) garment is weatherproof and will keep a sailor warm. Another test is to hold a single layer of the fabric right in front of your eyes as you face a bright window. If you cannot see the outline of the window, then that garment is weatherproof and will keep a sailor warm. Two different tests and they both work.

Is undyed wooI warmer than dyed wool?

2011-08-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

Short answer: Most of the time: No.

On a cloudy day in Ireland, the difference is detectable, with dyed being warmer. Here in California, the difference is huge. On a cloudy night, there is little difference. On a clear cold night, then white wool is warmer.

I put a lot of effort into looking at the research on the topic a couple of years ago, and I have written about it before e.g., http://gansey.blogspot.com/2008/07/knitting-warm-woolens.html

I knit hundreds of swatches and tested their thermal properties. I started by making a little blower and blowing air through the samples and measuring air flow. I tested the samples for radiation absorption, transmission, and emission. And, I tested for conduction. I made holders (bras) for the fabric samples and compared "skin feeling". I knit entire garments in natural yarn, measured their warmth, then dyed them and remeasured their warmth. I knit similar garments from dyed yarn and undyed yarn. Then, I went walking in the rain changing sweaters every 15 minutes. I went downhill skiing, and changed my sweater after every run.

My results were similar to those developed years earlier by the US 10th Army, US Army Cold Weather Research Lab (at Aberdeen Proving Ground,HTTP://www.army.mil/info/organization/apg/), Gerry Cunningham, and Holubar Mountain Sport.

The primary path of heat loss through fabric is heat advection via air flow and water vapor. Air molecules and water vapor molecules are tiny compared to the distance between wool fibers in an ordinary knit fabric. Thus, most of the air and water vapor molecules moving through the fabric do not directly interact with the wool fibers in any way. Small changes in the surface of the fiber as a result of dying *do not* affect heat advection through the fabric. Larger changes in surface texture as a result of "super-wash" treatments have a small effect (allow increased flow/ reduced warmth of the fabric).

Small changes in the surface of the fibers *do* affect the ability of liquid water to move from the outside surface of the fabric to the inside surface of the fabric. This is because there are hydrophilic sites on the wool fibers, and many dyes bind to these hydrophilic sites, and then the dye molecule presents a hydrophobic tail to any liquid water that contacts it. The presence of these hydrophobic tails tends to prevent water from wetting the wool fibers. Then, the water under its own surface tension forms a droplet. Motion in the fabric then tends to push these droplets outward, where they are able to drop off the fabric. The practical effect is to make fabric more weatherproof and warmer.

Water vapor passing from the inside to the outside of the knit fabric tends to condense on the outer surface of the garment. A blue fabric will absorb more light energy, which slightly warms the surface of the fabric, thereby reducing condensation. At the latitude of Ireland on a cloudy day, the difference between a natural white wool sweater and a navy blue sweater amounts to 0.3 watt per meter^2 per hour. This does not sound like much but it is enough to keep the outer surface noticeably dryer and warmer. However, on a cold, clear night, the white sweater will emit less radiation, and its surface will be warmer and dryer. If worn under an oil skin, the oil skin controls radiation, and different colored sweaters have the same warmth.

If you can hold a sweater up to the light and see points of light through the sweater, then heat (IR radiation) from your body can travel through those same holes.

Conduction is mostly an issue in socks and the inside of mittens. Even tightly felted wool holds plenty of air to retard heat loss by conduction.

Bottom line: Sailor's "ganseys" were blue, because blue sweaters were a good bit warmer. Arans were not dyed because that was cheaper, and in the rainy areas where they fished, they wore an oil skin, therefore, the color of their sweater did not matter.

Shetlands and other primitives produced colored wools, that reduced the need for dying these wools. The fine fibers with a high scale count of these breeds allowed spinning yarns that trapped air. For example Shetland lace yarn was 3-ply at about the same grist as English 2-ply. Thus, even their lace yarns were warmer. In addition, the stranded knitting produced very warm fabrics.

It is worth noting that the fine wools are better at trapping air, but in modern useage the wool fibers are too far apart to be effective at trapping air. If you want to effectively trap air, the wool fibers should be about 40 microns apart. That is a much tighter fabric than anything modern knitters are accustomed to knitting. On the other hand, such a tightly knit fabric is too warm for modern heated environments.

I was Senior Scientist at the world's largest engineering firm. My physics and chemistry are excellent. I have served on ASTM technical committees developing standard testing procedures. I understand testing procedures.

How do I account for all of the anecdotes that undyed wool is warmer? Skin feel is a very tricky thing. It can be very accurate if one is doing many inter-comparisons over a short period of time (and logging them carefully). However, over periods of a few days, the quality of the comparisons falls off dramatically. And, it there is not diligent contemporaneous logging of results, then the memory is going top play tricks on the results. It would take an extraordinary body of work for me to disbelieve the physics and chemistry of the situation. It would take an extraordinary body of work for me to disbelieve the US Army on this topic. No, my work, the Army's research, Gerry Cunningham's work, and Mrs. Holubar's work all confirm the physics and chemistry of the situation.

I suggest that many samples of undyed wool contain traces of potassium salts of lanolin fatty acids that tend to bond with the hydrophilic sites on the wool fibers and which then present hydrophobic tails to liquid water. This would temporarily give these wools the same water transport properties as dyed wools. However, lanolin is not a stable molecule. It will oxidize, and the wool will lose this virtue. see for example http://journal.scconline.org/pdf/cc1966/cc017n03/p00157-p00169.pdf

Moreover, it does not give them the same radiation absorption characteristics

Knitting sheath with clew

2011-08-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

A very functional knitting sheath with a clew to hold the yarn.

The wide hook of the clew was made to hold the big center pull cakes of yarn from my jumbo winder. Clews to hold other shapes of yarn balls have other shapes. Clews to hold yarn balls being unwound from the outside need swivels.

The Spinning News

2011-08-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

With my fixed DRS, I have to spin a little (couple hundred yards) and then wind off or my twist changes too much. Thus, speed of winding off affects my rate of production. I tend to wind off onto a storage bobbin set into my wood lathe. I use a little wooden jam chuck so the storage bobbin can be easily stopped, while the lathe continues to spin. Yesterday, I seem to have had the bobbin set a bit tight and it grabbed 2 spinning bobbins off of the holding rack and smashed them to pieces (in different wind off operations). This is why I do not buy $30 spinning bobbins. Until I turn new bobbins, I am stuck spinning frog hair, and I hope the frog hair is not strong enough to pull that last bobbin off of the wind off rack. On the other hand, I did not expect the 9,000 ypp to be strong enough to pull a bobbin off the rack either.

Mostly I spin coarse long wool such as Cotswold, Romney, Jacob, and Shetland. By modern hobby standards (NOT http://www.bothwellspinin.com/spinin/files/LongestThreadResults_2011l.pdf ) I spin fairly fine. Recently, a LYS owner applied the correct reverse psychology to get me to buy a couple of bags of Cormo. That kind of changes the rules. Makes me think about an ultra fine bobbin and spinning finer.

Last fall, I made some of Amos's drive band dressing. It helped at lot. It gave me more speed and my DD drive band has spun at least 30,000 yards of singles and is still going strong. Anyway, I gave the last of that batch of belt dressing away not too long ago. Thus, I had to make some more. I buy blocks of bees wax from bee keepers at the local farmer's market. I buy the little pouches of powdered rosin that are sold in sporting goods stores for baseball players. Then, I melt 2 oz of bees wax in a double boiler ( I use an old can set in a skillet of simmering water. Paste a 1/4 cup of the rosin with a tablespoon of turpentine, and mix into the melted wax. I pour the mix into little plastic portion containers, and let cool. It really works. I had been spinning at ~2,200 rpm, and with fresh belt dressing, I was back over 3,000 rpm - with less noise and vibration. And, it had only been a couple of weeks since I had put dressing on that drive belt. With a cotton belt and no dressing, I am lucky to get up to 1500 rpm. This is the process from Amos' Big Book of Hand spinning. He has more detail and some extra cautions. Basically, the process will make a mess. Wax that gets above ~212F will start to degrade and become very flammable. And, making drive band dressing is a good time to recycle (and discard) old cans.

Warmer Yarn

2011-08-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

Last night I was in Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft store and a 100 gram skein of Kashmira by Sensations jumped in my basket. Sensations is a house brand for Jo-Anns, so I was not too thrilled. How could something like that appeal to a yarn snob like myself?

It is about gansey weight - 260 meters for 100 grams - nothing special there.

Is is 10-ply!, constructed as 5 x 2-ply. Ya, it is special.

The fibers are about as fine as those in Frangipanni and Wingham's, but are longer. Long fibers are good. The wool has some luster - that is good.

The density is high enough that it is a very warm yarn, but not so dense that the fabric is heavy. This yarn produces the warmest fabric for its weight of any yarn that I have tested. On my #1 needles it produced about 7 spi, and that is how I would knit it.

If you want to knit a garment that is very light weight, but very warm, this is the yarn. I do not know how fabrics from this yarn will stand up to life, but it is an amazing yarn.

______

Edited to add on 8/29/2011: I have not been observant. I have been spending too much time spinning and not enough time shopping for yarn. There are a number of (new??) highly structured yarns (lots of fine plies) that should fun to knit and provide outstanding fabrics.

More on knitting for fishing

2011-08-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

I keep coming back to the question of when seamen and fishermen started wearing knit upper body garments. I open the topic of "Traditions of Commercial Fishing in Great Britain", and folks bring up anecdotes about herring and salmon fishing in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. No!, I want to go back to when British fishermen were developing the skills, tools, ships, and systems that allowed them to “fish out” the waters around Britain by 1300 AD. When people talk about “traditional” fishing from the coast of England in the 19^th Century, they are talking about fishing in waters that had been fished out for 600 years. They are talking about the last embers of a long dead industry.

Read *Cod* by Mark Kurlansky (ISBN 0-08027-1326-2) very carefully. Look at the bench ends from St. Nicolas' Chapel near Norfolk, England in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that were carved circa 1415. These bench ends depict English ships in the Icelandic Cod Fishery. They went to Iceland because they had fished out home waters.

Iceland was cold. It was a longer voyage. And, it belonged to the Hansa. A British ship caught fishing in Hansa waters was in trouble. Fishing Icelandic waters was the result of British fishermen being so good that they had taken all the fish closer to home. The St. Nicolas' Chapel bench ends tells us that those British fishermen were good enough to make a great success of the Icelandic Fishery, despite its great difficulty. The bench ends tell us that they had mastered the concept of the square-rigged ship. Thus, by 1415 they had all the tools, skills and systems to make square-rigged ships work in an open ocean environment. That is not when they started developing those systems, that when all of the systems were in such good working order that they had already made a lot of money. It likely took generations and generations of seamen and fishermen to develop those skills.

This was consistent with what was going in English maritime trade. From *A history of the administration of the royal navy and of merchant shipping in relation to the navy* by M. Oppenheim (1896) or *The Royal Navy* with Some Notes on the Costume of Sailors by Swinburne (1907).) we discover that the English navy and the English merchant trade developed together, and thus must have shared a large number of ship management skills and tools such as how to feed crews, how to keep crews warm, sleeping arrangements, as well as the obvious sailing and navigation skills and tools. The maritime trade overlapped with the fishing industry and they shared the same management skills and tools.

On page 342 of *The Royal Navy*, I note a reference to G. Chaucer (1343-1400), who spent several years as a special royal envoy to textile merchants in Flanders, and later Italy, prior to writing the referenced passage. Thus, Chaucer knew his fabrics and had spent time on ships, when in latter life, he wrote his great poetry. The term "falding" from which Chaucer's sailor's "sea-gowne" was made included knit fabrics. This is all consistent with the History Chapter in Priestman's (1921) *Principles of Woolen Spinning*.

Considering the trade and fishing record, we look to *A history of Newfoundland from the English, colonial, and foreign records* by Daniel Woodley Prowse (1895) to find discussion of Cabot's voyages derived from -- Spanish Archives. The last paragraph on page 15 and the first paragraph on page 16 are key to understanding the history of English fishing fleets. That is, from *Acts of Parliament* we understand that English fishing fleets actively and continuously fished these (Newfoundland) waters, but there is little mention in other histories. This is not unlike the situation where a history dismisses the discovery of the New World in 3 lines and gives Anne Boleyn a hundred pages. Fishing and knitting do not get much space in popular histories, and even less in academic histories.

*The Royal Navy* establishes that by G. Chaucer's time, English sailors had traditions of knit clothing to keep themselves warm. This is consistent with what we know about knitting on the Channel Islands. The Channel Islanders had been great fishermen, but by the end of the 11^th century they had fished out their waters and had turned to spinning and knitting for export as a source of income. By the end of the 12^th Century, the Channel Islands had become a knitting production center, in part because of the quality of their spinning. Soon, the Channel Island knitting industry out stripped local wool production and the Channel Islands turned to importing raw English wool. Somebody was buying a lot of "Guernseys" and "Jerseys".

Then, I look at other indications of sea faring. One such is the ceramic pots for transporting goods by sea made in in the7th and 8th centuries in what is now Southern Turkey. A large number of these pots, are found around old Irish monasteries. Thus, it was likely that there was extensive trade by sea between Ireland and the Eastern Mediterranean at that time. Remember that we have very early knitting with knitting needles from just south (Syria) and just East of the place where those those shipping pots were made.) Just east was the path of the Silk road. Just south was the route used by the Arab traders bringing goods from India to Europe. Southren Turkey was where goods from both trade routes were repackaged for transport by sea. Thus, there was a direct trade route by sea from Ireland to a place where we know there was knitting.) Ireland was likely knitting sailor's “sea-gownes” of some type by the 8th century. I have thought for a long time that The Origins of Knitted Fabrics by Braham Norwick made cogent argument that the Irish knew about knitting in the 8th century. He goes on to layout similar evidence for the knowledge of knitting in Scotland in the 8th to 9th century. Ireland as the Western Terminus of a sea trade route to Southern Turkey makes this more plausible.

Have you ever reefed a square rigged sail in a rain squall? ( As the ship rolls, you are bounced against the yard (spar). If the deck is moving a foot as the ship rolls, you are going to move a yard during that roll. Top-men (sailors working highest third of the rigging) get thrown around with 3 times the acceleration that the crew on deck experience. (Fortunately, tall ships tend to roll more slowly than your little motor boat.) And, top-men are up in the wind. If the deck is subject to 15 knot of wind, 90 feet above the deck, a sailor is likely subject to 30 or 45 knots of wind. If you try reefing square rigged sails in squall while wearing a woven garment, you will come away bruised and cold. If you have to reef several sails in a single watch, you will be very bruised and very cold and unable to work for a couple of days. However, if you are wearing a well knit Filey, the cables will have padded your chest and you will be able to go back on deck in 4 hours. And, working in the cold, until exhausted, getting 4 hours of rest, and going back into the cold was the life of a seaman. They did not have weathermen, they had seamen that could work in any weather. And, the seamen had their tightly knit woolen garments.

You cannot understand a seaman's clothing unless you understand his work and environment.

Moreover, life at sea in a ship without an engine is very different from life at sea in a ship with an engine. Don't believe me? Ask Capt Douglas on the Shenandoah,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdtallships/4188347110/in/photostream

(Somehow, in this picture he looks older than he did in 1979) See also

(http://www.theblackdogtallships.com/ )

the only tall ship left without an engine. And, even on the Shenandoah, most sail management can be done from on deck. Crew on the Shenandoah do not have to brave the roll of the ship and wind of the upper rigging for routine sail management.

I knit ganseys, and wore them fishing and sailing to see how they functioned. I was very surprised to discover how differently the various stitch patterns performed. This is most notable when when the fabric is knit very tightly. And yes, some patterns of ganseys are better for some jobs, and other patterns of ganseys are better for other jobs. If the sailor is heaving a capstan, he needs padding (cables) across the chest. If he is carrying his boat and/or spars on his shoulders up and down the beach, then he needs padding on the top of his shoulders. A deck worker hoisting 300 pound dories on and off the rolling, heaving deck, needs as much padding as he can get, because eventually one of those dories is going to swing over and hit him. If the fisherman is going to be rowing, he needs extra ease in the shoulders. One could give ease for rowing by knitting loosely, but then the garment would not be as warm, so one gives ease with moss or seed stitch. Some of the dory fishermen on the Banks survived weeks of being in an open boat, so we know their garments were very warm and tightly knit. Some rowed thousands of miles so we know they had ease. On the other hand a whaler in the Azors or South Pacific does not need such warmth.

