Ribbing

Socks knit from fine, multi-ply or multi-strand yarns do not need ribbing for stretch. These fabrics have enough stretch in the fabric.  However,  knit to fit - you do not have the crutch of ribbing to hide defects in fit.

This has implications for interpretation of old art for the presence of knitting.  Look at the socks and hose in Weldon's, and  it is difficult to determine if the fabric is knit or woven.  It is even harder working from an oil painting or fresco.  You may not be able to knit like that but, people can and do, and people did.   I find that textile historians tend not to be able to knit that well, beginning with Rutt.

Earlier, I mentioned that the current generation of sock needles are 8" long. These days, my finer needles corresponding to UK 16, 17, and 18 are 14" long, and I have stopped using the shorter needles in these sizes.  A work in progress on these needles is difficult to transport, and thus, these days all the fine knitting is done at home.   (Just a year after I got a knitting bag big enough to hold my gansey needles, I have stopped using them).  My favorite chair while knitting with the long needles remains a wooden folding chair - because it gives clearance for the knitting sheath and the needle.

The leather knitting pouch works very well for the more flexible, blunter needles (if any 1.5 mm needle can be called blunt  ; )  that I am using these days,  and I could live with a knitting belt as my sole knitting support.  I do like the knitting belt for knitting in the car or on aircraft.  And, certainly the Shetlanders knit gloves professionally on such long needles.  However, swaving with bent pricks is a game changer for fine gloves, and one cannot swave with a leather knitting belt.  Thus I need to keep my knitting sheaths for swaving. And I do think that the right knitting sheath is faster than a knitting belt. On the other hand, a knitting belt is faster than the wrong knitting sheath. And if one is switching back and forth between different sizes and lengths of needles, it is difficult to always have the right knitting sheath at hand.  And on socks, I like Eastern Cross Stitch on the sole, and swaving does not do that easily, so currently all socks are knit on 8"  straight needles with a knitting sheath.  Right now, the only WIP being knit on a knitting belt is a gansey from 6-strand fingering yarn on 14" long 1.5 mm knitting pins.  It is a nice fabric.

At this point, I think that modern knitting patterns are the result of trying to make a silk purse out of fat, 2-ply yarns.  There was a time when wassit was a standard yarn, used for utility knitting.  It was 5-ply.  The resulting fabric was durable and elastic. It was DK or sport weight, but could be knit on UK 13 or 14 needles to produce a very dense, elastic fabric.   Then, as we started using cheaper 2-ply yarns, they did not have as much elasticity, so we started doing more ribbing.  Ribbing is a trademark of a knitter that does not use multi-ply yarn.

When I started spinning 5-ply, I replicated the commercial product.  It produced stitches that "popped!" More recently, I have been making these yarns with less ply twist. They have to be steam blocked to balance, but they produce a denser fabric without the needle holes. I like it a lot.  Not as much stitch pop, but over all, a more attractive fabric.

Peck - Interwoven Globe

I never actually watched  Bueller.  I could not identify with it. With a few notable exceptions,  I did not go to class in high school.  I would go to home-room for roll call, and then I was more or less free for the day.

On the other hand, calculus class was small (4 students), and the teacher both very smart and very well qualified, so calculus was a delight.  I never missed that class. There was no place I would rather be. There was nothing I would rather do. I did not aspire to be Bueller!

Peck edited  Interwoven Globe, a beautiful book on the history of textiles with chapters by Peck, Guy, Phipps, Denney, Sardar,  and Watt.  In a previous post, in this blog, I noted  that perhaps the most interesting thing in the book was a footnote to Phipps's chapter on the Iberian Globe. It is the "Black Swan" that tells us that circa 1500, textile production in Europe was undergoing a revolution.

