Measure!

I get teased and chided on for using the traditional spinner's measures.  In  particular, measuring grist by stating the number of "hanks" of 560 yards that can be spun from a pound of yarn.

My ordinary grist is "10s". That is 5,600 ypp yarn spun worsted. Thus, I know how many pounds of wool I have, I know how much yarn I can spin. Easy.  And, when wrapped to refusal, 10s measure ~75 wpi.  A 75 wpi single can be sleyed to produce plain weave at 68 epi/68ppi, which weighs about 1 pound/ square yard.  Likewise, 20 hanks per pound produce 2 yards of cloth per pound of wool.

Thus, using hanks, I can easily calculate how much yarn I can spin from a given batch of wool, and how much cloth I can weave from that wool.  The more weaving I do, the more useful the old English system of yarn measure is.

This also tells us that the stories we were told in grade school were just that -- stories.  The yard and the inch may have been related to some king's reach and size of hand/toe/foot, but he would have lived before the very fine weavers of Classic Greece.  They had wool, yarn, and cloth trading, so they had measures that extended from Greece to what is now Turkey and Egypt, to say nothing of the silk road with textiles moving east.

Sorry, Love; but the fine fabrics of Classical Greece were not woven on single beam, warp weighted looms.  Oh, I am sure they had such looms, but I doubt if that is what they used to weave 12 meter lengths of 68 epi (and finer) wool fabrics.  No, by Classical Greek times, it was an industry, and they were using  rather sophisticated horizontal double beam looms.  And there was trade.  With trade, there were terms to define the various aspects of textiles.  You may not name your yarns, but merchants do; now and in the past. They give them names like  "45 grams / meter, white worsted single" or white "40s".

I expect that the definitions of (or other words that indicate the same quantity): hank, yard, inch, pound, wool fineness in hanks per pound, ends per inch, pricks per inch, woolen, and worsted, were all set, and known among textile traders by the end of the Greek Classical era.   In particular, the elegance of the hanks of yarn at 560 yards tied to fineness wool and the math of  wraps per inch suggests the mathamatical acumen of Syracuse in classic times.

The fact that we have variations such as the el as a measure of length, suggests that textile measures have been around long enough for dialects to develop.  For the larger, and well nourished Greeks, 36 inches was a reasonable width for a warp. During some periods in the textile centers of  Europe, there was famine, and people were smaller, so a narrower warp allowed much easier weaving.  Thus, during periods of famine, Europeans needed a name for narrower cloth, e.g., the el.

Yards, inches, pounds, and hanks were not isolated measures, but part of an intricate system of measure, essential to a large, profitable, international industry and  systems  of trade.  In systems that goes all the way from from wool fiber to yarn to finished cloth, the old English system with grist and wool fineness in hanks per pound  is the easy way to do the math  and make sure you get correctly paid.

Pig tails to skeins

I have bins full of skeins that never got properly blocked for one reason or another.  I call them, "My little shits."

Now, they are going on the squirrel cage swift, to be wound onto the new little niddy noddys. Then, they are steamed.  They finish drying on the rack in the patio, and bingo, I  have beautiful skeins.

It turns out that some of them look like weft for the weaving project. (Did I say it it was a stash buster.)

A good many of the little shits are hanks (560 yard) of singles with grist between 3,000 and 5,000  ypp that I made as I was working toward 5-ply gansey yarn.  Many were were high twist, worsted singles.  Some were woolen. Many were left over because they were too thick for those projects. I did not have a blocking reel, at that time, and  I made a good faith effort to make them into pretty skeins by blocking them wet under weight.  No matter how carefully I wound them or how much weight I hung on them, they dried into bundles of pig tails.  Then they went into bins, were they stayed as I worked with the singles that got wound onto bobbins.

Now, I take those bundles of pig tails and wind them onto a small niddy  noddy, hit them with a bit of steam (A tea kettle works), and I have a beautiful skeins of fine single.  Spinners need to be able to store singles.  I have been storing fine, high twist singles on bobbins.  This reduces my need for bobbins.  This little trick (steaming skeins while they are on the niddy should be in every book and blog on beginning spinning.  That it is not is stupid.  Do not try to tell me that I am the first to work this out.

