Goldfishy

Costco had several styles of men's shirts made by The New Ivy Brand:

All had prominent packaging stating they were hand spun and hand woven.

I trust Costco to require accurate labeling.  Unless you want to accuse Costco as an accessory to fraud,  accept the above, as labeled.


I would not have accepted the material as hand spun without having tried to buy such a spinning "frame", and run into the export tariff.  And, remember that Shetland Harris Tweed is also hand woven.

Cakes of sock yarn

Mostly, spinning in May was about 10,000 yards of 5,600 worsted singles and then plying up couple of hanks of  5-ply, and making up 5 hanks of  6-strand cabled "sock yarn" @ ~ 1,600 ypp  from 2-ply commercial warp yarn.

The  handspun singles were on little bobbins, each holding just over 100 yards.  Thus, 2 hanks of  gansey yarn frees up a whole boot box of  little yarn storage bobbins -- leaving almost a boot box of little spinning bobbins, each with about 100 yards of single on it. Making gansey yarn is about bringing order to chaos.

For the sock yarn, I go from a neat cone to a sweater box full of yarn cakes.  Then, the trick is to turn the yarn cakes into sweater.

Kit for Sheringham gansey: 2,600 yd of 6-strand cable at 1,600 ypp, 5 x 8" and 5 x 14" stainless steel DPN in size UK 15 with crochet hook. I will use a wide Durham style knitting sheath with a 1.65 mm needle adapter. Note that this sizing is a bit different from what is in the modern charts.  These needles and sheath have become my default knitting tools for this yarn.   At 10 spi, it will be a soft, warm, durable, elastic sweater, but NOT weatherproof. (This yarn is magical. It sucks the light right out of a room. Thus,I expect it is very good to wear while sleeping.)  The cable is a little bulkier than 3-ply. For ordinary 3-ply/ 1,600 ypp,  I drop down to  UK 16.  For straight 4-ply, I would stay stay with the UK 15 needles.  There has been enough swatching and sampling to drive my wife crazy.

This will be a soft fabric. Could I knit it without a knitting sheath?  Sure, it would just take me longer and the tension would not be as even.  The needles are fairly blunt, so a leather knitting belt would also work, allowing similar fast knitting and even tension.  

Again, these are all commercial needles and I have used fine emery to 'break" the polish just behind the tip for faster and easier knitting.

Strategies for low grist woolens

In the past, I spun low grist woolens only in sample quantities to demonstrate that I could do it. Now, I find myself spinning pounds of such yarns.

Bobbins fill so fast that there is no time to think through issues.

Suddenly!,  the appeal of the big bobbins in most modern spinning wheels shines like a beacon.

However, while the ratio changes, the rate limiting step does not.  Spinning takes most of the time and effort. Wind-off is relatively fast.  For the loom, I am using J&J No Tangles as my carding oil, so there is less need to wash after spinning, and wind-off can be direct to the ball winder.  A larger flyer/bobbin assembly would slow the spinning process more than it speeds up the wind off process.   Thus, a larger /slower  flyer/bobbin assembly would slow my over-all production of yarn, regardless of the subjunctive feeling that I need a bigger bobbin.  I must steel myself, and impose rational thought over emotion.

That said, I do ply knitting yarns on lager flyer/bobbin assemblies so that I can make 500 yard hanks without knots.  Here, I put up with slower plying because for for knitting, I like half-pound cakes of knot free yarn.

On the other hand warp thread requires lengths only a little more than the length of the weaving project , and my fly-shuttle bobbin are limited to ~1 oz per winding.  Here, I want speed more than I want for knot free, 500 yard hanks.

Back to the basics of plying

Soft and lofty woolen spun yarns present their own difficulties for plying, but the nature of the yarn hides the art of the plying.  If you want to show off your skill at plying, spin worsted.  Sure 4-ply woolen yarn takes skill, but 4-ply worsted  takes more skill.

If you want to know how good someone is at plying, look at one of their yarns plied up from fine, high twist singles.  In particular, 5-ply gansey yarn is a structure that is hard to get uniform, and the worsted singles make any and all faults in the plying clearly visible.  Because of its more stable structure, I feel that 7-ply is easier to ply into a uniform and consistent structure than 5-ply.

Making 5-ply gansey yarn is a evolution that every aspiring spinner should perform.  It is a good place to master Alden Amos's 4 principles of plying. (Tension, Distance, Re-wound bobbins, Constant Motion) With simpler yarns, one can get way with violating one or more of those principles.  However, a kilo of 5-ply will turn the Principles into habits, and thereby improve all of your yarns.  The lesson is worth the price of the fiber.  Sure it is a week of spinning, but we like to spin, right?

A kilo of 5-ply will also force you to acquire the tools (bobbins, lazy Kate, yarn guides or tension box)  for better plying.  These will stand you in good stead, when you want to make very high quality 2-ply woolen spun.

A kilo of 5-ply is enough for you to start thinking about blocking singles prior to plying. (If you go into one of mills producing high-end luxury yarns, you will note that they block the singles prior to plying.)  Alden talks about plying in Chapter 11.  In Chapter 10, he talks about ways to make yarn better.   I think one of the few glosses in the book is that on page 263,  he should have points 5 & 6 about washing and blocking the yarn.

Sometimes the extra effort to wash and block the singles will save a great deal of  time. I use spinning oil, so washing the single after it is spun means that I can store that yarn, and am no longer under pressure to use that yarn.  Thus, washing yarn immediately after spinning reduces my stress levels. Over all, it saves me time because the spinning oil lets me spin much faster. It produces a better yarn because the spinning oil lets me spin more uniform yarn.  Some singles are just much easier to ply after they have been blocked. One example is fine hosiery singles ( 23,000 ypp, 17 tpi).  And, yarns plied up from those singles will be much better when you do take the time to wash and block the singles.

This post was prompted when a spinner on Ravelry, who has never made any gansey yarn, tried to tell me that it is not important to rewind bobbins prior to plying.  It is this group that makes fun of me because I am only a beginner, but I have the "one right way to spin". They have this up-side-down.  I believe in different yarns for different purposes.  I believe in different tools and techniques for different yarns.   And, I believe that any set of  tools and techniques that has been invented, can be improved.  I always look for Better, Faster, Cheaper!  There is no one right way to spin!  Today's best way to spin is not good enough for tomorrow.  When I see a better way to spin, I adopt 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.