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.

The Care and Feeding of Carders

Henry and Roy Clemes came by the guild last night to talk about fiber preparation.

Sure I say that better spinning is the best competitive advantage in textiles, but better spinning demands better fiber preparation.

At this point, they know more about the universe of spinning fibers than anyone else.  Like other great artisans, they wanted better tools and they designed and built them. Other spinners have done this, but Henry and Roy went a step farther and really listened to their customers, so their tools have design features that go far beyond anything else on the market. They make tools that are the very best in their class.

Their (Elite) electric carder is the best carder on the market for making 100 gram batts. I happen to like my old Clemes and Clems hand carder with its shorter teeth for the thinner 48 gram batts that I want  for kind of spinning that I do.  However, for spinning slightly thicker yarns, their new Elite is the carding tool of choice.


Some might opt for a wider carder, but hand spinning works with small units of fiber at a time. In the context of hand spinning, an 8" x 22" batt is too big to feed into the orifice as is and a 16" wide batt is no easier to feed into the orifice.  For production of artisan quality batts with good uniform color ways, the Clemes and Clemes electric carder stands by itself with no superior and no peer.

Then, having made a set of batts with a uniform color way, the artisan is faced with storing them until they can be spun (or sold). Clemes and Clemes  have solved this problem with their batt removal and storage system.

Readers know I am a fanatic for freshly prepped fiber.  Clemes and Clemes offer a way to store prepared fiber in a minimum amount of space with a minimum amount of matting, and damage to the batts.  It is brilliant.  It allows making a set of uniform batts and safely storing them until they can be spun (or sold).  I rather expect this to become the standard packaging for fine batts of spinning fiber.

It is a new product that is not fully detailed on their web site yet, so be patient.  It is coming, and it is worth the wait.

What do I dislike about Clemes and Clemes?  They tell me, that the olive oil based spinning oil that I use, will rot the rubber that holds the carding pins.  They are the the kind of guys that tell the truth -- even if the customer is not real eager to hear the truth.  The rubber bed is why all wool going into a drum carder should be clean and free of lanolin. That is a serious truth that some spinners do not want to hear.  And, to get the wool free of lanolin, it needs to be washed at 140F or hotter (if you are using detergents).  That is hotter than for the old "washing soda"/ alkali  process.

5-ply revisited

I came to spinning as a knitter seeking better "gansey" yarn.  Everyone said that gansey yarn was worsted spun, so I spun worsted.  I liked the yarn better than mill spun. Thus, I started spinning 5-ply worsted.

I spun a lot of worsted 5-ply, then I started spinning worsted warp for spinning, and the 5-ply knitting yarn became a by-product of what I was spinning for the loom.

Then, I started spinning woolen weft of about the same grist.  There was a basket of it by the lazy kate.  Plying up a ball of woolen 5-ply was easier than going up stairs to get some worsted.  I liked the 5-ply woolen.

As I spin more woolen weft, it becomes a source for singles to be plied into knitting yarns.  After all, I have a big basket of weft singles sitting there, so when I want some knitting yarn, I just ply some up.

I like knitting yarns plied up from lace weight (6,000 ypp) woolen singles.  They are more elastic that any mill spun.  They are more elastic that any 2-ply.  They are more elastic than my 5-ply gansey yarns.  I like elastic knitting yarns.

They are durable.  More durable than any mill spun or any 2-ply.  They are almost as durable as my 5-ply gansey yarns.

They are warm.  Perhaps too warm for modern centrally heated environments.

The yarn is less splitty and more elastic than 5-ply worsted, so it knits faster. And, I tend to knit it on bigger needles than I use for worsted. I am still using blunt needles for all woolen knitting.

The yarn is much rounder than 2 or even 3-ply, so it shows stitch patterns almost as well as 5-ply worsted, Since the fiber is not combed, I can add something to give a halo and hide the stitch pattern.

Carding and fine spinning drops out the veggy matter. If one spins 1,800 ypp woolen singles, most of the VM stays in the single, thus, getting the VM out become a large effort in fiber prep.  Spinning fine, drops the VM. Dropping VM remains a worth while reason to spin fine.