Some English ports tended to specialize in particular kinds of fishing. This was reasonable, because good fishing takes a lot of very specialized knowledge that changes fairly rapidly. It takes a good deal of continuous effort to keep track of where fish are being found. The different fisheries were found in different climates – cod in Iceland, whales around the Azores, and herring in the Baltic. Thus, the different kinds of fishermen needed different weights of clothing. Thus, ganseys worn by fishermen doing a particular job in a particular fishery are going to wear similar ganseys, because those fishermen all need a similar level of warmth and padding.

And, skills and jobs were passed from father to son. A port that produced a large number of top-men, would have mothers, wives, and sisters that knew how to knit the kind of garments that would protect and help top-men survive and be successful. With the right kind of gansey, a young seaman was likely to live to marry and have his own son. With a poorly knit gansey, a young seamen was likely to perish of the cold. Thus, good knitting enabled good seamanship.

If the fisherman is standing in a barrel of straw (to stay warm while fishing from deck of the ship) then the stitch pattern does not have to go to the bottom of the sweater. This tells us that some of the sweater traditions go back before ~1500 AD when fishermen moved from fishing from barrels on the deck to fishing from dories.

Ah, but were those fishermen's and sailors garments knit? I keep being told ( by folks that do not fish or sail) that woven fabrics, or felted fabrics was just as good - and cheaper. (And , those folks assert, “They did not have knitting that early!”

Three hundred years later, similar knit garments served the crews of the Endurance and the Star of Alaska. Such garments served the fishermen of Digby fishing out of Nova Scotia. These three groups from around 1900, all had access to woven and felted materials, and yet they all turned to tightly knit wool fabrics. Why? Because tight knit wool solved the problems of cold, wet, and durability better than woven fabrics. Or, rather a combination of tight knit wool and woven fabrics solves the problems. Woven and felted fabrics alone were not enough to solve the problems. The Endurance, the Star of Alaska, and the Digby fishermen all needed to add tightly knit wool – just like the fishermen that fished out the waters around England and the Channel Islands in the 11^th Century.

A boat owned by my friend, Al Dring.

I cannot seem to find a picture of Al from the days when he was captain of the Alma.

http://www.boatingsf.com/photopage.php?photo=184&boat=28

A sailor knits

2011-08-02T15:44:00.000-07:00

Knitting while sailing on a wicked cold day on the Bay.

Waves broke over the bow, and soaked my knitting bag. Everything got wet, and the steel needles rusted. However, a little polishing with a bit of crocus cloth, and they were good as new.

Note the knitting sheath - it has become an absolute favorite for knitting out and about.

The current favorite for knitting in front of the TV.

Tools matter.

The second generation of hand spun gansey yarn

2011-07-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have stopped hand spinning 5-ply gansey yarn. (Mostly !)
These days, I spin 6-ply. Construction is 3 x 2-ply.

I like knitting yarns constructed from 16 hank/pound singles (9,000 ypp). The fine plies provide warmth, durability and a softer drape than 5-ply gansey yarn.

All of this was discovered by accident when I bought a trove of CHEAP wool yarn to use for stuff I did not want to waste good yarn on. Then, I started knitting it, and discovered that I liked it. I really liked it! More investigation showed that it was old stock Robison-Anton, worsted at 900 ypp constructed as 3 x 2-ply with ZSS twist.

Not a yarn construction that I had thought about. It takes some care to get a balanced yarn, but it is worth the effort.

The trail to 9,000 ypp

2011-07-22T13:33:00.000-07:00

Last year, I was making 5-ply gansey yarn from ~5,600 ypp singles.

Why that odd number? Going back to England in the 15th century, yarn was measured in hanks of 560 yards. If one spins a pound of fiber in to 10 hanks, then it comes out to 5,600 ypp. And, a good spinner can spin a hank every couple of hours. All of which made nice round numbers for professional spinners working in a cottage industry. (In a very long day of spinning, a spinner could produce 500 yards of 5-ply yarn. Ply 5 hanks together, and the twist of the ply shortens the length to 500 yd plus something for grandmother.) This would also imply that there were other traditions for the spinning of finer singles from finer wools.

However, the Irish and Scots seem to have (hand) spun to a standard of 16 hanks per pound. These finer singles were then plied up to produce yarns that were similar in weight to the English yarns, but they would have been warmer and more durable. This would off set the fact that the more labor was required. I wanted to investigate the trade off between the extra labor and the increased warmth and durability.

I started spinning such 16 hank /pound singles, but it was slow and hard. I looked for a faster wheel to buy but ended up building the "hot rod". That took a while. However, it was worth it. Now, I can produce such fine (and finer) yarns at a rapid pace. I am spinning singles for multi- ply yarns at rates close to a hank per hour. Singles for lace that must be very nice, smooth, and uniform are much slower.

Some of that speed comes from practice. However, in spinning, tools matter. My output using my DD bobbin/ flier assembly with controlled DRS is about twice my best output using the Ashford lace flier (with a similar ratio. There is more to spinning than just ratios.

A bit of Jacob and Shetland singles, plied together and wrapped around a caliper.

The two ply is in the 18-20 wpi range.

Bobbins of singles in the 16 hanks per pound range. Fibers include (clockwise from dark Jacob) Cotswold,

Shetland, Romney (blue), grey Romney, blend (~~8,000 ypp), Shetland, Merino (blue) and CVM (10,000 ypp). edited to add: A hank (560 yd) of the Natural Romney weighed 1.125 oz = 7,964 ypp. The others ran closer to an once per hank or 8,960 ypp. The CVM hank weighed .75 once for 11,947 ypp. I guess something about that bobbin is a little off.

This was not a post about how fine I can spin, it was a post about learning to spin fast. Recently, I ended up with some nice Romney from Royal Fibers (http://www.royalfibers.com/). The spinning bobbin at hand was for finer singles. I just wound it off, and in comparison to any of the singles above, it is very fine.

Two spinning bobbins and their flier whorl. The different sized whorls on the two bobbins tend to produce different sized singles. The one on the right tends to produce singles that run about 16 hanks per pound and the bobbin on the left produces singles that run about 20 hanks per pound. The difference between the two is a few thousandths of an inch. I have another spinning bobbin that tends to spin at 50 hanks per pound.

DIY: high speed production wheel for high grist singles

2011-05-19T13:36:00.000-07:00

Background:
In 2009, I decided that commercial gansey yarns were not as good as what they could be and that I should spin my own. (These singles are about 5,600 ypp grist.) After some thought, I bought my Ashford Traditional (Traddy) in April 2010. By August, I wanted more speed. The Ashford Lace Flyer Kit was a step in the right directions, but I wanted more speed. The Ashford DD Kit actually provided more speed. However, it became clear that belt slip was the big problem and at higher flier speeds, was the dominate issue. Then, I became interested in higher grist singles and the problem became acute.

A very careful reading of Chapter 8 from Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning, suggested that the solution was a "one-yarn" double drive wheel, where a precise relationship between the size of the flier whorl, the size of the bobbin whorl, and the diameter of the bobbin core allow the use of a tight drive band with limited slip. Thus, in this setup of a DD wheel, there are two drive bands suppling power to the flyer/bobbin assembly. Such wheel setups were common from circa 1600 until WWI. However, they are notably absent from the famous "Canadian Production Wheels." And, such DD setups are not offered by any of the manufacturers that mass market spinning wheels. That is because they take some skill to setup and keep operating correctly. However, that extra effort is repaid with real spinning ease and speed.

It looks like an ordinary "Traddy", but it is wicked fast.

Procedure:

Understanding "DRS", as the term is used by Alden Amos in his Big Book of Handspinning (or Preistman's discussion of Saxony Wheels in his 1925 Principles of Worsted Spinning) is critical to making this work.

An Ashford high speed flyer whorl and bobbins made for yarns in the 5,000 to 10,000 ypp range.

I started by turning new bobbins to work with the high-speed Ashford DD whorl at specific DRS for specific yarns with twist calculated for the bobbin cores. These did not have any bearings, so they chattered and were noisy. However, they proved the concept and allowed me to spin 560 yard hanks of 5,600 ypp single in about 4 hours, which was faster than I had been spinning such singles with the Standard Ashford High Speed DD kit, and was faster than I had been spinning those singles with the Ashford Lace Flyer Kit. Moreover, the spinning of such singles on a one-yarn DD wheel was less effort and provided a more consistent yarn. I was hooked. What opened my eyes to the possibilities of the technology was a bobbin that I made with a DRS of 1.02 that allowed the effortless production of 30,000 ypp singles. Yes, it was slow, taking a full 8 hours to produce a hank, but still, it was not something that I considered to be within the range of a first year spinner. It was an epiphany.

Then, one of my Ashford flyer whorls warped and I had to replace it. Afterward, I knocked the warped wood off of the steel core and epoxied a piece of walnut burl onto it and turned it down to a (flier) whorl with a diameter of 0.6275", which gives a flier ratio of ~35:1. However, the bobbin whorl diameter for a DRS of 1.02 is 0.61" for a bobbin ratio of ~40:1. Since this setup is run with a taut drive band I get a useful 2,200 twists per minute from the bobbin, which allows spinning a 560 yards of firm twist 5,600 ypp in a couple of hours or 560 yards of firm twist 9,000 ypp singles in well under 3 hours.

Ashford DD flier with whorls and bobbins to produce yarns in the 5,000 to 10000 ypp range with firm twist. These have a wheel to bobbin ratio of 40:1. They are very fast.

Tools:
The required wood working tools are a small drill press, a small wood lathe, and turning chisels. I cut the bottom of the flier whorls with the back of a skew chisel, and the bottom of the bobbin whorls with a skew chisel that has been rounded into a scraper.

The last sets of bobbins have either plastic bearings from Ashford or sintered bronze bushings from my local industrial hardware store. Both work, and I have not made up my mind yet as to which is better.

I wind off when there is half or a third of an ounce of single on the bobbin, and thus the bobbins do not need a large capacity, and there is a relatively small change in the bobbin diameter as a result of accumulated yarn on the bobbin to change inserted twist. This program is for fine singles. I have a little bobbin winder that supports very rapid wind off without taking the spinning bobbin out of the wheel.

My Traddy has vibration at about 1,600 rpm. I put on a set of better hinges under the MoA, and I use a white rubber vibration damper under the tension screw, all of which help but do not solve the problem. I can either loaf along at less than 1,500 rpm or treadle hard and get the rpm over 2,000, when vibration dies down again. Thus, I have a sweet spot for bobbin rpm between 2,000 and 2,200 which is fast with little vibration.

I had some problems with a prototype bobbin whorl swelling in unseasonably wet weather to the extent that it changed the DRS. However, when both bobbin and flier whorls are made of similar materials (wood) , similar dimensions, have similar finishes (oil/varnish); then they expand and contract at similar rates and to similar extents and this ceases to be a problem.

In summary, this is an old, but recently neglected spinning technology that requires a good bit of knowledge and skill to implement. However, it offers a way to easily spin very soft and very fine yarns that are very difficult to spin with any other technology, and it offers a way to spin fine yarns very consistently and very fast.

9,000 ypp worsted singles and DRS

2011-04-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

Last winter, I decided that (in the old days), there were spinners producing 8,960 ypp singles for weaving into cloth for garments and that these singles likely also got plied up into yarns for knitting. I wondered what such yarns would be like for knitting. I thought I would make up some such yarns and find out. It has been harder than I thought.

And, I did not think that I would take so much criticism for trying to learn to spin better.

I had been spinning for (only) 9 months, and was having no trouble spinning singles from Cotswold ( a coarse wool) to a grist of 5,600 yards per pound (10 hanks per pound). I thought, "How much harder could 9,000 ypp be?" Well, the local spinning teachers were not teaching spinning that fine, so I was on my own.

First, I tried finer fibers rather than the coarse, long wools that I had been spinning. 9,000 ypp was still very hard. So, I reread The Big Book of Handspinning by Alden Amos because that was the only modern text on spinning that I had, which addressed spinning fine.

He talks about differential rotation speed (DRS) as an aid to finer spinning. In fact he spends a lot of space on DRS. He thinks it is important. So I took it to heart, and I learned the math. Then, I went into the shop and I applied the math to making flier/bobbin assemblies - over and over.

The "Spinning Police" said, "Forget about all that DRS crap. Just learn spinning skills"

With finer fibers and my flier/bobbin assemblies providing the correct DRS, I was able to spin 9,000 ypp singles. Soon after, I was able to spin 32 hanks per pound ( 18,000 ypp), and then with well prepared Shetland I was up to 50 or 55 hanks per pound (~30,000 ypp). Today, I would say that kind of spinning is not really difficult. Those singles need a lot of twist, so it is a bit tedious, but it is not really difficult. The correct DRS makes the process much easier.

After learning to spin finer with the aid of the right DRS, I am now able to spin rather fine, using Scotch Tension or Irish Tension. This morning I was using an Irish Tension flier to spin a single from Cotswold wool to a thickness of about .007". That comes out to more than 125 wraps per inch, putting it in the range of 16,000 ypp. Knowing DRS helped me learn some spinning skills.

How many students, studying under the Knitting Police learn those skills in their first year?

That single that I was spinning this morning is thin and strong, but otherwise, it is not "pretty". It will get plied up into a multi-ply yarn, which will hide its imperfections, so I do not care. If a pretty yarn was important, I would use a DD flier with the correct DRS. Today, I can spin singles at 32 hanks per pound using ST at over 150 yards per hour. With a fairly fine wools, I would not even call such spinning difficult. However, the singles that I spin DD are higher quality for much less effort. And, I doubt if ST will ever let me spin more than 50 hanks per pound with any wool.

No, that is not quite right. Today, I just do all my spinning on DD with the correct DRS for the yarn being spun -- because it is a lot easier. I am lazy. I am not even going to try spinning more than 50 hanks per pound using ST. I would just spin it the easy way.

The moral of this tale is to choose your teachers with great care. And, sometimes, a book is better than a classroom.

And, let's face it, professional spinners have a financial interest in making spinning seem difficult and arcane. It increases their value as teachers, and it increases the value of their spun yarns. Amos is not a spinner, he makes spinning wheels, thus he wants to make spinning accessible. What I really want are good woolens at a reasonable price. Thus, I want to make both spinning and knitting accessible. I want higher quality for much less effort in both spinning and knitting.

PS
The old Shetland "Lace weight" yarns were based on singles spun at 16 hanks per pound or ~9,000 ypp.
Modern commercial "cobweb" lace is a single ply of ~7,000 ypp, thus the modern 2-ply Shetland lace is ~3,500 ypp. The old 2-ply lace was ~4,000 ypp and the old 3-ply was ~ 2,700 ypp. The English knitting lace weight yarns were based on singles of 5,600 ypp, so that English 2-ply lace weight was ~2,500 ypp or very similar to the Shetland 3-ply. However, a 3-ply yarn is a warmer and more durable yarn construction. Shetland lace yarn was better.

The point is that you can spin really nice lace yarn without trying to spin "fine as frog hair".

Supporting your work

2011-04-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

Basically, large objects get supported on the lap, whether you are working with circs, 3+1 x 14" DPN with a Shetland knitting pouch, 4+1 x 18" gansey needles, or 6+1 x 12" Scottish needles.

If you are knitting a gansey or rug for the Queen, then it helps to fold-up the completed work, and hold it together with a few stitches of waste yarn so it is easier to turn, and to keep it from dragging on the floor.

Very large pieces can be hung from a hook on a swivel attached to a belt, at or just below the waist or the bottom of the knitting sheath. Again the object in progress is held in a compact shape with a few stitches of waste yarn. This works for things like shawls and lace table cloths. However, this is awkward, and you may have to adjust the yarn path or or switch to continental knitting, but it does allow working the edge of an object that is several feet in diameter and where the row you are working on contains thousands of stitches. Normally, a modern knitter would think about doing such a object on circs with long cables (tucking the center bulk of the object into a bag to facilitate handling.)