Anyway,  steaming skeins while they are on the niddy works very well if you do not have a varnished or shellacked niddy noddy.  This can also be done by dipping the niddy with the yarn on it in water and microwaving, but it takes longer to dry. I use the microwave technique when the yarn needs have spinning oil rinsed off.

Pig tails from the bin get wound on niddys, steamed, and the result.  The dime is for scale.

More on Twisty Sticks

A twisty stick is a piece of wire 8-12" long with a hook at one end.  The Scandinavians make, big, tapered, wooden ones, but I am interested in the British tradition.

They were used for grading wool in the time of Chaucer, and it makes sense to me that a spinning tool was used to determine how fine a wool can be spun.  Anyway, Chaucer was hundreds of years after great wheels had been introduced for the fast spinning of woolen yarn, so twisty sticks are likely an old and deep tradition.

Alden Amos uses 1/8" wire and gives directions with drawings for making them in his Big Book of Handspinning. He likes them, and considers them an essential tool - the kind of thing that spinning guilds should make for every member as guild projects.  I like 2 mm steel wire and make them a bit longer (10.5" over all).  Mine weigh about 5 grams, and I use them for yarn grists that I would use a 5 gram spindle with whorl, e.g. ~30,000 ypp.  An iron hook from cheap, soft iron wire bound into the split end of a dogwood twig with a bit of linen thread and some glue makes a 2 gram twisty stick.  It works. With  half an inch of iron wire, linen thread, hide glue, and a sharp flake of chert, an iron age spinner could make one in a few minutes. It has about the same size shaft as AA's twisty sticks so it will be about as fast, but it only uses half an inch of thin iron wire. This gives us an idea as to why they are called "sticks".  A twisty stick is a drop spindle with a hook, but no whorl, and is often made entirely of metal.

I find that I can do a thigh roll with the twisty stick with one hand do a long draw draft with the other hand and quickly have a good make of yarn. The draft and the thigh roll can occur at the same time.  Then, I can drop the drafting hand, and the return thigh roll will wind on the yarn. The wind on is backwards.  There is almost no wasted motion.  Where a little more twist is required,  the twisty stick can be given an extra shove and released for a moment at the end of the forward thigh roll. Then the twisty stick will deliver a surge of twist to the yarn. The process is very fast. It is not something I have seen any other modern spinner do. It is not in the literature.  This is very odd.  The copp is built to wind off as an end feed package.

However, I do not know how to spin worsted with a twisty stick. So what I produce on twisty sticks are "weaving quality" woolen yarns. The quality would improve if I would practice. The problem is that even the best twisty stick is not as fast as my AA modified wheel, so my tendency is to spin any yarn on my wheel.   Thus, I am not likely to put the required practice time into twisty stick spinning, and I will not achieve and maintain professional competency with the tool.

Still, I have no doubt that Iron Age Brits used this method to produce woolen cloth for export.  I would not be surprised to discover that this was the "rolling on the thigh" method described for Bronze Age Greeks.  It is a concept that would allow a textile professional to produce less expensive woolen cloth.

The wire gets brittle and breaks. What the archaeologist would find a few hundred years later is a small piece of wire.  Any archaeologist ever see anything like that in a Bronze Age or Iron Age site?  Any chance that such an artifact has been found and incorrectly identified?

We have not really thought about hand spinning with a spindle on an industrial scale (e.g., ship-loads of cloth) for a long time.  Linen and hemp need a spindle with whorl because the long fibers and low twist per inch require slow insertion of twist. Thus, we see the spindles with whorls in the Egyptian drawings. Silk also has very low tpi, and want slow insertion of twist. Spinning worsted wool requires a whorl because both hands need to be free to draft, and therefore spindles for worsted spinning need whorls to store momentum and gradually transfer the twist to the yarn over a period of time . This is what we see depicted on Greek urns. Weaving wants worsted warp, so wool cloth production always set a demand for worsted thread, and we find  lots of whorls in every hand spinning culture.