Combing for worsted spinning rejects much fiber.  Spinning woolen conserves fiber.

Woolen is easy to spin from short fibers.  Some days I get tired of spinning Merino worsted.

It is soft.  I can spin it from fine wool and it is always skin soft.

Why did I not do this before?  I had the idea that the right way to make 5-ply was to spin worsted.  Nobody was making 5-ply/sport weight woolen yarns. I was a captive of the conventional wisdom.

Net time to spin 5-ply woolen yarn is about 100 yards/ hour for me. A sweater is ~2,000 yd, so it takes me about 20 hours to spin the yarn for a sweater.  Having DRS lets me afford better yarns.

Fiber prep for high speed woolen

Good spinning requires good fiber preparation.  Spinning very fine and very fast requires near perfect fiber preparation.

My first fines were all worsted, so early on, I climbed the learning curve for combing wool.

Now that I need fine woolen spun singles for weaving, I am climbing the woolen prep learning curve.  It is just as long and steep, as the worsted combing learning curve.  For a long time, I would divide a batt from a drum carder length-wise, and call  what I spun from that "woolen".    Well, it was more woolen than the worsted singles I spun for ganseys.  It was/is  really semi-woolen.  Spun slowly, it could be mostly woolen and that was good enough for my needs.  And, in fact I preferred that semi-woolen yarn because it was denser, warmer, more durable.  It was/is a very nice knitting yarn that I still like.

Now, I am thinking bout woven fabrics that are "fulled".  And, fulling requires true woolen spun weft. A lot of it, so to get enough of it to be useful, I have to spin very fast.

To spin true woolen, the fiber prep must be carded and then rolled up into a rolag. Spinning fine and fast requires a uniformity in the fiber prep that one is not going to get with hand cards. If you are spinning fast, you need high uniformity from throughout the rolag and from rolag to rolag.  This kind of uniformity requires blending with drum carder.  If you try to spin rolags from hand cards fast and fine, there will be break-offs that will slow you down, until net productivity is higher simply by spinning much slower so that one has some time to adapt so that there are fewer break-offs.

If you must spin fine and fast, you will need the uniformity in you rolags that comes only from very good fiber prep tools. Details matter.  I had been rolling rolags on 3/8" acrylic cores.  Henry Clems suggested that I use use  a 1/2" birch core. That 1/8 inch in diameter, and difference in texture matters.  Half-inch birch is better than half-inch acrylic.  Half-inch birch is better than 3/8" birch. And, 3/4" is too big.  And, if the cores make that much difference, the quality of the carding cloth makes more difference.  Anyway, it turns out that making rolags is a major art from.

These days, Henry and Roy (Clems and  Clems) are the smartest guys on woolen fiber preparation, and they make the best tools for fiber preparation.  (This does not mean that I think 1/2" birch dowel is the very best possible rolag form in the world, but I would agree that it is likely the most cost effective.) These days, their drum carders and blending boards are without equal.   At this point they have hit a nice compromise between the makers of the tools using the tools on a daily basis, and industrial production techniques to achieve outstanding uniformity and quality control at a reasonable price point.   They have gotten to the point where they are starting to have a waiting list.  At this point the waiting list is only a few days, but if you are going to need fiber prep tools this summer, order now.

If you know that you only want to spin one kind of fleece, then one of the drum carders with changeable drums makes sense.  However, I spin about equal parts long wool and fine wool, and I like being able to card both of them on the same carder.

A bit off topic, true woolen requires more twist per inch  than worsted.  The difference is small at low grist, but at  higher grist, the difference is about 50%.  If you want to spin fine, and have a slow (low ratio) wheel, then spin worsted.  I find spinning worsted fines to be reasonable on a slower wheel, but spinning woolen fines on a low ratio wheel is always a long, slow, slog.  Spinning fine is made much easier with a very fast wheel.  Fine yarns that were very difficult on a slow wheel become easy on a fast flyer.  Fine yarns that are easy on a fast flyer are much more difficult on a slow flyer.  This is true at, and well beyond, the spin count.