However, DPN with a knitting sheath allow finer and faster knitting, that cannot be sustained on circs. And, the weight of the object hanging from a hook suspended from the bottom of the knitting sheath helps to counter balance the weight of the object on the needles. If museum collections are any guide, then at one time such counter balance devices were fairly common. Of course, if you are just knitting socks, a clew hanging from the bottom of your knitting sheath, will keep your yarn out of the mud as you knit on the quay and counter balance the weight on the needles.

I had better stop. I have written too much about too little.

History of a knitting sheath

2011-04-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

In the last post, there is a photo of some knitting sheaths and the top one is an open twist design - and one of the prettiest knitting sheaths that I ever made. The open twist design was an effort to reduce the weight of the knitting stick.

It gets tucked into apron strings or a waistband. There are needle holes in both ends.

Originally it was used with 6", #1 needles. However, it has been rebored and now fits #2 and #3 sock needles. It gets used with wooden or bamboo needles.

The open twist was not turned, it was just whittled with a knife from a piece of black walnut firewood, some years ago. In those days, people were telling me that knitting sheaths were not used in the old days because knitting sheaths were too much trouble to make. Thus, I did a long series of knitting sheaths to compare how much labor it took to make a good knitting sheath to how much labor could be saved by using a knitting sheath.

While knitting sheaths/sticks do allow knitting dramatically faster so that the time required to make a knitting sheath becomes trivial -- the real advantage of a knitting sheath/stick is that it allows the production of fabrics that cannot be produced with hand held needles. Modern knitters, not only cannot produce such fabrics, they have forgotten that such fabrics can be produced. When I tell or write of the fabrics I knit with a knitting sheath, other knitters do not believe such knitting is possible.

Knitting sticks with spiral designs want an "S" twist. "Z" twist designs tend to slip out, or slide down. This is a Z twist, and it tends to slide down. There is crack on in it where I had a belt threaded through it, trying to keep it from sliding out of my apron strings. It is not one of my more functional designs.

Note, that many old Dutch style knitting sticks had a "X" twist. This works even better than an S twist, but is harder to generate by hand. There is a special tool for generating these patterns on a lathe.

Above is much more functional knitting stick. It is not as pretty. It is not as traditional, but much more functional. It was rapidly produced on a wood lathe from cherry and maple.

However, it really is possible to whittle a very good knitting sheath from firewood in a matter of a few hours. If you do not have a drill, you can heat a bit of steel wire to burn the needle holes.

Belts

2011-04-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

A knitting group that I belong to teases me about my having more belts than Imelda Marcos has pairs of shoes.

Yes, I have a lot of belts. Having the right belt for for your knitting sheath or knitting stick or having the right knitting sheath or stick for your belt is critical. And, just as there is no knitting sheath, that works perfectly on all belts, there is no belt that works perfectly with all knitting sheaths.

If you are working with very stiff needles, then the knitting sheath should be able to pivot. Examples include Dutch knitting sticks:

and Yorkshire goose wings

used with stiff needles. Here apron strings or an elastic waist band or a nylon belt work very well.

On the other hand, a Cornish fish

used with long gansey needles wants a good leather belt to hold it in place. However, shorter "Cornish fish" made so the needle placed less leverage on the belt work very well with lighter, narrower, (and slipperier) nylon belts. For example, this:

worked well with leather belts, but very poorly with the nylon belts.

Your knitting sheath and your belt need to work together as a team.

My favorite belt for use with knitting sheaths that hold the needles firmly:

My favorite belt for Dutch style knitting sticks and Yorkshire goosewings used with rigid needles:

I just warp it around my waist and knot it in place.

I buy leather belts from LL Bean (and every outlet mall), wear them with my jeans and knitting sheaths get tucked into them or threaded onto them. Knitting sheaths that thread on to belts are a pain to put on and take off, but they do not get lost.

knitting sticks in the Dutch Style

2011-04-08T09:00:00.001-07:00

knitting sticks 1Q10, a photo by agres@sbcglobal.net on Flickr.

Tucked into apron strings, knitting sticks were used with short needles for knitting small objects such as socks and mittens

More Plies

2011-03-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

How many plies does it take to make a good knitting yarn?

More! Modern knitters have forgotten that more plies are warmer and more durable. If you are going to put that much labor into something, make it good! I came to spinning, because I wanted better yarn.

Modern mill spun is prepared for knitters that knit in accordance with Yarn Craft guidelines (http://www.craftyarncouncil.com/ ). Such knitting is loose. There are gaps between every each stitch and the next. No matter how warm the yarns, heat is going to escape between the strands of yarn, so there is no reason to make the yarns warm. In other words, if you are going to knit loosely, then there is very little warmth advantage from putting in the effort to spin all those plies. And, spinning more plies is does cost more. Knitters have price-points and the yarn industry is very competitive, so the mills cut cost by designing yarns with as few plies as possible. The existing, competitive, yarns then become the standard for most knitters .

However, I want better yarns. In the yarn life-cycle of sheep to to sock, while finer plies do take extra spinning time, it is not a lot considering overall effort.

How fine a ply? I aim for about about 1/3 of the spin count. For example, Cotswold has a spin count of 30+ hanks per pound, so I aim for 10 hanks per pound (5,600 ypp) for my singles. (Five such plies gives you to 5-ply gansey yarn @ 1,000 ypp.) Jacob has a spin count of 48++, so I aim to spin my Jacob singles at 16 hanks per pound/ 9,000 ypp.

Ok, the 2 ply takes 6 hours to spin and the 5 ply at the same overall grist takes 16 hours to spin. However, whether I knit with 2-ply or 5-ply of the same grist, a pair of socks takes 20 hours to knit. The 5-ply lasts much longer. So by investing an extra 10 hours spinning (or about 25% of total yarn preparation time), I can save myself several days of spinning and knitting replacement socks. This goes double for an elaborate fisherman’s knit-frock. This becomes an overwhelming factor for fine lady's gloves with fancy patterns that might require a hundred hours to knit.

I assert that 9,000 ypp singles are good for weaving garment weight fabrics. Thus, for the last thousand years, spinners have been spinning linen, silk, worsted, and woolen singles at grists near 9,000 ypp for the use of weavers. Some of these singles would have been diverted, and plied up into knitting yarns, well because, knitting yarns with fine plies really are warmer and more durable. It makes a nice knitting yarn. In the context of traditional spinning, 9,000 ypp just is not a big deal.

The other day, I ran across an old pattern for Shetland Shawls. There was a center panel of tightly knit fabric (Shetland 2-ply lace weight (22 wpi) knit on UK #16 needles) that was actually much warmer than any of the fabrics produced from the patterns in Knitting Ganseys with Beth Brown-Reinsel. I find it funny that the old lace shawls were warmer than the modern fisherman’s sweaters.

A gansey by any other name

2011-03-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

I have been going through old sources on knitting, looking at what they made, what the material was, and what they called it. The results have been eye opening.

I started with Weldon's Practical Knitter, The Delineator, and the resources of the Rutt library (http://www.soton.ac.uk/library/bopcris/wsa.html ). This does not go back as far as I would like as some of the resources in Rutt are more recent than the dates on the homepage suggest.

The first thing I noticed was how many things were knitted from wool. Convention is to assume that undergarments named in old inventories and wills were woven linen. This may have been the general rule, but Weldon in particular makes it clear that "gents drawers", gent's and lady's under vests, knickerbockers, gent's, lady's & children's vests, baby's dresses, Spencers, chest protector, lady's under sleeves, girl's and lady's petticoats, lady's under bodice, lady's leggings (for riding), and various chemises were all knit from wool on occasion. While these sources are 19th century, it would seem that that they reflect older traditions.

Then, I looked at what various garments are called. Fishermen's sweaters knit of wool are called: Jersey Jacket, Sailor Jersey, short-waisted jacket, Guernsey frock, fisherman's Jersey, Boating Jersey, Boating Sweater, and warm undervest. Again, I expect that these reflect older naming traditions, and when we see these any of terms in older wills and inventories, we can not be sure that they do not refer to a knit fisherman's garment -- a gansey if you will.

I found it most interesting that the term "gansey" for a fisherman's sweater came into circulation in Great Britain about the time the old Guernsey knitting technique called gansey died out. And, of course, modern books on ganseys and gansey knitting do not instruct on the old Guernsey knitting technique. This is a bit sad.

Other things that I have been reading, and which are available as free digital editions include:

Old-time tools and toys of needlework

By Gertrude Whiting

The rural life of England

By William Howit

How long did it take to make a Seaman's sweater?

2011-02-27T08:34:00.000-08:00

When I first asserted that knit "sweaters" were a regular part of a seaman's regular wear, I was told that they took too long to knit to be practical. However, I have shown that using gansey needles and a knitting sheath such a weatherproof garment can be knit in well under a hundred hours.

Then, I was told that such garments could only have been made after the advent of mill spun because it would have taken too long to spin the appropriate yarn by hand. So, I got a spinning wheel and learned to spin. In my tests, it is quite possible to hand spin worsted 5-ply (gansey) yarn, and it takes well under a hundred hours to prepare the yarn for one good seaman's sweater. Thus, the total time from sheep to sweater for a hand-spun, hand-knit seaman's sweater is well under 200 hours.

Assuming uncoated long wool such as Kent, this includes, a day to wash the wool, a day to dye the wool, 16 hours to comb the wool, 50 hours of spinning and plying, and 20 hours of "yarn management". I am confident that the spinning could be done in this time on either a flier type spinning wheel or drop spindles. Yarn management tools in my calculation are limited to niddy-noddies and hand wound balls. Groups working together (i.e., neighbors) could reduce the required time substantially. For example, 4 house holds working to together could easily dye 4 lots of wool in one day, reducing that time requirement by 6 hours. Professional textile workers or well to do households would have had other tools to improve productivity.

Never the less, it might well have taken 800 hours of hand labor (spinning & knitting) to produce the knit contents of a 15th century seaman's bag including: 2 knit frocks, socks, mittens, hood, and neck warmer. Some of these items would have to be renewed each year, and some would last for several seasons. Some items such as fisherman's nipper's would have been cut from old socks. And, there would have been pants made of woven wool. Seaman required specialized clothing to pursue their trade. This clothing was the seaman's tools of the trade, like a blacksmith's forge and tools or a carpenter's tools.

In addition, the bag would contain clothes to wear ashore, as the clothes worn on-board would have become highly soiled.

Cable needles and knitting sheaths

2011-02-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

Single point needles and cable needles do not work with knitting sheaths.

At one point, I put a lot effort into thinking about ways it could be done. Then, I asked, "Why do it?" What are the advantages of SPN and cables?

Well the cable's advantages are that it folds up and is not "pokey" in the knitting bag. I kid you not, that is a really big advantage - for knitters that take their knitting to tea parties. I often sit by my kitchen window, drink my tea, and knit. Then, cables have no advantage for me. If I go out to a tea party, I take shorter needles that fit in my knitting bag without being pokey.

Pocket sock needle case that doubles as knitting sheath.
Invite me to tea, and I will bring my knitting!

Virtues of Scotch Tension

2011-01-14T10:24:00.000-08:00

Previously, I noted that Double Drive (DD) spinning wheels can go faster because they have two drive bands to transmit that power from the drive wheel to the flier assemble. However, you may not really need to go that fast.

If you do not have a real need for speed, “Do you want a DD spinning wheel?” I suggest, not likely.

With DD wheel, the ratio between differential rotation speed (DRS) strongly affects the kind of yarn that you spin. A set DRS can help you spin a very consistent yarn if you are working with the same kind of wool and want to spin miles and miles of the same kind of yarn (production spinning).

On the other hand, if you to work with different kinds of fibers/wools, or you want to spin a different kind of yarn, with a DD wheel you need to change the DRS. This means changing your bobbin or changing your flier whorl or both. If you want to spin different yarns with a DD wheel you need a whole set of bobbins and flier whorls.

Now, some of this can be done by working with a partially filled bobbin to fine tune DRS, and some can be done by adjusting belt tension. However, these steps only take you so far. If you do not have a bobbin/flier whorl combination to give you the DRS that you need for the yarn that you want to spin, you are going to have to fight your wheel for every inch of that yarn that you produce. This takes away from the joy of spinning. This is one reason that people have different DD wheels. Each has a (set of) different DRS, and thus different yarns that they spin easily.

DD wheels come with a very limited selection of bobbin/flier whorl combinations that allow the easy spinning of a very limited number of different yarns. If you have an Ashford Traddy with a (Fast) DD kit, you will find it easy to spin lace singles at about 5,000 ypp. However, spinning 11,200 ypp singles leads to cuss words that cannot be said in public – until you get the right whorl (custom made), and then it goes like butter on warm toast. (Oh, yes, it can be done, but it is not as easy as it is when you have the bobbin/flier whorl combination to produce the correct DRS for that yarn.) If you want to spin 22,400 ypp singles (easily), then you need a different (custom) bobbin/flier whorl combination. Thus, if I want to spin a new kind of yarn, I start by going into the shop and turning a new spinning bobbin that gives me the correct DRS for the yarn that I want to spin. And, when I am spinning ST, I put a lot of yarn on my spinning bobbin. When I am spinning DD, I stop and wind off frequently, because as the bobbin fills, my DRS changes.

Scotch tension (ST) on the other hand will allow you to produce almost any yarn that you want from almost any wool. Small changes in drafting technique, or treadle rate or brake tension are all that is required to easily produce a wide variety of yarns. Thus, Scotch tension is better for people that want to work with a variety of different wools/fibers to produce a variety of different yarns. The downside of ST is that it has lower limits on speed and it is harder to produce a very consistent yarn.

The virtues of DD are ease of producing a consistent yarn very rapidly. The vices of DD are the extreme difficulty of producing yarns for which you do not have an appropriate bobbin/flier combination to produce the correct DRS, and the difficulty of obtaining appropriate bobbin/flier combinations for specialty or unique yarns (particularly for old wheels.)

A New Twist on Lace Fliers

2011-01-09T17:15:00.000-08:00

I came to spinning not as a spinner, but as a person interested in yarns that I could not get from commercial sources. As a good student, I asked, “What is the best way to spin fine, high twist singles?” The conventional wisdom that I received was to use a “Lace Flier”.

Lace fliers are Scotch tension flier and bobbin assemblies ostensible designed for the rapid production of lace singles. They tend to be “balanced”, and have low friction bearings to allow them to spin at very high speed. They are flier lead and have small whorls resulting in “high ratios” so that they can turn very fast with a limited treadle rate. Or, at least that is the conventional wisdom.

In fact, at lower speeds (400 – 800 rpm) this is how lace fliers work. As a beginning spinner starts wanting to spin faster, a lace flier helps them insert more twist into their fine singles, and for the beginning spinner, it seems like a lace flier is the ultimate answer to rapidly spinning fine singles.

At slightly higher speeds, things start to fall apart. At low speeds, it takes very little power to drive the flier and bobbin. Windage is minimal. Energy to accelerate the flier is minimal. Energy going into twisting the yarn is minimal. And, (if you oiled your wheel) friction is minimal. However, windage is proportional to the cube of the speed and acceleration is proportional to the square of the speed, with the power dissipated as friction and going into twist being directly proportional to the speed. Together these represent a power consumption function. All the power to the flier is supplied to the flier and bobbin by the drive belt.

Thus, if “windage” consumes 1 watt at 400 rpm, it will consume 8 watts at 800 rpm, 27 watts at 1,200 rpm, 64 watts at 1,600 rpm, and 125 watts at 2000 rpm. This power must be delivered by the drive band. A piece of kitchen string tied with a square knot can easily transfer 8 watts, even if it is sweeping a small whorl. To get that kitchen string to transfer 125 watts (i.e., 2,000 rpm) you are going to have to ply it up into a cable and douse it in a high-friction belt compound, otherwise that belt is going to slip or break. You will be treadling like like crazy, and you wheel will be making all the noises that say it is going fast, but drive belt will be slipping against that little lace flier whorl, so that the flier and bobbin are not going as fast as you think they are going.

Wheel wrights have put great effort into reducing the windage of their lace fliers, but that cubed function for windage is against them. And, in a Scotch tension system, the bobbin cannot go any faster than the flier. In fact, the bobbin speed (and hence twist) will be between 10 % and 30 % less than the flier speed.