And, then the next 6 chapters in the book is a superficial catalog of fabric objects. There is a long chapter on tapestries. (In the Louvre bookstore, the book is actually shelved with the books on tapestries.) This is all very interesting, but there was a revolution in textile production during that time period (1500 - 1800) that affected politics, economics, and social welfare; that the book completely ignores.  The authors are more interested in nuances of  dye print patterns, than in how the base fabric is made. However, understanding base fabric is essential to understanding dye print technology, which is essential to understanding  nuances of  dye print patterns patterns.

This book is like most textile history books; there are a lot of observations, but no thought about what they mean.  It is such a beautiful book.  I am sure that all the folks that love the Ferris Bueller movie will love the book.

I have a very different take away.  The book fascinates me for what it does not say; and, the questions that it fails to raise.  Every  object raises the questions, "How did they make that object?"  and "Could I make that object with the technology base and infrastructure that they had?"  If I can not answer those two questions, then I either do not understand the object or I do not understand their technology base and infrastructure.  Certainly, sometimes we do not understand the objects. However, sometimes it is clear that we have absolutely failed to understand the technology base. That is, they had tools we do not recognize.  Sometimes, we just have to say, that if they had these objects, they must have had those tools. And that logic is valid until someone shows us how to make such object, without those tools.

 Look at the photo of the sample book on page 283; and, we can know by the 1771 date that they are hand combed, hand spun, wool fabrics.  They are producing commercial volumes of  a variety of different fabrics, and they are offering to sell substantial volumes of these fabrics.  If they were able to spin like that (quality and volume), then every competent hand spinner should able to spin like that.  That page gives me a baseline for reasonable minimum skill for a hand spinner (and weaver.)  Moving on, objects such as the great tapestries were the result of industrial scale factories. Hundreds of  spinners, spun for their entire career to produce edition after edition of these works, all produced from the same cartoon and woven on the same looms for a period of ~120 years.  The yarns contained silk, silver, and gold.  If hundreds of spinners could spin like that for generation after generation, then I should be able to spin like that. Note the cottons from India and the silks from China.  If they could spin like that, then I should be able to spin like that. These materials were mostly produced in commercial quantities by professional production spinners.  
with respect to the cottons, we need to remember that printing is inherently a technology of mass production.  If they were printing, they were producing commercial quantities.  Let us call all spinners producing yarn for these commercial weavers  "competent spinners".  Individual spinners with talent and elan could be expected to produce small quantities that were at least 2 standard derivations better. Let us call these "expert spinners".

I see Interwoven Globe as an outline of the skills that a competent hand spinner should have.  I do not see why a hand spinner in 2013 should not be held to the same standards as spinner in 1770.  Looking at British Law, it appears that circa 1600, spinning schools were expected to produce a competent spinner in only 2 years - call it 5,000 or 6,000 hours of instruction and practice.  Does that number seem familiar?

The spinners that made the objects in Interwoven Globe set a standard.  If I am going to call myself a traditional spinner, I need to meet their standard.  What other modern spinners do is not my problem. My problem is to understand  the traditional standard and try to meet it.

VM

When sheep do what sheep do, they get Vegetable Matter in their wool.  It is a fact of life.

If you see commercial wool fiber in the form of  top, or roving, or batts, that does not have any VM in it, then either the sheep were covered, or the wool was lovingly combed, or more likely, the wool was treated with acid (carbonized) to remove the VM.  

Acid treating wool has become the commercial standard.    Most of us have forgotten that acid treated wool is harder to spin, and is not as durable as natural wool. Most of us have forgotten how nice natural (not acid treated) wool is to spin.  Likewise, I do not think most knitters and weavers understand what they are giving up when they buy commercial yarn spun from acid treated fiber.  In particular, I do not think most reenactors understand how different modern fabrics are from fabrics made before 1770 (mill spinning) or even 1880 (acid treatment).  I am not even sure textile historians understand how much acid treating fiber changed the character of woolens.  This effect has been noticed before, see for example http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=CF18760928.2.10.1 or Textile World, Volume 59, Issues 14-26 page 29 et seq.

