The path to handspun fingering weight yarn

 When I first thought about hand spinning yarn for a Sheringham gansey, I assumed that the long wools that I had been using for Yorkshire style ganseys would be the right fleeces for yarns knit into Sheringham ganseys.

I tried but could not make them work. I would spin 11,000 to 12,000 ypp singles, ply them together in various combinations, and try to knit them. All of those yarns came out too splitty to be reasonably knit. At first, I thought the problem was my knitting - that I needed to learn some trick for knitting these kinds of yarns. I spent a few months trying to learn how to knit these yarns.

Then, I was reading a Victorian collection of knitting patterns, there was Paton's Behive fingering specified for objects for babies and ladies - that meant it was a fine* soft yarn, (from a high crimp fiber). Paton's Behive fingering was also commonly used in the Victorian period used for Sheringham ganseys. It was clear, I was using the wrong kind of wool.

I had some Rambouillet, and tried it. It worked perfectly. 

These were raw fleeces from Anna Harvey (Contact - Anna's Got Wool (annagotwool.com).

I washed the wool by putting a pound or so of fleece into a blue 5-gallon bucket, covering the wool with tap water, and letting it sit in the sun for a couple of hours then pouring the warm wash water through a course screen onto a fruit tree. Then, I put a teaspoon of Dawn Ultra dish detergent on the wool, covered it with water, and let it sit in the sun until the water was warm, then I poured out the water onto a fruit tree. I repeated this a few times with less and less detergent until the wool was clean, and I was just rinsing the detergent out of the wool. (This is the easiest and least expensive way I know to wash wool. Dawn at these concentrations is biodegradable.) I drained the wool on my big screen, and let it dry enough to drum card. 

I applied spinning oil (Alden Amos recipe) on the wool, and drum carded it. Then I combed the wool on English combs, and dized it off using a diz with a 1.5 mm orifice and wound it on to my distaff.

Such gently prepared fiber has more crimp and is easier to spin fine than commercially prepared (e.g., pin drafted) fiber.

I use a flier whorl which controls how much twist is inserted into the yarn as it is spun (differential rotation speed flyer/ bobbin assembly). For the fingering yarns I am making these days, I am drafting the singles at between 11,000 and 12,000 yards per pound and inserting 17 twists per inch into the singles.

(Five hundred yards of these singles weighs less than 22 grams, so 500 yards of the 3-ply fingering is only 66 grams (just over 2 ounces) and I can make 500 yards of 3-ply yarn using my normal 3" spinning bobbin.) 

Three singles are plied together, with a ply twist of 5 ply twist per inch. I use a tension box to control the feed of the singles into the plying operation.

The yarn is wound off into skeins, washed, blocked/dried.

The grist of this yarn is ~2,700 yards per pound. It knits to ~12 stitches per inch / 20 rows per inch on either 1.3-mm or 1.5-mm needles with the finer needles producing a thicker, denser fabric. 

I agitate the yarn enough while washing resulting in minor fulling thus it is not at all splitty, and it is wonderfully easy and fast to knit, but it does not have great stitch definition. 

I do not have enough wear experience to know how durable the yarn will be. I am sure that it will knit into the best socks that I will ever own. I still have skeins of fingering spun from long wool and I may find that the long wool yarns provide better wear for sock heels and glove fingertips. 

Early in this evolution, I could make 30-yards of this yarn in half a day. Now, after climbing the experience curve, I can make a hank (500 yards) in a day. I do have a spinning wheel with a differential rotation speed-controlled flyer/bobbin assembly and an "accelerator".

I will be at Lambtown (2023), spinning my Rambouillet singles for this yarn.

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*Traditionally, spinning was divided into coarse, medium, and fine spinning. Fine spinning was singles with grist greater than 33,600 yards per pound. I do not consider the singles I am spinning for fingering yarns to be fine spinning. 

The Rambouillet fleece I am using has not been sorted and graded, and cannot be spun much finer than ~36,000 yards per pound.  Some years back I purchased an extra "fine" fleece from Anna Harvey, sorted and graded it carefully. The result was a packet of fiber that easily spun to ~48,000 yards per pound, and that was for competent yarn. Some recent yarns submitted to various spinning contests have been reported as being much finer. I do not find any wool yarns with grist over 50,000 ypp competent for hand crafting.  As such I stopped thinking about spinning contests.

Winding off of a precise DRS bobbin assembly

For high grist singles, I use a precise DRS bobbin to flier ratio without slippage.  This means that the twist inserted in to the yarn changes as the effective diameter of the bobbin changes as yarn winds onto the bobbin. Thus, consistent twist requires frequent windoffs.

In the past, I simply knotted the the new single to the end of the single already on my windoff bobbin. Then, when I plied, I would take the knots out, and overlap to form a continuous yarn.   However, I never liked having singles with a knot in them every couple of hundred yards.

However, by putting a hook  in the end of the dowel that holds my windoff bobbin, I can now make "spun" joins as I wind my singles off, even if it takes a hundred turns to make a secure joint in the yarn.

I taper both ends of the singles to be joined, overlap the ends, and insert enough twist to hold the joint together.  Inserting that twist with the drill is fast and easy.  Sure, I could have done it manually, but that was very slow for fine, high twist yarns.  And, it did not really matter for 5 or 6 ply gansey yarns.  For a lace yarn, it matters.

Thus, this bobbin now holds some 400 yards of  27,000 ypp single spin on a precise DRS bobbin assembly without a knot in it.

The fiber is Rambouillet.  It has more luster than the other fine wools.  I like that luster a lot.  This stuff gleams and sparkles.  The stuff on the bobbin above does not sparkle because it has spinning "goo" on it.

Seduced by the Soft Side

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.