The truth is that a high-speed double drive system will provide higher bobbin speed and hence insert more twist into the yarn, allowing faster spinning than a lace flier. There are several reasons for this. Double drive wheels have more than twice as much contact surface with the drive band to transfer more than twice as much power. In a double drive system the bobbin goes 10 % to 30 % faster than the flier. Thus, if you have a Scotch tension wheel and a double drive wheel with the fliers going at the same speed, the double drive wheel will be putting 20 % to 60% more twist into the yarn. I did not know this when I looked at the ratios of various fliers as I prepared to buy my first wheel.

Last summer, I spun 10 miles of 5,600 ypp singles with a lace flier on my Ashford Traddy, and I guessed much of the above. In December, I got a Neiko Digital Tachometer (NDT). That confirmed my worst fears. I was wasting effort. I was treadling and my drive belt was slipping like crazy. (Despite that fact that I have long experience with drive belts in the power range of 0.5 to 800 hp, and I know how to minimize belt slip.) The bottom line is that the small swept area of the lace flier whorl is not capable of handling the power required to drive the flier at much over 2,000 rpm.

The NDT tells me that if I treadle diligently, I can insert a lot more twist into my yarn using the high-speed double drive (ratio stated as 17:1) than I can using the lace flier that Ashford tells me has a ratio of 40:1. For example, the NDT tells me that the Ashford Turbo dive band starts slipping at ~2,000 rpm. It does not matter how much tension I put on it, the band does not drive the Ashford Lace Flier faster, no matter how fast I treadle. From my treadle pace, I think my flier is flying, but the NDT is there to keep me honest.

The NDT tells me that much of what is tossed around about speed of spinning is not accurate. And, it tells me that much of the conventional wisdom about spinning is wrong.

A faster DD bobbin/whorl set for my Traddy that I made by hand.

Moreover, the industry has a odd way of calculating the ratios for DD spinning wheels. The actual drive wheel/ bobbin ratio affecting spin insertion for the high-speed Ashford DD bobbin/whorl set is closer to 22:1. The drive wheel/ flier ratio is ~ the stated 17:1, but in practice the bobbin turns faster than the flier, and thus twist insertion is greater than would be expected by comparing the ratios of the DD kit with the ratios of the lace flier kit.

DD is the smart spinner's way to fast twist insertion.

Modern Knitting as Art

2010-12-06T17:35:00.000-08:00

Back in art school, I learned that: Art is something that makes people think about their world. In general, art is a non-functional representation of an object, i.e., paintings, sculpture, textile art, jewelry, decorations on objects (color patterns in functional textiles), and public architecture. In the “Art World” functionality has no value. Decoration is everything.

And then we had “crafts”, which were functional objects. We were pushed to find the perfect tea pot, the perfect wine chalice and so forth. If we were going to make a perfect tea pot, we had to learn how to make tea. We had to test our tea pot(s) to ensure that they were perfectly functional. In the craft world, decoration without function is nothing.

I think that most hand knitting over the last 80 years falls into the category of: “Art”. Consider the fisherman's sweater.

Long ago, a fisherman's sweater displayed his social status, but mostly it kept him warm. Warmth was the core function of such a sweater. A representation of the sweater that did not function to keep the wearer warm was, and is “art”. This would include a textile representation that does not provide the warmth of the original sweater. Worsted weight yarn knit on # 6 needles will never come close to providing that kind of warmth, and thus is “art”. Modern hand knit sweaters are decorative – they are knit on big needles, and the wind blows right through them taking body heat with it. If you want a real fisherman's sweater, knit it on #1 needles.

A lot of knitters shout that, “Oh, my lace shawls are so warm!” or “my hand knit socks are completely functional.” Statements that one's woolen objects are “warm” are disingenuous, because the really remarkable thing about this knitting is how little warmth these objects do provide for the amount of wool used to construct them. Yes, lace shawls are light weight and provide detectable warmth and protection from drafts, but their primary purpose is as objects of personal adornment. They are badges that wearer does not have to work (and stay) outside when the weather turns foul. Originally they were worn as badges of a Shetland woman's great skill in domestic chores. A lace shawl showed that she could could do her chores and still have time to spin and knit decorative items for herself. Then, ladies form the south started buying such shawls to show the wearer's family was rich enough to afford a heated environment. If you are wearing a lace shawl as your primary outer garment and you have to stay outside in a cold rain squall, you are going to get wet and cold. In contrast, the Shetland women wore warm clothing under their lace shawls. Shawls are a display of status display rather than for practical warmth. Lace shawls are “warm” only in a culture that thinks that a “fisherman's sweater” knit on US 6 needles from [4] weight yarn is warm.

Hand knitters recite the myth that “any hand-knit wool is warm”, (but that if you go out side, you have to put a jacket on to stay warm.) By commenting on how warm their hand knit objects are, these knitters are saying, “My art is to produce a little warmth from a lot of wool!” In early Victorian times, that was indeed very clever art. It took the concept of “warm wool” and stood it on its head. It made people think. Now, that clever art has become the norm, and warm, hand-knit wool has become the rarity.

Most modern hand knit socks are not durable enough to be particularly functional – in truth, they are no more functional than a painting of socks. (Do not tell me how long your socks last. Consider the the fresco on the wall.) Those socks function as personal adornment, as a statement that I can waste my time knitting non-functional objects. The knitter says, “My hand knit socks are more functional than the store bought socks.” Ok, but are the store bought socks functional?

I had a good bit of time in the big department stores over the weekend, and the socks that I saw therein were designed for personal adornment. Thus, saying that your hand knit sock is more functional than what you can buy at Needless Markup, is just not saying much. Those socks are primarily for personal adornment – jewelry made out of textiles. I look at the sock yarns that are being sold to knitters and the sock patterns that are popular, and together these produce more textile jewelery than functional socks. They are not people that walk much. These yarns and patterns produce socks that scream, I am well to do, I do not have to walk, I can drive or take a taxi. I mean they are buying sock yarns made from fine, short staples and they are knitting it loosely. Does the knitter really expect the resulting sock to be “durable”?

One more point, in those department stores, the cheap knit sweaters and hats had gauges similar to that of most modern hand knitting. However, the very expensive (machine knit) sweaters and hats had gauges and textures similar to what I knit. It was what I consider to be warm and durable. It seems that Needless Markup and its suppliers concur with me on what makes a good knit fabric.

In the Begining

2010-12-06T11:59:00.000-08:00

I wore a very nice hand knit fisherman's sweater, and I about froze, so I asked the question, “How did the old fishermen stay warm?”

As late as 1844, it was hand knit sweaters. Why were their sweater warmer then our sweaters? I tried different wools and stitch patterns. None of theses were particularly warm. Then in 2004, I came across Gladys Thompson, Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys, & Arans. Careful reading showed that all the patterns were knit much, much tighter than any of the modern hand knitting patterns.

In those days, I knit on circs – Addi Turbos. However, the Gladys Thompson gauges were so tight they were very difficult for me to knit. So the question became, were those very tight fabrics worth the effort to knit. Were they so much warmer, that they would be worth effort?

I knew from the literature and basic physics that advection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advection, Air is a fluid that can advect heat ) was a major source of heat loss through clothing. I set out to measure air flow through knit fabrics. I took an old vacuum cleaner and made a little device to measure the pressure drop across a small sample of fabric. I also turned an old water bed heater into a heat source to measure conduction across small samples of fabric by measuring how long it took to melt a standard ice cube. Then I knit and tested hundreds of samples. I tested commercial fabrics and products.

The results were fairly straight forward.

Tighter was warmer. (in the range possible by hand knitting)
Some stitch patterns (in very tight knitting) dramatically increased the warmth of the fabric.
Hand knitting could produce fabrics that were as warm as the best commercial products.
Knitting such tight fabrics on circ needles was not practical. (Yes, it could be done but many who tried it, ended up requiring wrist surgery.)

Since science is the systematic collection and organization of information by the making of observations, formulation of hypothesis, and testing of those hypothesis, this was good science. However, there were nothing here that was any more deserving of a peer reviewed publication than any high school student's assigned science lab exercise. This had all be done, and published long before. My work simply calibrated my materials and techniques.

The early posts of this blog describe how I then worked out (un-vented) the old knitting sheath technologies so that I could easily knit much tighter and faster without damaging my wrists. The various garments that I have knit, tested, and used confirm and validate all of the testing that I did on the swatches. The proof of my swatch testing is the garments I knit on a daily basis. The proof of that swatch testing is when I do a demonstration; and, the oldest and most experienced knitters in the room, squeal, “Oh, My God! How do you knit such objects?”

People that have not seen my fabrics, simply do not believe such fabrics can be hand knit. And, they call me a liar, or worse. It is slander and liable, but I know they are just ignorant. And, it is OK! As long as they disbelieve, I know I am knitting much better than they are. If they started believing, they would use these techniques to produce objects that are better than anything I can dream.

The a view of the other side of my world is at : http://climatecrocks.com/2010/12/08/more-ben-santer/

I got it wrong on spindles

2010-11-22T09:27:00.000-08:00

I looked at videos of Peruvian spinners, and thought they were using the Berber spiral groove on their bottom whorl spinners.

They were not. One of those spinners assures me that they were using a half-hitch, and there was no grove on the spindles.

Turns out, that half-hitches on bottom whorl spindles can be set and released faster than the eye can see. And, it can be done by feel, in any position. No need for even the Berber Spiral Groove. What is takes is a lesson and practice.

On the other hand, the ancient Egyptian spinners that were spinning linen threads only 4 fibers thick, did use the spiral groves that the modern Berbers use.

The state of yarn

2010-11-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

Knitters talk about how warm a lace shawl is -- that is silly. Lace shawls are only "warm" in the context of a very mild environment, generally the result of central heat and heated transport.

Ladies that think lace shawls are "warm" have been the primary market for yarn mills for the last 100 years. The yarn companies have adapted. For the last 100 years, few people have worn hand knit work clothes, and the wool industry has adapted. The ladies want softer yarns, so the yarn companies make softer yarns. Now, if you go to a ski resort, you do not see wool sweaters on the ski slopes, you see them in the (heated) restaurants and in the (heated) lodge in the evening sitting by the fire. Nobody is asking for the more durable fibers these, so the wool industry stops growing them, and the yarn industry has stopped spinning them into yarns for hand knitting.

The result is that there are likely 20 good yarn stores within 30 miles of my house, and not one of them carries a a single yarn containing any of the high luster, traditional British long wools. Even if I mail order "5-ply gansey yarn" from the UK, none of the 4 brands in my stash have any long wool in them. However, if we look at the pictures in Gladys Thompson's Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys & Arans, we see that high luster long wool was used for every object except the Aran patterns. This tells us that yarns really have changed in the last 55 years since GT was first published. What does this mean?

It means that if you buy a "5-ply gansey yarn", it will be spin from fine, short fiber. It will not be nearly as durable as a yarn spun from long wool. The fibers are thiner and will not tolerate abrasion as well as the coarser long wool fibers. The fibers are shorter and more likely to pull out of the yarn, and the yarn will fall apart if the object is worn for an extended period of time while wet. To hold the shorter fibers in place the yarn has more twist and ply and thus is stiffer and requires more effort to knit into a weatherproof fabric. On the other hand, the high twist yarn shows off cables even when knit loosely. These are yarns that have evolved to meet needs of personal adornment, rather than the practical needs of a waterman. These are yarns of status rather than for warmth.

Seeking more durable yarns for outer wear, you are likely to find MacAusland's Woolen Works and Cottage Craft in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. These are 2-ply and 3-ply yarns that are spun semi-woolen or semi-worsted. With their coarser fibers and woolen nature, these yarns do have a certain itch factor when worn next to the skin. With their thick plies, these yarns require great effort to knit tight enough to be weatherproof. And, when knit tight enough to be really warm, these yarns produce a fabric that is stiff. On the other hand, I have worn sweaters that were hand knit from these yarns to keep me warm and comfortable while pruning apple trees in fierce storms. With their coarse fiber, these yarns are relatively durable. And, over all, they are the most comfortable garments that I have ever worn skiing.

What were the virtues that caused the old knitters to use long wool 5-ply gansey yarn when knitting "ganseys"? First there was cost, long wool was plentiful and less expensive. There was durability; both the thickness of the fiber and the length of the fiber contributed to produce a very durable fabric that was tough enough to be workman's clothing in an industrial environment (ships). The yarn was very supple which allowed it to be knit tight enough to be weatherproof and yet the fabric remain flexible and elastic, and thus very comfortable. The worsted spun structure resulted in a smooth surface, that while not soft, was pleasant to the touch. Thus, it produced a relatively thin fabric that was light in weight, flexible, and very durable. This met the needs of a sailor working in the rigging above deck, or sleeping in his hammock, or indeed anyone working on the water.

There are a lot of farm stores selling yarns spun from long wools. Some are even an appropriate "sport' weight. However, they are 2 and 3-ply, which do not have the durability or suppleness of 5-ply. Further more, the the fibers for these yarns "have been through the mill". That is, they have been commercially processed to remove vegetable matter, and subjected to aggressive picking and carding. This is much harder on fibers than hand combing. Thus, the fibers in the yarns sold by "farm stores' tend to be shorter than the fibers in the fleeces sold by the same farm stores. There are two reasons for this. The fleeces with shorter fibers tend to be the ones sent to the mill for spinning into yarn, while fleeces with longer fibers are sold to hand spinners. And, mills tend to break fibers.

Thus, at this instant, if you want to understand why people made such a fuss over British seaman's ganseys, you are going to have to hand spin your own yarn and knit it yourself. In fact the whole British tradition of knitting yarns consisting of long wool spun into fine singles and plied up into 3-ply fingerling, 4- ply, and 5-ply is well worth investigating for anyone that is interested in light weight, but very warm and supple clothing.

Drop spindles do gansey yarn

2010-11-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

Spindles for testing

A friend, who is a very experienced spinner with a large collection of good spinning equipment, "demanded" that I make her a better drop spindle. I thought that very odd as there are lots and lots of drop spindles on the market and this woman attends all the wool shows, and I was not really making drop spindles.

A little experimentation showed why she made her demand. Most drop spindles on the market are not really suitable for production spinning. In fact, I had assumed that it was not possible to make any useful amount of worsted spun 5-ply gansey yarn on a drop spindle. I thought that because drop spindle spinning was so slow, prior to around the year 1500 there would have been no worsted spun yarn. Fishermen (and others) would have had to rely on semi-worsted yarns spun on a great wheel. I had heard that the sails of Columbo's ships were woven form yarns that were drop spun. However, the reality that drop spinning could be "fast" never crossed my mind.

The problem is that when spinning became fashionable, spindles started being made to be pretty rather than functional. The other day, I had a student who owns 80 drop spindles. They are all beautiful. They are all jewelry - articles of personal adornment. Not one those spindles is particularly functional for rapidly spinning high quality yarn

Moreover, I hear spindle makers spouting all kinds of nonsense about their spindles and the new owners of those spindles reciting the same stupidity. As I get deeper into this, I even see silly statements by experts, who really should know better.

For example, a bottom whorl drop spindle can be spun with an elegant "Princess Twinkle" flick in the drawing room. Or, you can use a thigh roll with a bottom whorl spindle and it is is just as fast as any Egyptian drop spindle. Or, you can use a two-handed toss on your bottom whorl spindle and it will be faster than an Egyptian drop spindle. With a two-handed toss on your bottom whorl drop spindle, you can spin very fast. It is not elegant, but it is fast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FpO_bbbinc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4lzA_aBHCI

In short, it was perfectly feasible to spin worsted 5-ply yarn for fine knitting on drop spindles. It is even feasible to ply 5-ply with the proper drop spindle (and lazy kate with singles guides from LK to plier. In addition, you need a spindle that is made for doing that sort of thing, rather than a spindle design that is made to be easy (cheap) to produce, or a spindle design that is mostly for personal adornment.

And, Oh! yes, I like that spindle standing in front with the bit of white single on it. Does it look like any commercially produced spindle you have seen recently? Sadly, I think not.

Why 5-ply?

2010-11-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

Alden Amos says in his, Big Book of Handspinning, that there is no reason to spin 5-ply yarns.

In fact, 5-ply yarns are more supple for their thickness, and thus easier to knit into weatherproof fabrics.

