Rumpelstiltskin

 Rumpelstiltskin was an imp or goblin that could spin straw into gold, quickly and earn a huge reward for doing so.  Hand spinning is still difficult, and modern experienced, good, fast, spinners earn status for being good spinners.

Thus, experienced hand spinners like spinning to be difficult, because if beginners could spin well and fast, the more experienced spinners would lose status. And the people that make and sell handspun yarn want to limit the supply of hand spun yarn to keep its price high.

Thus, modern high-status spinners do not like the idea of differential rotation speed flyer-bobbin assembles (DRS) because it would allow less experienced spinners to spin fast and well.

It is the high status spinners that set the market for new spinning wheels - they advise beginning spinners on what wheel to buy.

Finally, spinning on a DRS wheel is a different skill set and experienced spinners do not what to go back and relearn spinning. Learning to spin on a scotch tension wheel was hard and they do not want to go through that again.

However, I am on the side of knitters and weavers. Knitters and weavers often want yarns that are not commercially available. Spin it yourself is the logical solution. I am a knitter, and I started spinning because I want yarns that are not commercially available. 

Spinning has allowed me to knit objects I could not otherwise have made. 

Spinning fingering yarns with Scotch tension

Every serious hand spinner knows one can spin excellent fingering yarns on Scotch tension or bobbin lead flyer-bobbin assemblies!

On the other hand, spinners that are competent with Scotch tension, bobbin lead, and differential rotation speed flyer-bobbin assemblies know that the differential rotation speed (DRS) flyer-bobbin assemblies can produce fine singles 3 or 4 times faster than Scotch tension or bobbin lead. 

It took me a long time to work out just how to spin on DRS. And when I thought I had worked it all out, Stephenie Gaustad came over and moved my hands a few inches so I could spin much better and much faster. I consider Stephenie to be the Great Goddess of hand spinning, made more powerful by her being a great teacher.

If two people of similar skill sit down to spin yarn and then knit similar objects from their yarn, the person using DRS will have the yarn spun and knit before the person using Scotch tension or bobbin lead can get the yarn spun.

I consider my time valuable. I like to get things done, and do more things. I like to spin, but I use DRS because it is faster. Then, I put an accelerator on my DRS wheel so I can spin faster still. I want to spin yarn for a project and finish that project. I like to knit, but I use a knitting sheath because it lets me finish a knitting project faster.  

I enjoy just spinning - so sometimes I take on big projects that involve a lot of just spinning.

And, when I am spinning, I remember all those many thousands of textile workers through history that spun better and faster than I do.  When I knit, I remember all those many thousands of textile workers that knit better and faster than I do.  I try to respect them by remembering their skills.

   

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.

Needles for fingering yarn

 I have gone off the deep end.  Now that I have really good fingering knitting yarns, I have stowed my fat needles (e.g.,2.3 mm), and all my knitting bags and project boxes are stocked with 1.3 mm and 1.5 mm needles. These days they tend to be between 6" and 16" in length. 

For a while,  I was using pointy needles for the first couple of knit rows after casting on, but as I became more accustomed to casting fingering yarns on to fine needles, I find that I can use flat tipped needles for everything, (with the understanding that I am not doing lace or brioche or or such.)  

Also, my knitting sheaths have become smaller and lighter. All in all, my knitting bags can be smaller and lighter. The exception is that I have moved toward keeping my knitting yarn on bobbins, and having a very small "tension box" under my right foot to hold the bobbin and take some of the tensioning work off my right hand.

We were pruning the olive trees. When I cut up the branches, it turned out that there were yarn bobbins of every size and kitchen spatulas hiding in every length of the branches - dozens, scores.  Who could have guessed?  : )

Regrets

 I try to live a life without regrets. This week I have a regret.

I have an old Clemes drum carder. It had been getting a bit cranky.  

Last week I cleaned her up and put a new drive belt on her. 

She is back to being wonderful! I regret not doing it sooner.

Sheringham Ganseys

 I have been interested in Sheringham Ganseys since I bought Gladys Thompson circa 2007.

By then the fine yarns needed for such fabrics were not common, and I was learning to spin yarns for Yorkshire style ganseys (e.g., 5-ply, 1,000 ypp). I spun those singles at 9 tpi and I plied those yarns at 9 ptpi. That made a nice yarn for weatherproof seaman's gear. I could spin an 8 ounce/ 500-yard hank of the 5-ply yarn in an easy 8- hour day. Spinning the yarn took about one-third as long as knitting the sweater, or hat or socks, or mittens.

I am now learning to spin "Sheringham yarns" that can be knit at 12 spi and 20 rpi. There are "swatches" everywhere. The socks I am wearing fit into that category. They are a pair, but they are knit from different yarns to test durability, and now I am getting results as one develops a hole.

I spin singles of 11,000 to 14,000 ypp at about 17 tpi. That is easy. They are lovely strong singles - I do not see such strong, durable singles on the market. Twist is expensive and yarn mills put as little twist as possible in their yarn and use "soft" as their selling point. If you are a fisherman, fishing every day, durable is more important than soft.

When plying the Yorkshire yarns, I could ply five singles of 5,600 ypp together and get a yarn of close to 1,000 ypp of grist. The math was easy!

With 17 tpi singles of 12,000 ypp, when I plied four together with 17 ptpi, I did not get a 2,700 ypp fingering that I want - it comes out closer to 900 ypp, and it knits at about 6 spi. The trick is to take the yarns fresh from spinning, and hang the singles wanted to make a yarn from, with a knot at the top and a small weight at the bottom. They will twist together to make a stable yarn. I count the twists per inch, and that is the ply twist I use to make the yarn.  Counting twist is easy if I put a single of the same grist/twist/fiber, but of a different color.

It turns out that with my 12,000 ypp singles, about 4-ply twists per inch to make a yarn element and then about 4-ply twists per inch to ply the yarn elements together produce a 2x2 ply cable that makes a good fingering yarn that will knit at ~ 12 spi and 20 rpi.

I have spun such singles from various yarns ranging from fiber varying from  Cotswold to Rambouillet.  It works. You may not want to knit such a sweater! It is a nice yarn for socks, mittens, and hats. Because of the high twist, the yarn and the objects made from it will be both warm and durable.

By 1320, the Italians were spinning yarns that fine, and machines for plying such yarns are in Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks. Sheringham style fabrics were then available. We have just forgotten some of those skills.

The trick is that all this is much easier if you use a differential rotation flier/bobbin assembly. Alden Amos tells how they work in his book. After the book was published, many spinner wanted such spinning wheels. Alden and Henry Clemes made and sold a bunch of such wheels, but spinners returned those wheels because they could not figure out how to use them.

For the record, using a differential rotation flier/bobbin assembly I can spin a hank (500 yards) of 12,000 ypp single in about 2 hours.  I can use a standard 3" long spinning bobbin. I use flyer whorls for 17 tpi for spinning and 4 tpi whorls for plying.  Plying is super fast, so I can spin a hank (88 grams) of 4-ply fingering yarn that will knit at 20 spi in an easy day of spinning.  An ounce is ~ 170 yards, so the grist is ~2,800 ypp -- similar to the grist of the old Paton's Behive fingering.