I will get a lot of push back on this, as most of the most pretentious fiber sellers sell acid treated fiber.  Their customers are very picky and do not want any bits of VM in their very expensive fiber. However, every time I spin acid treated fiber, I am reminded how much I hate it.  This is written as I finish spinning 17,000 yards of 5s (2,800 ypp singles) of such fiber for a bolt of cloth.  (An older spinner stopped spinning as a result of health problems, and she sold me some of her stash  to me for a tiny fraction of the price she paid for it.  Spinning 40 hanks of worsted gives one time to think.  Originally it was pricey fiber.  Not great fiber, just very expensive fiber.)

It is medium fine, and it should be very easy to spin at 30,000 ypp, but when I sampled, it is was difficult to spin finer than 22,000 ypp.  Nor does it draft as fast and easily as the fiber I scour and card/comb myself.  I think acid treated wool is one reason that many modern spinners have trouble spinning fast, or spinning wool at its spin count.

In another case, I bought a "lace kit" from one of the pretentious dyers.  It is supposed to be Merino, but it is acid treated, and I have (natural) Jacob that I can spin finer.  Heck, I have natural Romney that I can spin finer.  On the other hand, I have a bunch of commercial, acid treated Jacob, and I have natural Cotswold that I can spin much finer than the acid treated Jacob.   And, somebody gave me some expensive Shetland from the Shetland Islands. It was so pretty,  but it was acid treated and very difficult to spin fine.

Nor do I think that acid treated wool is as durable as natural wool.  Mill woven or frame knit fabric is inexpensive, so its lack of durability as a result of the fiber having been acid treated is less of an issue. And, objects of fashion are discarded as they go out of style.  However, in the context of a hand knit or hand woven object, the lack of durability is more of and issue.  In the context of a hand spun - hand woven fabric, durability becomes important.  If I am going to invest the time to spin and weave, I will make the effort to use good fiber.  Thus, now I am spinning 9,000 yards of warp from 1.5 kg of natural Cotswold/Romney blend that I have in the stash, and I will only use the yarn from the acid treated fiber as weft.  And, this is still my practice exercises on the loom. 

I will never again buy acid treated fiber. 

Never! No matter what kind of a deal I am offered and how cheap the fiber seems to be.  

This also means that I am not going to buy any more knitting or weaving yarn spun from acid treated wool.  You may knit or weave fashion items that will quickly go out of style, but I want my hand knit objects to last.   There are still some wool mills that do not carbonized their fiber. Find them.

As long as I am bitching about milled wool: I am going to bring up wool grading.    While over the last 100 years sheep have been bred to have more uniform fleece, every fleece still contains different grades of wool.  These days, most mills throw whole fleeces into the process.  That means all the different grades of wool are mixed into the top or roving.   Likewise, when you buy a fleece and send it off to be washed, all the different grades of wool in the fleece get mixed together.  This is not ideal.  Better is to buy intact fleeces grade them, and keep the different grades separate.  If you need the best Merino, you should buy several fleeces, and sort out the "A", "B" & "C" wool from each fleece. If you are buying good fleeces, the B and C wool will not be bad, it just will not be as nice as the A wool.  And, over all, more consistent fiber sized in the A, B, & C yarns will result in less itch.  This is because one cause of itch is variance in fiber diameter within a yarn single. Yarns made from  fibers with a narrow range of diameters have less itch. Remember this as you think about doing or buying fiber blends.

Yes there is superfine and extrafine Merino out there, but if it goes into a mill, and all the grades on all the fleeces in that sort are mixed together, you lose the value of the best A grade wool.  If it gets carbonized, it is going to be harder to spin. The bottom line is that you are going to spend  $30 to $60/lb on fiber that will not spin up as nicely as the 19 micron Rambouillet that I buy from Ann Harvey at $10/lb. 