5-ply yarns are also more durable than a 2 or 3-ply yarn of the same fiber and grist.

Those issues may not enter into your decision making, but if you are thinking about knitting a sweater that will keep a seaman warm on a long sea voyage, they are valid reasons.

Handspun gansey yarn

2010-07-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

I have not posted for a bit, because I was learning to spin my own gansey yarn.

I had been told that NOBODY ever spun gansey yarn by hand because it was impossible. The required plies were so fine that they could not be spun by hand and that it was impossible to ply 5 singles together by hand.

Well, lots of pre-mill spun woven cloth had very fine singles - that were spun by hand. Plying 5 singles together is not that hard.

Thus, after a 3-month learning curve with my little Ashford Traditional, I am turning out my own handspun gansey yarn, and I am very impressed with its competence.

It is stronger and more durable than any of the modern commercial gansey yarns. I spin it softer, so it is more friendly. It is warmer than modern commercial gansey yarns. I like it.

Why in the world would somebody bother to make a 5-ply yarn when it would be easier to spin 3 thicker plies? Well, 5-ply is warmer and more durable. It is the compromise that provides the most warmth for the least amount of wool. Given all the effort to prepare the fiber and knit, it is also the compromise that provides the most warmth for the least amount of effort.

Here is the pix taken in November. The blue on the left is hand combed, hand spun 5-ply at 16 wpi, and the darker yarn on the right is is 5-ply at 14 wpi being knit up as boot socks.

An apology about waterproofing wool

2010-07-11T09:51:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, a yarn supplier told me that a drop of baby oil would oil ,and waterproof wool. I tried it, and it has worked very well for me on a large number of swatches and objects. I have repeated the advice often.
I now find that the situation is more complex, and the baby oil was acting a carrier for other materials with which I inadvertently contaminated the yarns and/or objects. Thus, the waterproofing that I see in my knit woolens requires more than just baby oil.
Other materials in my crafting environment which may be causing the effect include:

• Spinning oil on a yarn that I frequently use

• Bees wax,

• Petrolatum

• Lanolin.
One, or all of these, is likely contributing to the weatherproof qualities of the objects that I make.
In any case, my weatherproof fabrics are not noticeably oily or waxy, nor do they smell like sheep when wet. Thus, I am taking bout trace quantities of contamination. The advice to knit very tightly, full completely, and oil the wool stands. The ambiguity is what “oil” is best.
Anyway, I am sorry for any confusion or problems that this may have caused.

hand spun gansey yarn

2010-07-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

I just passed a milestone and had something of an epiphany.
I am working with Cotswold, spinning and swatching for a gansey. I had been working toward finer singles, but had stalled at about 35 WPI due to lack of skill to spin the coarse wools finer.
However, when I did finally get to 40 WPI, I realized that gave me 10 hanks per pound, and 1,000 yards of 5-ply per pound. This all harkens back to a standard for cottage hand spinning on an industrial scale.
Coarse long wools such as Cotswold were an important industrial fiber. With hand spinners in different communities, using different equipment under different conditions, some kind of commercial standard for spinning coarse wools was necessary so weavers and knitters would know what to expect. When all spinning was still by hand, 40 WPI was about as fine as such a diverse group of spinners could consistently produce. It was an easy standard to enforce by giving each spinner a length of dowel with 2 marks on it and telling them the single must wrap so many times between the marks.
Certainly, any good spinner could spin that wool finer, but the standard was a commercial compromise between human variability, technology, and economics.
Then, 2-ply yarn was about 2,500 yarns per pound, 4-ply was about 1,250 yd/lb, and 5- ply was about 1,000 yards after tight plying – all a direct consequence of wrapping a single around a piece of dowel with two marks on it. Do those numbers ring a bell? They have the virtue of being easy math in a cottage industry where many can’t read / write, but can do commercial arithmetic, and make their mark.
After about 1770, factory spinning in England was so much cheaper and better than cottage spun yarns that industrial and domestic users both switched to factory spun yarns. The market for handspun yarn crashed, and hand spinning was no longer a viable commercial activity - except for a few niche markets.
The traditions of the cottage industry of spinning industrial yarns was lost. People bought their 5-ply. After families had bought their 5-ply for 4 generations (60 years) families assumed that they had always bought their 5-ply.
The factories produced yarns similar to those that had been previously produce by the cottage industry. They did not have mass media to teach weavers and knitters to use new kinds of yarn, so the spun yarns that were similar to the yarns that had been produced in cottages and homes for hundreds of years. In 1800, knitters and weavers bought yarns of the same thickness that they had bought 50 years earlier because those thicknesses of yarn produced textiles suited to the environment. A hundred years later in 1900, central heating and better windows was resulting in a warmer living environment for many. Thus, by 1920, very different kinds of textiles and yarns were required for the new living environments.
However, in 1820, clothing requirements were very similar to what they had been in 1720. Fashion changed, but the amount of insulation that the clothes were required to provide did not change much. Thus, the nature and types of yarn produced changed more between 1820 and 1920 than it did between 1720 and 1820 despite the fact that in the later period yarn production moved from hand spinning in cottages to the factory.

Two Ply, Three Ply, More Ply

2010-07-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

I have been hand spinning classic gansey yarn from traditional British long wool fleece. The extreme fineness of the singles that I had to spin to get the right grist on the final yarn was a real eye opener.
Yes, I had deconstructed modern commercial gansey yarns and had seen how fine the plies in it were. That is what triggered my decision to learn to spin. However, there is a big difference between seeing such fine singles (as a non-spinner) and actually spinning such singles as a (beginning) spinner. Moreover, spinning gives one time to think.
One thinks of England as a cool place, full of sheep and wool, so wool must be cheap and they can afford to be extravagant with wool in their clothes, right? England was full of wool because wool was useful and valuable. In fact, the English were very good a making a little bit of wool provide a lot of warmth. It is only recently, that they have become extravagant with their wool.
The English have long traditions of spinning very fine and knitting with fine needles. The result is fabrics that by modern standards of hand knitting are extraordinarily warm, but by modern standards of hand knitting are light weight and have very little bulk. They really are nice fabrics for all kinds of uses, because they are so much warmer than we expect such a thin fabric to be.
I spun the singles to be plied into the gansey yarn, and I wondered, what would happen if I plied these up into a 2-ply yarn? Knit on fine needles (UK 16 / 1.6 mm) I got a fabric warm enough for cool mornings in spring-summer- fall. I made up some 3-ply, knit it on 1.75 mm needles, and lo and behold! I got a fabric that is warmer than modern commercial gansey 5-ply yarn knit on 2.5 mm needles! In a mild climate, 3-ply (22 wpi) on #00 needles was/is good for winter wear. (For skiing, I might put on long pants.) Again this is a stealth fabric. Look at the fine 3-ply knit on the #00 needles next to the 5-ply knit on the larger needles and you would say that the gansey fabric is many times warmer. However, it is not.
This brings home several lessons. The first is that fine yarns can produce very warm fabrics. The second is that gansey 5-ply yarn knit on “big” needles does not produce a very warm fabric. The third is that appearances can be deceiving and you need to test a fabric for warmth, because the eye can be deceived. The fifth is that you do not need a bulky fabric to be warm under most conditions. The sixth is that 5-ply gansey yarn knit tightly produces a fabric that is suitable for very cold conditions.
Fisherman’s sweaters in the modern context are knit loosely because most people do not want that kind of warmth.

Adapters

2010-06-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

There were places I had to go, and things I had to say (in other places). Then, I had to learn to use my new spinning wheel. Then, I had to become a rather better wood turner, and you wonder why I have not been blogging?

And, I had to make some knitting sheaths with adapters:

Knitting sheaths and Adapters for different sized needles

I have knit with ALL of the above knitting sheaths and adapters and they work. The adapters are interchangeable between all of the knitting sheaths and any knitting sheath can use any of the adapters. Needle sizes run from way too small for elves to big enough to plug the Gulf Oil Leak. (Number of black bands reflects needle size.)
The adapters need to be a wood that is as hard as rock maple (or harder). The knitting sheaths can be softer woods. For example ebony and walnut work well together, as do maple and maple, maple and ash, or maple and oak. The male fitting on the adapter needs to be ~3/8" and the knitting sheath needs a thickness of ~1/4 on each side of the adapter or it will crack. Thus, the minimum thickness/diameter of the knitting sheath is 7/8". The adapters can easily be made from 3/4" stock.

Do I like using them? Not really. I prefer just using a knitting sheath made for that needle size. However, I tend to work with a very limited number of needle sizes and I do not like the kits of circs with interchangeable needle tips either. But, that is just me, and many knitters do like the kits.

When I first knit with a Yorkshire Goose Wing knitting sheath, I was amazed at how ergonomically and comfortably the goose wing fit against my body. After more experience with the turned knitting sticks, I have to say they are just as good and perhaps more versatile.

A quick review of Brears reminds us that while Yorkshire had the goose wing knitting sheaths, they continued to use the turned knitting sheaths.

I had some of these at a KIP the other day, and the adapters kept falling off and -- hiding. This design is not good enough.

Nothing in the mud?!

2010-04-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

How many knitted seaman’s frocks would YOU expect to find from the medieval period? We will not know that there were medieval ganseys unless we have a model that estimates how many, and where, we are likely to find ganseys. Then, we estimate the number of samples that are likely to be required to find that number of ganseys over the expected area, and based on the results of our sampling we accept or reject the hypothesis that there were knit fishermen's frocks in the medieval period.
To find such an artifact, 4 rather improbable things must occur:

1) The frock must be knitted. Knit fabric is 8 to 100 times more expensive than woven and is thus only selected where the properties of knit material are required or where it is being used as conspicuous consumption. J. M. Synge’s “The Aran Islands” make it clear that in 1900, “ganseys” were are rare on the Aran Islands as silk suits are in Wal-Mart. Woven cloth was cheaper, and that is what they used, layers and layers of woven wool. This worked for an impoverished subsistence farmer that had to sometimes row out to the steamer or to another island. On the other hand, note that the men that went off island and worked for wages as seamen, did have knit sweaters.

2) The knit frock had to be discarded. Seamen had one gansey and they wore it all the time.

How many sailor’s frocks would we expect to find in the wreck of the Mary Rose or the General Carlton? Every sailor was wearing his knit frock. If he had an extra, it would be lashed in his hammock to the deck railing. (And, the railings are one of the first parts of a wooden shipwreck to be lost.) If he survived, his frock went with him. If he drowned, his body cavity filled with decomposition gases, and floated away carrying the frock with it. If he died of trauma, then the nutrients in his body attracted scavengers (sharks and crabs) that would also damage the gansey. Thus, our hope of finding a gansey is to find the “slop chest” on board. Was the “slop chest” found? If not, the probability of finding a gansey at the wreck site is almost zero.

Moreover, if the wreck was salvaged at all, any seaman’s frocks would have been valuable and easy to carry away. The slop chest would have been a target for anybody that could get to the wreck.

What happened to “ganseys” on shore? In hand-spun days, last year’s gansey was un-raveled and the resulting yarn re-plied to make next year’s gansey. (Or, socks for the kids.) The sailor either wore this year’s gansey to his death and Davy Jones Locker, or it became last year’s gansey and was un-raveled and re-plied. Thus, in “hand-spun days”, I would not expect to find a fragment of a gansey. I would expect the first old ganseys to show up about the time mill-spun started to gain acceptance and knitters did not have a spinning wheel handy. In environmental science, this is what we call “fate and transport.”

In short, ganseys were not something left lying around.

3) The gansey had to survive after being discarded. Given the number of bugs, critters and molds that destroy wool, discarded ganseys would survive only if they were dropped into acid bogs or anaerobic muck. Certainly small items were trod into the mud of York, but an entire gansey is harder to lose. At some point, a rag picker sees it in the mud and picks it up.

4) Archeologists must sample the acid bogs or anaerobic muck until they find the gansey. Mostly, archeologists look at centers of population. However, if it was a center of population, then some contemporaneous rag picker would have recovered and recycled the yarn. Thus, to find old discarded ganseys, archeologists are going to have to sample bogs and muck from the period away from centers of populations. We have to find some sailor that wore a gansey, fell in a bog, and his body never floated to the surface. (Rare, because most bodies that were not staked to the bottom of the bog, do float to the surface. If he was alive, he would have recovered his gansey, and gone on his way.) The method of calculating the required number of samples to find such textile fragment(s) can be derived from Gilbert’s text on Statistical Methods for Environmental Pollution Monitoring or for a more general case, Cochran’s Sampling Techniques. We are going to need more archeologists.
I would like to point out how few artifacts of spinning wheels we have from some periods when we know that they did have spinning wheels. At first thought, there are not as many artifacts as one would expect for the amount of spinning that we know was done. However if we think about spinning wheels as tools of production rather than as sentimental items of decor, we understand that they are kept until they are worn out, then they are repaired and used some more. These days we discard obsolete technology. Prior to 1780, there was no such thing as an obsolete spinning wheel. There was only spinning wheels and firewood. Second thought, brings forth the realization that spinning wheel artifacts would be very rare indeed. This is consistent with what is found in the field.

As for searches for “gansey” in news papers: while “gansey” does occur in Howlett (1840) it did not make it into an OED cited source until 1851. Clearly, in 1840, it was a term of art in use by contract knitters and not in general use. I trusted OED, and looked to “frocks” for richer pickings.

Given the variations in population as famines and pestilence swept the medieval period and the way that cultural material is lost every time a structure is abandoned for even a short period, I would be very surprised if any sample of a pre-1700 sailor’s frock is ever found. (Richer families could protect their structures in downturns, but knit frocks were still work clothes that got recycled. There was also a class of knit goods that served as conspicuous consumption. Part of the conspicuous consumption was that the garments were always in good repair, and thus recycling was part of the conspicuous consumption. At the end of its life as a frock, the yarn became socks and hats. Again, such knit goods are likely to be as rare as Armani suits in a Salvation Army thrift store. That does not mean that they did not exist, it only means that you are not going to buy a good Armani suit for $5 in a Salvation Army Thrift Store.

I spent the weekend looking at homestead sites that had known dates of abandonment over the last hundred years. The people with me were astonished at how fast a farmstead could become an archeological site, and how fast materials and contents were lost. Some of those sites are being rebuilt today and an archeologist looking at the material in 200 years would think that there was essentially continuous habitation, as there has been some continuous, dateable, deposition on the sites. We need to remember that areas that we consider to be continuously inhabited were subject to plagues and famines that caused drops in local population and temporary abandonment of some buildings and structures with resulting loss of cultural material. These were frequently periods of salvaging. A single sock in the mud might be overlooked, but a gansey was trove of yarn that could be unraveled, and from which much could be made.

Looking for a gansey in the midens of Yorkshire is like looking for a Rolls Royce in the auto junk yards of America. It is not that Rolls Royce were never in wrecks in America, it is that there were relatively few of them, and they were so valuable they were taken out of the junk yards and reused. You can look, but I can tell you right now, that you will not find a Rolls Royce in an American junk yard.

In my model, it is unlikely that any reasonable number of samples is likely to reveal gansey artifacts. If we should suddenly find a bunch of 17th century ganseys, then my model is faulty. In short, old ganseys are rather like neutrons, in that they can only be detected indirectly. We have evidence that they exist today, but our evidence that they existed yesterday is indirect—unstable isotopes for the neutrons and square rigged ships for the ganseys. Never the less, we can be sure that both existed “yesterday”, even if we did not specifically see those particular neutrons and ganseys. Do I “believe in neutrons”? It is a model that explains the observations without exception. Do I “believe in ganseys”? It is a model that explains the observations without exception. Do I believe in Irish Fairies? No, there are simpler explanations.

Lord Kelvin got a lot of things correct, but he was way off in his estimate of the age of the sun. Ussher, Kepler, and Newton all placed the creation of the Earth around 4000 BCE. This forced the compression of the timelines affecting all branches of human development. Now, we know that Cornwall/Wales were trading tin to Carthage in 500 BC, and Carthage was also trading to Syria and India at the time. The timeline has expanded. The Han had treadle spindles for spinning cotton; and, the silk road was a fact when the Romans got to Britain. However, textile arts have been slow to decompress their timelines, and they still write of “inventing” treadle spindles 1500 years after the Han. Modern Knitters seem to cleave to an old model that says knitting is new, more on a basis of what we have not found, than of careful analysis. We need to look beyond Wright, Rutt, and Tompson, just as Einstein looked beyound Newton.

I look for skill sets that we have lost. Some of those skill sets are like a gansey in the mud -- they have value. The awe and greed on the faces of the people touching and feeling my products this weekend tell me that I am on the right track.

New technology needles

2010-02-27T11:09:00.000-08:00

I have been admiring and praising the Hya-Hya DPN for knitting softer spun yarns on the basis of some hand knitting at a show. These are very light weight knitting needles made from stainless steel by fusing the tips on to tubing. Recently I bought a bunch of them and it turns out that for use with a knitting sheath sizes US#1 and larger sometimes tubing crimps and collapses suddenly unless the knitting sheath fits them just perfectly. used very gently, and they will likely work very well, but I am an agressive knitter and they lasted seconds.However, minor wear in the knitting sheath can result in such loss of perfection. Their #0 and smaller needles are solid stainless steel, which does not crumple like that larger needles but does not have much spring and bends rather than flexing.

The Signature needles have that fine point so beloved of fast knitters of tightly spun yarn. Again in sizes above #0, the needles are made by fusing aluminum tips to tubing. Again localized pressure on the shaft of the needle can result in fatal (to the needle) crumples. Moreove, Signature needles do NOT like being stepped on. Knit VERY gently if you must use your Signature needles with a knitting sheath, and I do think you will be OK. Signature’s needles in sizes #0 (and smaller) are made of a very high quality stainless steel, and are not real “springy”, they may bend on you in knitting sheath use. Still they are beautiful needles made by very nice people.
My needles just are not as pretty. On the other hand my needles have more spring, and there is nothing that your or your kid or your horse can do to damage the needles that I make (except leaving them in the damp so that they rust.) Take the above with a grain of salt, because I bend my spring steel needles all the time. I bend them and they keep on working. Hya-Hya and Signature do not keep working if they get bent.

Citations

2010-02-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

I do not give many citations. Suppose I cite British customs taxes from the 14 th century? The few folks that would go to London and check the original customs ledgers know where they are and how to get permission. For anyone who is not going to check the original manuscript, there are variety of transcriptions and summaries of those documents. However they are mostly in collections and you have to go to the library or collection, put on the white gloves and look. Just having the title of the document does not ensure that I did not transpose some numbers when I was taking notes on my little steno pad.
There are a lot of library skills that I take for granted. My dear Readers should take that as a complement.

I said, “that we do not do fine knitting any more”, and we do not. Bug knits is tiny stitches, but it is novelty work. There is a wonderful collection of similar work in a knitting shop on the North Shore of PEI, and I am sure that there are many other similar artists around. The lady on PEI said that each of the little garments required more than 200 hours of work. In contrast, the Pope’s Stocking was a fragment of men’s hose that was designed to be worn.

As late as the start of WWII, a good deal of fine knitting was still being done in the couture houses in Paris. These were finely knit, one of kind objects, which were not publicized. They also required thousands of hours of hand knitting. By the mid-1980s those knitting divisions at the couture houses were phased out. One of the last of those professional knitters now works as a sales clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue in SF. She is one of the few people in the US that I have met that knows how to knit with a knitting sheath, but most of the knitting when she was working in the couture houses was looser, and done with circs.

Folks today do knit gansesys. Gorden knits beautiful ganseys on circs, but he knits for half an hour per day and it takes him a YEAR to knit a gansey. Dawn9163 on Ravelery knit her son a wonderful gansey on circs in only 6 weeks, but at the end, her wrists were sore. The days of "terrible knitters" doing a gansey in a day are passed. I can knit a plain (but absolutely weatherproof) gansey in a week without hurting my wrists. I can knit a good, weatherproof sailor's kit in two weeks. I made many determined attempts to knit such fabrics on circs, and never could do it (fast enough to suit my needs for winter wear). At one time, I had a whole bin of failed attempts. For the first couple of years after I moved to DPN/knitting sheath, I would go back to my circs and make another stab at knitting such fabrics on circs. I always failed. No! that is not quite right. I COULD do it, but I could not do it fast enough or long enough at a time to to make it a practial method of production. I would freeze before I got enough knit to keep me warm. With a knitting sheath, I can easily keep myself and all my skiing and hiking buddies supplied with weatherproof knit wear.

The French had year-round navy patrols of the English Channel in the last couple of decades of the 14 th century. Why? Who knows? The British Crown was too broke to mount an invasion. Would you have volunteered for winter patrol in the English Channel? Not considering their ships, lack of charts, lack of coastal facilities, poor food, and lack of weather forecasts. No, France pressed their sailors. Press gangs worked later, and they worked just as well in 1380. We know that the Channel Islanders were knitting garments for sea faring men, and some of that product went to France. It is very likely some of it went to the sailors on Channel patrol. Ships are expensive, and hypothermic sailors result in lost ships. No, France bought their sailors tightly knit ganseys so the sailors could keep the ships a float. It is worth noting that 100 years later, France was still one of the largest customers for English wool. Trade routes tend to persist for generations.

My View of Knitting History

2010-02-19T12:51:00.000-08:00

I am highly amused by the reaction that I get when I talk about knitting sheaths in history groups. Knitting sheaths are tools, like rocks and hammers. Sometimes they are the right tool, sometimes they are the wrong tool for the job. However, for me, it is funny for somebody that has never used a knitting sheath to vehemently say that knitting sheaths are unnecessary. That is like somebody that has never used a hammer telling a carpenter that hammers are unnecessary. I have to think that this is a residue of the Victorian loathing for the poverty associated with “knitting for pence”, and the Victorian distain for the tools of the impoverished contract knitters.

Actually, I thought about felt quite a lot. However, we have good knowledge that it was not much used aboard square rigged, sailing ships. So the real question is why was felt not used more? The answer is that felt clothing does not suit the kind of work done on a (square rigged) ship. As a result, the great sea faring centers have museums devoted to knitting, not felting. Felt clothing was very practical and popular on steam ships starting in the Victorian Era.

Knitting for subsistence fishing could be performed by wives, sisters, mothers, and other family members. However, Great Britain was a great sea faring nation with a navy that pressed crews - no chance for a mother to knit for her son while he served in His Majesty’s’ Navy. So there was commercial knitting for seamen as early as there were navy press gangs – and in France that was um – 1380? Customs tax records suggest that the wool that those French navy sailors wore came from England and was knit in the Channel Islands. Knitting was such a large industry in the Channel Islands that for a while customs tax on British wool exported to the Channel Islands was the primary income for the British Crown. When the Tudor Wool Act was passed, (to protect the Yorkshire knitting Industry) the Channel Islands turned to piracy, which was only resolved when Sir Walter Raleigh reestablished knitting on the Channel Islands as an industry. In those days, knitting was big business.

In Victorian days, knitting became conspicuous consumption in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, Gary Becker, and Kevin Murphy. Knitting loosely proved that a lady’s house had central heat. Ladies wrote new knitting manuals to teach their students how to knit slowly and elegantly. Another great virtue of knitting slowly and loosely is no stress on the wrists. Thus, the ladies were able to discard the distained knitting sheaths. The old professional knitters did not write their skills down, and subsequent generations of knitters from all walks of life looked to the knitting manuals written by Victorian ladies. However, later generations of knitters forgot that those Victorian ladies had a distain for practical professional knitting.

As Mary Thomas writing in 1938 said,

Knitting sheaths, or sticks, as they were sometimes called, are now a feature of museum interest, but at one time, when hand knitting was a vast and flourishing industry and speed a matter of pence, every knitter owned and used these implements. . . .

Mary Wright was one of the first to address the subject of knitting sheaths openly in her 1979 book, Cornish Guernseys & Knit frocks. (It is also worth noting that she damaged her wrists knitting a replica gansey on circular needles.)

In the old days, when knitting was an important technology, they were very, very good at it. One of the finest examples of knitting that we have is a fragment of silk hose with designs in gold filaments from the Arab world, knit in the Ninth Century. That was knit with the élan that separates the talented professional from the merely competent amateur. Yes, today we have people that do things like: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/dawn9163/whitby-gansey, but it took her more than a month and she had sore wrists afterward.

In the Victorian era, we lost much our heritage of these professional knitting tools and expertise. We no longer have cadres of talented professional hand knitters with trade secrets, advancing their craft generation by generation. We forgot how to knit ganseys without sore wrists. We have forgotten how to hand knit silk and gold at 30 stitches per inch. With a few exceptions, now, we do “hobby” knitting. Our professional knitters are designers that make a living doing designs for “hobby knitters”. I look to history, not for history per se, but for clues that can let me be a better knitter in the future.

Knitters that come to me for “history” are going to be disappointed. Knitters coming to me for ideas on how to knit better are going to be amazed and delighted. I have used rocks (Clovis blades) to cut my meat, but sometimes a steel knife is - just better. I have pounded nails with a rock, but sometimes a carpenter’s hammer is – just better. I have used Addi Turbos, but sometimes DPN with a knitting sheath is - just better.

He, who knows only his own generation, remains always a child.

An approach to using different sized needles with the same knitting sheath

2010-02-03T11:34:00.000-08:00

Many Victorian knitting sheaths have adapters that allow several different sized needles to be used with the same knitting sheath. Many of these Victorian knitting sheaths with adpaters have a look about them that make me think of vocational school projects for teaching young men to use a variety of power tools. That is, these are not tools made by a knitter. Moreover, I do not see much in the way of wear marks on such tools suggesting that they were often gifts and keepsakes.

Several knitters have asked about how to use several different sized needles with one knitting sheath, and this is certainly a workable approach. The photo shows two knitting sheaths that I made which accept adapters. By changing the adapter, different sized needles can be used with the knitting sheath. Thus, with these 4 adapters, US # 0, 1, 2, or 4 needles can be used with either of these knitting sheaths.

These are crude prototypes, but they work very well.

Another advantage of this system is that the knitting sheath can be made of a light weight or decorative wood while the adapter can be made of a harder wood such as maple. Thus, the design life of the system can be longer, that the design life of a system with the (steel ) needle flexing against a softer wood.

On the other hand, these adapters are tricky little fellows and I expect they will tend to runoff, join the circus, and never to be seen in a knitting bag again.

Wood for knitting sheaths

2010-02-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

The traditional wood for for making knitting sheaths was "sycamore". I had been looking for sycamore, and the American sycamore that I had been finding was not suitable..

The deal is: English sycamore is very similar to America soft maple. Sycamore from Scotland and Yorkshire is more similar to the harder American maples.

Thus, maple, and particularly rock or sugar maple, is an excellent wood for knitting sheaths.

Two Yorkshire style knitting sheaths made from rock maple.

Every time I use "goose wing" knitting sheaths, I am amazed at how well they work for gloves, hats, and other small knitting when tucked into apron strings I love them.

My thanks to Chris at Robert Sorby.

Heat of sorption in wool

2009-12-06T14:38:00.000-08:00

Years ago, I got out my “Handbook of Chemical Property Estimation Methods” and calculated the heat of sorption for wool. Then, I looked at B. V. Holcombe’s mathematical models for moisture and heat in merino fibers and decided that heat of sorption was a largely theoretical issue. That is: a very real effect of very little practical importance.
First, heat of sorption for wool only occurs when the wool is fairly dry. When I was first thinking about this, I was thinking about sailors and fishermen. Their wool never got “fairly dry.” They lived in a damp environment, and their wool always contained a very high percentage of the amount of water that it could absorb.
In a damp environment like Ireland/England, unless there is a determined effort to dry the wool, the wool as it comes off of the sheep will have always contain a very high percentage of the amount of water that it could absorb and cannot absorb more water and thereby it will not release heat.
Certainly, storing the wool in a low humidity, centrally heated environment for weeks will dry the wool so that when remoistened, it will release the heat of sorption, but if you take the garment out and wear it every couple of weeks, the wool will retain enough moisture from wearing to wearing that the evolved heat of sorption on any particular wearing is minimal.
What will dry the wool so you (in Yorkshire) can get enough heat of sorption that you can really feel it, is to put your wool in the clothes dryer and run it for a few cycles on high heat. Take the (now ball of felt) out of the dryer, and for the next few minutes you will be able to feel the heat of sorption as the wool fibers pick up moisture from the atmosphere. Or, you can take your wool with you for a summer in the desert of Saudi Arabia or the Australian Outback. Then, pack the wool in sealed plastic bags, and when you open the plastic bags, for a few minutes, you will be able to feel the heat of sorption in all its glory.
Here in sunny (dry) California, we had bit of rain a couple of weeks ago and cool, dry weather since then that has suddenly turned cold. Thus, this morning my office is unheated (45F), cold, and dry (30%). I brought a synthetic fleece garment with me out to my office. In a short while, my cheeks were cold. I have a good gansey, here in the office that has been packed in a cloth bag all through our long, hot summer and which has not been worn since last spring.
I put the synthetic fleece against one cheek and a sleeve from the gansey against the other. The cheek with the synthetic fleece fabric against it was warmer than the cheek with the wool against it. If there had been perceptible heat of sorption from the wool as moisture from my cheek combined with the wool, I would have felt it. However, the wool still had moisture in it from that damp spell a couple of weeks ago and it could not absorb enough additional moisture to produce warmth that exceeded the ability of the synthetic fleece to reflect warmth to my cheek as a result of better insulation. That gansey was not out in rain. It was not worn. It was merely exposed to a couple of days of 70 F and 70% RH a few days ago. That kind of moisture is common in California or Yorkshire. However, the wool absorbed enough moisture that it impeded the detection of a practical heat of sorption effect in wool a few days later.
Synthetic pile has been so successful because of its ability to feel warm against the skin - even in comparison to well knit wool. If wool’s heat of sorption was of practical significance, synthetic pile would not be as successful as it is. Right now, I am wearing a Patagonia synthetic pile jacket because it feels so warm, despite having some good ganseys on the table behind my desk. If I could get a burst of warmth by putting one or two of them on, I would.
On the other hand, wool fleeces in the part of our house that we keep much warmer (and therefore lower RH) for my elderly and frail aunt, do dry enough in a couple of weeks that if one sits on them, the heat of sorption is very perceptible. Sit on the same fleece every few days and it retains enough moisture for several days that the effect is not felt.
It is a real effect, but one must start with very dry wool to detect the effect. It is not an on-going effect. One cannot expect bursts of warmth from your gansey as a series of rain showers blow over in the course of an afternoon.

Someitme in the near future, I will return to the topic.

Yorkshire Goose Wings

2009-11-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

The first time I made and tried knitting with a Yorkshire "goose wing" knitting sheath, I was just amazed at the perfection of the concept. They tuck into apron strings and sit on the point of the right hip and hold a knitting needle in just the right spot for good knitting. Over the last few years, I have made a bunch of them.

When I did not want to wear an apron to knit with them, I would just tie sash around my waist and tuck the goose wing into the sash.

However, goose wings do not work so well with the wide leather belts I tend to wear with jeans around the house. The Cornish "knitting fish" have always worked better wide belts. And, the goose wings tend poke the leather easy chair that my wife made me buy to be my "knitting chair" in the living room. (During the day, when she is not home, I like to knit seated in a folding chair in the kitchen.) Think about how many of the old drawings show knitters seated on stools or benches rather than seated in chairs.

The other day, everywhere I went seemed to have nice work aprons on sale. I took it as a sign that should do something with goose wings. Then Abbot, my favorite Smith, asked about goose wings and I knew it was time to revisit goose wings. He also likes to wear wide leather belts.

They poke, so grind off the "pokey" tips. Done!

Now grind groves so the apron strings stay in place and anchor the sheath firmly in place. DONE!

[With goose wings in apron strings the resistance of the knitter's abdominal tissue provides some spring action allowing fast, low effort knitting even with ridgid (brass & aluminium), or weak (wood) needles. This is particularly useful for lace which is too loose a fabric to use the fabric as a spring to assist the knitting. The goose wing really is a brilliant tool design. ]

Cut the "blade" thin enough to slip under a leather belt. Grind an offset tab at the end of the blade to catch on the lower edge of a leather belt to anchor the goose wing under a leather belt. Done!