Actually, the $10/lb is for raw wool.  I figure the clean, combed wool costs me more than $26/ lb plus my labor to scour and comb. And, from a fleece, I get only some A grade wool, and some B & C grade wool.  (Of course, there is some byproduct for felting and that sort of stuff.) So my cost for the A grade is more than $26/lb, so my costs for the B & C grade wool can be lower.   I do not buy it because it is cheap.  I buy it because I like the finished products I can make from it.

There are very good reasons for blending wool with silk or the various synthetic blends, but my usual reason for blending wool it that I do not have enough of the right wool for the project, so I blend two or three bins together so I have enough fiber for the project - as in the case of the Cotswold/Romney blend that I am using for the current warp project.  I would say that for every need, there is a correct grade of wool, and for every grade of wool, there are needs.  

So a mill tosses all the fleeces from a flock in together and everything gets milled into one stream of roving or top - that contains 10 different grades of wool.  Then, some fiber dealer takes 3 different kinds of roving and cards them together to produce a proprietary fiber blend - that now contains 20 different grades of wool. (The different rovings likely contain some of the same grades of wool.)  Now, besides extra itch, what do all of those different wool grades add to the fiber blend?  $$$$$$$  The purpose of most of this blending is to sell cheaper wool at a higher price.   Regardless of the artistic bull shit, the purpose of blending commercial fiber is to maximize profit.

 It is better to just select one wool grade that suits the need. 

Most of my spinning over the last year has been either rather fine or that nasty acid treated fiber, and I have gotten accustomed to spinning slowly.  Spinning the warp is going about twice as fast as I expected.  It is nice.  I spin like a demon for 15 or 20 minutes, wind off the hundred or so yards on to a reel, wash it quickly to remove the spinning oil, set it in the sun to dry, dress the distaff again, and repeat a hundred times.

I am still doing tabby samples with commercial yarn as I tune the loom.  However, there is this old rule of thumb that says it takes 10 spinners to spin the yarn for one weaver.  I look at how much yarn I am using and how much yarn I am spinning and my ratio is closer to 1:3.  I want cloth that is obviously hand spun/ hand woven and I am taking advantage of that and spinning rather fast. If I was seeking to make "professional" quality fabric, my spinning rate would be slower, so that I could maintain tighter control.  I may be sorry for trying to spin so fast when I see the results.   In the mean time, I like the idea of spinning 3 hours for every hour of weaving, rather than spinning 10 hours for every hour of weaving.

What to do about VM in a fleece?

First put the fleece on a open rack and "willow" it.  That means beat it (gently) with a stick so dirt and VM fall out of it.  Then, scour the fleece (grade by grade) using lots of water and soap until the fleece is clean.  Willow it again.  If it is long wool, and is going to combed, combing will take out all of the VM!  : )  Problem solved, and this is one reason I like worsted spinning.

For woolen, card the fiber, several times using a vacuum cleaner to pick up all of the VM that will be thrown off.  Then, card again in very small batches and use a pair of forceps to pick the VM out of the carding drum. It goes faster than one would think.

Finally, spinning rather fine will allow most of the remaining VM to drop out at the drafting point. This is another advantage to spinning fine.  Spinning at 2,800 ypp drops out most of the VM.  Spinning at 11,200 ypp drops almost all of the VM, so I just do not see VM as enough of a problem for me to use acid treated fiber. 

Wash the yarn to remove the carding/ spinning oil in less than a month after oiling.

The Rambouillet that I got from Ann Harvey last year had a significant amount of VM in it, but the singles were VM free. I know a number of spinners that would have turned those fleeces down because of the VM.  I knew I was going to spin that wool worsted, and therefore, I was going to comb it.  Since I was going to comb the wool anyway, the VM did not add any extra work or diminish the quality of the yarn. Really!  Could I have done that spinning on acid treated fiber?  No!  And the longer staple length of the Rambouillet give me a much better yield over Merino on the combs.