They work exceptionally well with steel needles from ~6" to 12" long, but last night I was using them with 18" gansey needles and they worked very well indeed! A heavy leather belt was worn very low around my hips and the sheath was tucked in over my right buttock. Close to perfect performance (in my folding chair -I do not use the gansey needles in the leather chairs. The arm rests impair needle movement.)

Sometimes, I live in a bent world.

A Path Foreward - Lace!

2009-11-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

I started this reseach because I wanted to know how seamen of old stayed warm. Now, I know, they knit tighly to produce a warm fabric. They saved their wrists by using a knitting sheath.

The process works. I proved it with prototype samples. And, my knitting sheath prototypes do look like engineering prototypes. They feel like something that would be at home in a machine shop. They have the solid feel of utilitarian tools used for making the most utilitarian of garments - a fisherman's gansey.

However, we know that knitting sheaths were also used in the production of lace. One of Rutt's informants on knitting sheaths was using her knitting sheath to make lace. The great "wedding ring" shawls knit in the Shetland Islands were knit on the same tools used to knit ganseys. Why?

Well, because a knitting sheath is the easy way to knit lace. It really is.

I have been swatching lace. I am not real thrilled with "modern lace" as taught in most contemporary texts on knitting. I do not like the fabric. I mean, really, do you like these fabrics?

That little swatch in the photo does not look like much, but it is 650 stitches. It is also a nice fabric. No, it is a very nice fabric. It something a REAL lady would want to wear. A knitting sheath lets one knit fast enough that one can actually finish a lacey something in a reasonable length of time. A knitting sheath also helps maintain even tension.

Anyway, I have drunk the "Kool-Aid", and I am going to the "Dark Side". I am going to do some lace -- just as soon as I finish a couple of pair of house socks and a gansey.

Likewise, it is time to move past my "engineering prototype" style of knitting sheaths and make some that not only work, but that have some aesthetic appeal to folks other than locomotive machinists. I really am working on this. No more knitting like a pirate.

The lace needles in the photo are from various sources and about 1.4 to 1.5 mm by 20 or 25 cm long. I am going to say it right now,"Commerical lace needle makers focus more on making needles pretty than on making them functional. Lace kntters aided and abetted this by buying needles that were more pretty than functional.

Knitting hearts were used by ladies in Jane Austin's time to support fine needles for knitting lace. These hearts were jewlery in every sense of the term. However, such hearts required fairly stiff gowns to support the hearts, so I do not think I will go in that direction. However, if someone wants such jewlery, let me know and I will work with my sister (www.golddreams.com) to help you design a knitting heart that fully functional.

Recantation about sheaths holding needles tighly

2009-08-08T17:36:00.000-07:00

Several times I have said that the knitting sheath should hold the needle firmly.

Yet, just now I caught myself using a US00 needles in a knitting sheath bored for US1 needles. In fact, I have a whole tray of needles smaller than US1, and all my current knitting sheaths are bored for US1 or US0 needles. Yes, I knit with needles that fit very loosely in the knitting sheath a good deal of the time.

Well, I put a lot of effort in to learning to do that. And, I find that students have a lot of trouble if the needle does not fit firmly into the knit sheath.

I still think that learning to use a knitting sheath is much easier if the needle is held snuggly. It is not necessary, but it is easier. And, it is more important for gansey needles where there is a spring load on the connection between the needle and the sheath.

UK knit circa 1800?

2009-06-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

How did folks in the UK knit circa 1800?

1) Certainly, hand-held DPN (or needles held, supported, or controlled in the arm pit) with the yarn in either the right or the left hand. These needles develop a very slight curve and distinctive wear marks at the extreme tip that allows them to be distinguished from broken awls. The disadvantages are that knitting firmly can put a stress on the wrists, knitting is slower than with a knitting sheath, and long needles are difficult to control.

2) Short (6- 12 inches), straight (more or less), DPN held in a knitting sheath under the right elbow or over the point of the right hip, with the yarn in either the right or the left hand. These knitting sheaths were 6 to 10 inches long in a variety of designs. These designs for such sheaths included bundles of feathers bound together with a bit of waste yarn or a cone of leather filled with horse hair for tucking into the waist band. of the sheath designs work very well tucked into apron strings. Many Other designs allow for separate tapes or belts. In general, the needle flexes along its length, and does not rotate in the needle hole of the knitting sheath. Many of the needles pick up a significant curve or arc with use. These needles have distinctive wear marks in an annuls ~1 cm form the shoulder of the needle tip. If you see this band of linear striations, you know the needle was used with a knitting sheath, and that it was a knitting needle and not something else. Such knitting sheaths can be used with 3+1 needles for small objects or many needles if a large carpet or blanket is required. The side of the right hand pushes the needle into the stitch and the base of the thumb pushes the working needle back through the stitch. It is a low stress knitting technique suitable for people with tender hands and wrists. It can be a very pleasant way to knit at a reasonable pace. It can also be done quite aggressively to knit very rapidly. This technique allows knitting fabrics much tighter than any other method on this page. These are most of the old knitting sheaths that people liked, and kept, and that one still finds in the collections.

3) Knitting sheath as above in 2) but used with 2 needles for lace items knit flat.

4) Gansey needles (14 -18 inch long steel DPN) used with a knitting sheath firmly attached to a strong belt over the right buttock, with the working needle arched forward under the right arm. The belt is worn much lower on the body than in the short needle technique above. The weight of the right arm rests on the needle. The needle is forced downward into the stitch, the right hand loops yarn over the tip, and the spring action of the needle lifts the loop of yarn back through the old stitch to form the new stitch. This is a powerful, industrial knitting technology. It can be done very fast, and then it is very hard work. On the other hand it is the easy way to knit a real gansey.

5) Curved, blunt needles called “pricks” used with very large knitting sheaths (40 -50 cm) tucked into a belt worn low on the hips. The yarn is controlled with the left hand. The prick rotates in the needle hole of the knitting sheath. The prick is “popped” into the working stitch with a down and out simultaneous impulse of both hands that caused the prick to pick up the yarn as it stretches the forward leg of the working stitch. The stretch of the yarn and fabric provide a spring action that push the prick and yarn back through the working stitch, which then pops off as the next stroke starts. The process is very fast and very demanding. This was a method for commercial knitting. As soon as the need passed, these big sheaths were tossed in the fire, and people reverted to straight needles with smaller knitting sheaths. The nature of the spring process means that everyone using the same sized needles and the same yarn will tend to knit at the same speed. Thus, everyone in the room can sing to the pace of their knitting, knit to the pace of the song, and at the end of the evening, everyone will have knit the same number of stitches.

6) Knitting belt/pouch with DPN. Very similar to 2) above, excellent with the blunter needles used for the softer spun yarns used in Fair Isle knitting. The needles are not as firmly held and have less of a tendency to develop an arc and develop polish rather than marks on the shaft of the needle. Perhaps not quite as fast as knitting sheath but very good for travel.

7) Knitting hearts – very small, decorated knitting sheaths, designed to pin to a lady’s dress to support very fine knitting needles used for knitting lace.

I am a bit pedantic, but I would say that circa 1800, there were at least 11 different and distinct knitting styles in Great Britain, the use of which employed at least 7 different tool kits.

A note, at one time, I thought that gansey needles were very difficult to manage without a knitting sheath. Now, I know some knitting styles that allow use of long needles without the use a knitting sheath. One of these methods is the knitting style of Miriam Tegels. (A second is s Spanish style of "Pit Knitting.") However, I still think that if Miriam Tegels and I sat down together to knit ganseys, for the first day or two she might blow me away, but that by the time we had knit a dozen ganseys, she would be a convert to knitting sheaths. I know that I just sold a set of knitting sheaths to a knitter that had learned excellent pit knitting skills as a girl in Spain. I showed her how to use the knittng sheaths, let her play with them for a while, and at the end of the session, they went in her knitting bag.

New Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool

2009-06-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

I knit my first gansey from "Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool" some 3 years ago. It is an extrodinary garment knit from an extrodinary yarn.

However, Lion Brand has changed its sourcing of Fisherman's Wool. It is now a different fiber, a different spin, and a different ply. It is not the same. I bought a bit of the stuff, and will knit and test.

It really does feel nice while being knit, and looks nice right after being knit, that is it is easy to knit consistently and uniformly. There does not seem to be any veggy material in it, however there were a fair number of breaks in the yarn.

It felt wonderful while I knit it. As knit, the fabric felt wonderful. However, it lost stitch difinition while being blocked. The fabric lost elastisity and resiliance while being blocked. I would not use it for any garment that might get wet. I would certainly not use it for a gansey, and I would certainly not use it for anything a fisherman might wear.

How Knitting Sheaths Work

2009-06-08T10:18:00.000-07:00

I get this question- frequently. So, I am going to post an answer, HERE, where everybody can find it.

First, a knitting sheath is a tool like a knitting needle. Just as there are different kinds of knitting needles, there are different kinds of knitting sheaths. And, just as there are different techniques of knitting there are several different techniques of using a knitting sheath. The most common knitting sheaths can be used while tensioning the yarn in either the right or the left hand, or with a strand of yarn in each hand, or with two strands of yarn in either hand.
A knitting needle is a lever for moving yarn. In most modern knitting techniques, the mechanical advantage is about 1: 3, with the fingers/ thumb of the hand providing both the force and acting as the fulcrum of the lever. This places stress on the hands and wrists. When the needle is inserted into a knitting sheath, the knitting sheath becomes the fulcrum and the force is applied with a 1:50 mechanical advantage. In addition, the knitting sheath allow the forced to be generated by the large muscles of the shoulders and transmitted through the very strong tendons of the upper arm.

With a knitting sheath or stick tucked into a belt or apron strings under the right elbow, and a fairly short working needle set it, The needle is pushed sideways into the working stitch with the palm, the yarn for the new stitch in any one of half a dozen ways, and the base of the thumb pushes the working needle out of the stitch, finishing the new stitch and transferring it to the working needle.

Gansey needles act as springs. One end is firmly anchored in a knitting sheath, and the needle flexed under the right arm. The weight of the arm pushes the needle tip into the stitch, and as the arm is lifted a bit, the needle springs upward, finishing the stitch and pulling it onto the working needle.

In swaving, (terrible knitting) a short curved needle pivots in the knitting sheath, and the yarn tension is controlled by the left hand. The blunt needle is “popped” into the stitch with a symmetric downward and outward push with both arms. The forward leg of the old stitch and supporting fabric act as a spring. The needle catches the yarn with another “pop”, the force of the arms holding the stitch open is relaxed and the spring of the yarn in the old stitch pops the needle out of the old stitch (still carrying the yarn) to form the new stitch on the right needle. (I have not mastered swaving yet and there may be changes to this in the future.)
Knitting sheaths are tools that provide leverage, just as hammers are tools that provide leverage. You can drive a nail by holding a lump of iron in your hand, but using a hammer is easier. You can knit with hand held knitting needles.

That is my story, and I am sticking it until I get better data.

I made the same stupid mistake as Rutt

2009-06-02T18:50:00.000-07:00

I did.

Look at the knitting sheaths in all the collections and most of them are 2o to 25 cm in length. Then, at the end of the Beamish collection is a big one -- with curved needles -- see the fine Beamish image at http://www.beamishcollections.com/itemsimages/thumnails/161155.jpg. It is 42 cm long. A big one!

I looked at it, and I did not pay attention because so many knitting sheaths were smaller and they worked very well with even 12 inch straight needles.

However, knitting with curved needles is a different technology and requires different tools.

I tried making a bigger knitting sheath. See above. The big one. It is the one that works with those little curved needles. Try an evening of swaving with one of those 20 to 25 cm long knitting sheaths, and the next morning you will wake up with sore fingers.

Really, the little ones do work just fine for straight needles.

In a rut

2009-06-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

I read all of Rutt. Then, I looked at a bunch of his original sources, and read him again. Then, I went to the shop and made needles and experimented. Then, I went back and re-read passages.

Note for example that I compare what he says on page 20 with what he cites from Howitt on page 120. On page 122, Rutt discards Howitt's eyewitness description without a stated reason. Rutt's eyewitness (Sedgwick, pg 122) has abandoned the curved needles by the time Rutt meets her. Why? I propose that she stopped swaving because swaving is a high effort activity. It is hard work. It was a way for a commercial knitter to knit as much as possible per hour, and Sedgwick was no longer getting paid by the piece, so she did not put in the effort into knit extra fast. The swaving needles were thus surplus, and got lost – maybe a metal drive during WWll.
Rutt assumes that the needles were bent of long usage, but does not state a basis for that assumption. However, a look at old museum needles shows two classes of bent needles. Needles randomly bent from long usage show clear differences, and needles with a deliberate bend in them. The Dentdale knitters put a deliberate and specific bend in their needles. My first swaving needles looked like the bent from age needles. Once I understood swaving, I went back and re-bent my needles. Re-bending the needles was a real effort, but then, my needles looked the deliberately bent group of needles in the museums. Those needles did not get bent by usage. Rutt should have figured this out.

Rutt does not consider the possibility that there might be a very fast, commercially oriented hand knitting technique that required a knitting sheath and needles with very specific curves. He does not think about the physics or the ergonomics of swaving. Old Mrs. Sedgwick no longer had a need to knit very fast, she no longer had the strength, she no longer had the skills, and she no longer had the old curved needles. She no longer had the big knitting sheath. She was not a good witness for the technique. Yes, she did show him one or two of the 3 or 4 knitting techniques that they used, she just did not show him all all of them.

Rutt – A History of Hand Knitting

2009-05-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

For the last few years, every discussion of the history of knitting has eventually resulted in somebody quoting Rutt, and that often being accepted as the final authority, because Rutt has so many sources, he must be right! That should not be the case. A History of Hand Knitting is manifestly incomplete, and often wrong. The common theme of his errors was to ignore the traditions of professional, commercial, and serious knitters. He ignored their tools and their techniques and this inevitably lead to erroneous conclusions about their knit products.

His first error is in his definition of knitting, where he limits it to yarn. In fact, many early knitters included gold filaments, and the incorporation of such metal wires does not prevent that work from being "knitting." Moreover modern knitting machines may use strands of synthetic material which is yarn only in the broadest sense, yet the fabric is still clearly knitting. Thus, the definition of knitting must one of process and topology, and not one of material.

Rutt wonders around his description of knitting needles without ever understanding that different knitting needles were used for different knitting techniques. (While he references commercial knitting techniques, he does not actually discuss them. Thus, glosses are deliberate, rather than purely ignorant.) Most importantly he fails to point out role of knitting sheaths in various knitting techniques. He fails to note that there were long steel needles used with knitting sheaths yeilding a spring action for knitting ganseys – this is one kind of needle with its own technical constraints. Shorter DPN could be used with other kinds of knitting sheaths (and different knitting technique) for knitting other kinds of objects. Despite later extensive quotes from Howitt, on the use of curved needles in the Yorkshire Dales later in the book, Rutt does not bring this information into his section on needles. And yet, it was the physics of a curved knitting needle (with a knitting sheath) that made the very fast knitting of the Yorkshire Dales possible. This is a completely different knitting technique from what is used with gansey needles, and a history of knitting needs to recognize that. Thus, Rutt does not describe the needles that were used by generations and generations of professional, commercial, and serious hand knitters. The cottage workers in England made exporting boat loads of hand knit hose to France possible. They are a big part of the history of hand knitting. These are the tools that made fine fisherman’s ganseys possible. Those ganseys made cod fish possible. The cod fish made the Church's "fast days" possible. Taxes on the knit goods supported the British Crown. These tools that Rutt ignores were critical to history as we know it.

Then Rutt talks about holding the needles and he ignores knitting sheaths and pouches. These had been at the core of techniques for professional, commercial, and serious hand knitters for centuries. What he does get right is admitting that the knitting styles that came in at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, slowed knitting down. However, those knitting techniques are the only ones he describes in detail and says little about the methods of hard working (and fast) cottage knitters. Rutt says, “Ideally only one needle should move”. This may be true for slow, elegant, stylish knitting in the post-Victorian drawing room, but it contradicts Howitt’s eyewitness description of how the fastest knitters ever known (the Terrible Knitters of Dentdale) did knit. They are an important part of the history of hand knitting and they need to be discussed by someone that understands what they did, and how they did it.

Rutt did not understand the tools used by generations of hand knitters. This is a deep and fundamental fault with Rutt’s knowledge of knitting.

Having glossed the tools and techniques of serious knitters, in favor of drawing room fashion, Rutt dismisses the work of Braham Norwick while acknowledging that the metal work discussed is topologically knit. Rutt says it is not knit because it is not yarn -that is silly! I have knit metal wire and the process is knitting; that is one must now how to knit before one can knit metal wire, and if you can knit metal wire, you can knit yarn because the process is the same. Anybody that has knit both knows this. Any knitter that has knit wire knows that after knitting wire, you go find some yarn to knit because it feels so good after knitting the wire.

And so on! That is my feelings on the first 25 of or Rutt’s 213 pages, and it does not get much better. He attributes dates without justification, and he missed important work. He makes mountains out of molehills and molehills out of mountains, and it is hard to tell what he is going to do with any particular reference.

I will gladly admit that Rutt cites a great many sources, but his analysis of those sources is faulty and out of context. If Rutt is cited, always go back and look at the original source. Rutt is not the last word in knitting. Rutt did not write a history of hand knitting, he wrote a justification of modern drawing room knitting.

Curved Needles and Sock Yarn

2009-05-25T18:11:00.001-07:00

OK! Curved needles do work for sock yarn, I just had to drop down to 1.5 mm pricks, and it gives me about 10spi. The yarn band says 7.5 spi for Amrican size 2 needles. I like the firmer, 10 spi fabric better. In fact, the firmer fabric is much more like the fabric in those nice Smart Wool socks that my wife just bought. (Those Smart Wool sock are knit at ~32 spi so I am not even getting close to their gauge.)

This swatch was started on 2.38 mm pricks, and I just could not make those big needles work with the fingerling yarn. You can see the big stitches at the bottom. Besides, I do not like the fabric.

The wood thing is the knitting stick I am using.

Curved knitting needles in the style of the Yorkshire Dales

2009-05-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

I am simply amazed at how little has been written about curved needles (pricks) as knitting tools.

My first swatch with the first curved needles. There is some junk stitches, but the last 300 were very nice. And, since then, better pricks, have resulted in better knitting.

Mary Thomas, at least wrote briefly about knitting sheaths, and had pictures and drawings of knitting sheaths in her classic book on knitting. Certainly Mary Wright talks about knitting sheaths at length, and I even found a paragraph in one modern text explaining how to use a knitting sheath. However, there is even less on curved needles.

Curved needles can be used hand held to facilitate continental knitting. However, they come into their own when used with a long knitting sheath. The needle then pivots in the knitting sheath. The front leg of the stitch is used as at fulcrum to lever the yarn through the stitch. The effort comes from the large muscles of upper arm. Control and stability come from the knitting sheath and the inter–actions between the yarn, the fabric, and the needle. Therefore, the Yorkshire commercial knitting techniques do not work for all yarns and fabrics, but when they do work, they are very fast. This is a very different motion from any of the motions for using straight needles with knitting sheaths, and it certainly was not contemplated in the one modern text that describes how to use a knitting sheath.

The leverage available with a knitting sheath and curved needles is not as great as with a knitting sheath and straight needles, thus curved needles are not suitable for knitting very tight fabrics. Nor, are curved needles suitable for loose fabrics or lace. What we would call standard hand knitting (http://www.yarnstandards.com/weight.html) is too loose to use the fabric to stabilize the needle. However, I do not like those fabrics anyway. (And, I note, that the knit wool fabrics offered at good or fine clothing stores are also firmer than what results form following the recommendations of the Craft Yarn Council.) That is, professional or commercial quality knitting is firmer than the recommendations of the CYC.

However, if you want to knit a nice firm, consistent fabric very rapidly; pricks are your tool of choice. If you want to knit a fine Jersey in a day, get curved needles. If you want really consistent knitting, get curved needles.

So, she asks with a sneer, "Is it fun knitting that fast? How can you enjoy knitting that fast?" It is like riding in a car. In a new BMW, it is comfortable going 80 mph. An old Ford Model T is not comfortable at 50 mph. NO! with most needles, it would not be any fun knitting that fast, but with curved needles, when you get everything dialed in, it is just knitting at the natual speed that feels right.

I have some Special Blauband sock wool, and I have not yet figured out how to knit it with curved needles. It is on 2.4 mm pricks and I was lucky to get a thousand stitches done in 4 hours. I mean I was struggling to do 5 spm, so I do not have this all figured out yet.

Knitting before Newton

2009-05-16T15:29:00.000-07:00

Lack of evidence for existence may or MAY NOT be evidence of non-existence. Lack of evidence may simply be good evidence for moths, mold, damp, hearths without chimneys, and frogging for reuse. Lack of evidence may be a problem with experimental design or the mechanics of the sampling methodology. I find that knitters tend not to spend a lot of time pondering design of experiment and sampling methodologies.

A careful reading of Rutt suggests that he never knit with a knitting sheath, which I find a singular lack in someone writing about an industry where the knitting sheath was a primary tool. He handled ganseys in a museum context and did not go out and determine their functional qualities. His statement to the effect that too much has been made about how weatherproof fisherman’s ganseys tells me that he did not understand the rigors of sailing in a wooden ship or the warmth of a real gansey. As one's body cools, one loses judgement and coordination. For a sailor working in the rigging, loss of either judgement or coodination is sudden death as he falls. In contrast, a cold farmer may stumble on his way home, and still make it back to his warm hearth. If one does not understand these two points, one cannot make sense of that knitting masterpiece called a “fisherman’s gansey.” Rutt did not understand the physics of knitting, the physics of how a knit fabric insulates, or human physiology.

Fisherman’s ganseys and seaman’s gansey are functionally similar and produced with the same materials and tools. For all practical purposes they are the same. While the British navy did not set a uniform, they constrained what a seaman could wear by what was available for him to buy aboard ship. A sailor pressed off of a merchant ship might be wearing a gansey, but but a landsman would not. Now, go back through the British Admiralty contracts, and see what they put in the "slop chests" from which every British seaman had to buy the clothes that he wore. A good place to start is Admiral Nelson and work backwards. This is piles and piles of documentation in the best British tradition. Every British Naval vessel had what we would recognize as seamen's ganseys aboard to sell to the seamen.

The French built Louisbourg on a cold point in Nova Scotia to protect their cod fishery and to a lesser extent their fur trade from the British. King Georg was projecting his navy across the Atlantic and we have records of what was in the slop chests on those ships, and thus what British sailors were wearing. We can make a reasonable assumption that the French sailor’s supporting Louisbourg were similarly dressed. And yet, when I visited Louisbourg nobody on their huge staff knew about knitting sheaths. Nobody knew what a gansey needle was. They had not even looked for DPN – they had looked for Victorian style SPN. There were living history staff for a remote, cold, outpost set in 1740, knitting lace with SPN?! No wonder they did not find evidence for knitting in a very cold place where there were sheep bones and wooden shoes in the midden. They did not seem to know what to look for in the way of knitting tools. While we were there, one of the enactors got hypothermia, and they had to send her off to get warm. It was June! It was nice and warm (6C & 25 knot wind) right there on that parapit. Of course, I was wearing a gansey, hat, and wool socks, all knit from local wool. (My wife in her Patagonia gear was very cold. No other tourists stayed on top of the wall for more than -- seconds.) While I expect that the ladies of Louisbourg did knit lace in 1740, I am also sure that somebody in that fortress was knitting warm woolens.

When I visited the archeology dig at York, they told me that they had not looked for knitting tools because everything they were looking at was before knitting was introduced into Europe. I suggested, maybe not, and showed them what wear marks would indicate knitting needles rather than awls. Recent publication reports the finding of 14th century metal double pointed knitting needles at York.

Estonia, Ireland, and Scotland were all very much in the Norse world of trade from the 8th through the 13th centuries. Consider the fragment of elaborate “Fair Isle knitting” that was found in 1949 in a 13th century Votic grave. It was in the literature, and yet ignored by Rutt. This tells me that the York knitting needles are not anomalous, and there was elaborate knitting being done in Europe in the 13th century. We can be sure that in the 13th century knitting was established from Estonia to Ireland.

In the early 13 th century the Portuguese were selling cod form the Newfound Land Banks. They must have had ganseys. Ganseys made commercial, long range fishing economic. Knit ganseys kept sailors from getting so cold that they fell to their death. If too many of the sailors on board get chilled the ship is lost and the venture is not econmic. In this same time frame the English from Norfolk were fishing cod from square rigged ships as shown by the bench ends from King's Lynn. They fished so well that in 200 years the grounds were fished out and the tradition of cod fishing in ships from Norfolk was forgotten. All that remained was a knitting tradition, supporting fishermen in small boats.

The 11th century saw Cistercian Order with abbeys in Portugal, France, England, Ireland, and Scotland moving rams to improve their flocks of sheep. They had wool, ships, and they had a mission to teach. I think we can be sure that they taught knitting and even gansey making.

Knitting is knitting, whether it is done from cotton or wool or silk or silk with gold threads. That is, knit fabrics containing metal threads has always been considered knitting. We have Irish and Scotch metal work, with good provenance clearly dating to the 8th and 8-9th centuries containing knit metal wire. We have all seen these examples in our art history books, we just did not think about what we were seeing. Ladies and Gentlemen, knitting in Great Britain is an ancient art.

One thing that is unique about knitting, and that makes it different from naalbinding and woven material is knit fabrics' ability to be easily unraveled, and the yarn reused, or re-spun and reused. If I am a thrifty housewife with a drop spindle, every bit of yarn is precious. If I have an old bit of thread-bare knitting, I am likely to unravel it, and use the old threadbare yarn as one ply in a new yarn. Or, I might just reknit the piece. In a land of hand spinning, I would never expect to see any scrap of old knitting. If the owner did not want the yarn out of it, somebody else would. We should be very surprised to see old knit fabrics. If the moths or mold did eat the fabric, then the nearest spinner or knitter would have used the fabric.

What is an old knitting sheath? Firewood! Firewood next to the fire is always better than firewood out in the yard. Old knitting sheaths went on the fire. Old wooden knitting needles were saved for kindling. Any blacksmith would buy steel or iron or brass or bronze knitting needles for cash money. We should not expect to find many old knitting implements.

So, why don’t we find ganseys in the document record? Why are they not listed in wills? Well they were a work garment, and work garments wear out. No, they were THE work garment. A seaman was likely to be wearing his best gansey, and one way or another, he was likely to be buried in it. If he is planning on being buried in it, it is not going to show up in his will. In fact, a man on land did not need a seaman’s gansey at all, and a gansey was a very expensive thing to own if one did not need such an elaborate garment. If he sells it of gives it away, it is not going to show up in his will or inventory. If he is wearing it, it is not going to show up in an inventory of the house. I would not expect to see much documentary evidence relating to “fishermen’s” or “seaman’s” ganseys. Which brings us back to – What was in the slop chests of the British Navy? There, where we expect it, we have references to knit frocks.

A ship is a complex system. Change any part of it, and other systems much be changed. The great changes in western ships counting backward were, use of liquid petroleum fuel, use of coal, use of square rigged sails. . . . . . . . Diesel and steam meant that sailors could operate the ship without going above the deck, and without the kind of gymnastics that sailors traditionally performed. Engines also provided heat for the crew. Thus, after the advent of steam power, sailors could have a warm dry place to sleep, this changed their clothing requirements. And, the costume of sailors changed.

We know that square rigged ships sailed by sailors in ganseys worked very well for a very long time. The question arises, “Which came first, square rigged ships in Europe, or knitting in Europe?” Square rigged ships appeared around 1000 AD or two centuries AFTER we know the Irish were knitting even very difficult things like wire. Thus, the system of square rigged ships and knit sailors’ ganseys could have evolved together.

To move the above from an isolated chronology to a documented web of history, consider the Channel Islands. Early on, they were agrarian, developing their own fine breeds of milk cows, sheep, and very complicated land inheritance traditions. In the period of the 8-10th centuries, they became the primary provider of salt fish to Catholic Europe (and England) for fast days. They were such good fishermen that they fished out their local waters and in the 11th century were selling “exceptionally cunning” garments knit from their local wool to other sailors and fishermen. By the 12th century, their knitting production exceeded local wool production and they were importing wool from England. The customs taxes on that wool were the primary source of cash income for the cash strapped treasury of the English Crown. This continued until the Tudor wool act which stopped the export of raw wool. (Thus, a few years later, Cabot's men were wearing Englsih knit frocks rather than Guernsey knit.) Suddenly cut off from the wool for their knitting that was their principle source of income, the Channel Islands turned to piracy to support themselves. Elisabeth R sent Sir Walter Rayleigh to stop the piracy. Rayleigh helped the islanders reestablish their knitting industry.

It is worth noting that despite great advances in scholarship the field of knitting history, Rutt has not updated his book.

Swaving

2009-05-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

It is how the "Terrible Knitters of Dent" knit so fast.

Miriam Tegels as a speed kitter? Ha! she does not even have a "clew." See (http://www.truveo.com/Learn-to-Speed-Knit/id/144115227455160401 ) Swaving takes all that, and pushes it to the extreme; including minimal motions and keeping the shoulders loose by flexing them. Then it goes beyond that, by synchronizing the hand motions so both hands are making similar symmetric motions. This seems to make coordination of everything easier, i.e., none of this; right hand do this, and left hand do that stuff. Both hands just make tiny circular motions together.

Swaving is not continental knitting. Both swaving and continental use the left hand to tension the yarn. However, with swaving, both needles move at the same time.

It was not just a fiction. I know how it is done. I am not real fast - yet! In fact, I have not even worked out how to purl yet. But, damn it works! Wow! I have not timed it yet. Maybe it is not as fast as it seems. I doubt if I will be able to knit 200 spm – that is for nimble fingered young ones that started knitting as kids. Still the nature of the motion makes it seem very, very fast. We will see.

Very low stress on both hands. All the effort in both hands is from the shoulders and upper arms. On the other hand, knitting fast is a high effort activity, No wonder the Victorian ladies let this style of knitting die out.

This makes it clear that there were at least 4 styles of knitting based on knitting sheaths and knitting pouches:

There was/is the English which produced very tight fabrics
Continental was/is fast, but tended to produce looser fabrics
Swaving
The two handed, two -yarn techniques for Fair Isle, weaving, and twining
There are specialized techniques for carrying two yarns in on one hand

On a lighter note as I pick up the sock I was – swaving – last night, I note the needles in it are cheap, old aluminum (Susan Bates or Boyle or ?) that somebody bought in a “hobby shop” and I got in a bunch of used needles on eBay years ago.

Why were the old knitting sheaths so big?

2009-05-14T17:27:00.000-07:00

The books said old knitting sheaths were BIG, so my first knitting sheaths were big. Then, over time I discovered that for just plain knitting I really liked smaller knitting sheaths with a different leverage between the belt holding them in place and the needle. There was a clear difference; the smaller worked much better, so why did the old time contact knitters consistently have bigger knitting sheaths? I would not say that it kept me up every night, but this has been a persistent question for me over the last couple of years.

Certainly, part of it is what I normally wear while knitting. I wear a different kind of belt and I tend to wear it higher on my hips than those old timers. My normal apron for knitting fastens in the back with a clip, so normally no apron strings to tuck a goose wing or knitting sheath into.

Then, there is how the knitting sheaths were made. Green wood would have been split with an ax and shaped with a draw knife, then finished with a small knife. The last step would have been to make the needle hole either by burning it with a red hot needle or drilling it. There was the chance that the wood could check or crack. In a large knitting sheath, this made no difference; in a small knitting sheath it would have ruined the work. In a large knitting sheath, everything could have been done by eye, while for my smaller knitting sheaths I have to measure very carefully. In short, the large knitting sheaths were much easier to make.

Then there was the question of life style. Many of the knitters had gardens, orchards, fields, and animals to look after. Knitting was done in the evening after the farm work was done. A big knitting sheath is more durable as it endures farm life, and is easier to see if it is dropped in the grass or in the bedding in the barn.

Finally, replicas of some 16th century rural goose wing designs that I recently found show exceptional versatility in function. These are much more versatile than the late Victorian goose wing designs that I had first used as templates. The older designs are not nearly as pretty, but they work better. Those old knitters knew what they were doing. The Victorians favored form over function.