However, woolen and cotton spinning just want lots of twist insertion. Woolen and cotton can absorb twist very rapidly. Drafting can be with one hand, so one hand can keep the spindle turning at a very high speed. If one hand is devoted to tending the spindle, there is no need to store momentum.  One can get the highest rotation speeds and therefore the fastest yarn production from a spindle with no whorl.  The spindle can be spun up very fast, and  all the twist energy transferred to the yarn almost instantly, rather than momentum stored in the whorl.  Over all, the process can be much  faster than modern spindle spinners using whorls think is possible.

This can be seen by the fact that the basic unit of woolen production was a hank of 1,600 yards, while the basic unit of worsted production was a hank of only 560 yards.  Yes, I think that in a world where all spinning was done by hand with a spindle, a yard of worsted was worth 3 yards of woolen. Wool yield, wool preparation, and spinning effort are all factors, but I would also say that in a given time, a woolen spinner would be expected to spin ~3 times the yardage of a worsted spinner.  We do not see this today because both woolen and worsted spinners use spindles with whorls that all rotate at the same slow speed.  Thus, woolen spinners spin at the speed of worsted spinners.   And the goal is better yarn, rather than  faster yarn.

Victorian ladies looked at the depiction of Egyptian linen spinners, Greek and Roman worsted spinners, and decided that all spindles need whorls.  Modern spinners (after 1960) took this as the wisdom of the ages. They felt that spindles needed whorls - everybody knows that, why would they stop and test this bit of folk wisdom? They did not think about spinning faster by using a spindle without a whorl.  They were spinning for a hobby, they did not care how fast they could spin.  In fact, showing off how fine and fast one can spin is considered rude.  When hobby spinners want to spin woolen faster they use a great wheel or charkha.   

I think spindles for worsted spinning need much higher moments of inertia than spindles for woolen spinning.  I find it amusing that this difference does not show up in the spindle market place.  It does not matter to me because I make my own spindles, and mostly I spin with my wheel.  

The above will raise some hackles  Any hand spinner that can sit down and spin wool at its spin count (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_count) is very welcome to tell me that I am full of shit.  Any person that cannot hand spin wool at its spin count should be polite.  

The trail to 9,000 ypp

Last year, I was making 5-ply gansey yarn from ~5,600 ypp singles.

Why that odd number?  Going back to England in the 15th century, yarn was measured in hanks of 560 yards.  If one spins a pound of fiber in to 10 hanks (10s), then it comes out to 5,600 ypp.  And, a good spinner can spin a hank of 10s every couple of hours. All of which made nice round numbers for professional spinners working in a cottage industry.  In a very long day of spinning, a spinner could produce 500 yards of 5-ply yarn. (Ply 5 hanks of 10s together, and the twist of the ply shortens the length to 500 yd plus something for grandmother.) This would also imply that there were other traditions for the spinning of finer singles from finer wools.

However, the Irish and Scots seem to have (hand) spun to a standard of 16 hanks per pound.  These finer singles were then plied up to produce yarns that were similar in weight to the English yarns, but they would have been warmer and more durable.  This would off set the fact that the more labor was required.  I wanted to investigate the trade off between the extra labor and the increased warmth and durability.

I started spinning such 16 hank /pound singles, but it was slow and hard.  I looked for a faster wheel to buy but ended up building the "hot rod".  That took a while.  However, it was worth it.  Now, I can produce such fine (and finer) yarns at a rapid pace.  I am spinning singles for multi- ply yarns at rates close to a hank per hour.  Singles for lace that must be very nice, smooth, and uniform are much slower.

Some of that speed comes from practice.  However, in spinning, tools matter.  My output using my DD bobbin/ flier assembly with controlled DRS is about twice my best output using the Ashford lace flier (with a similar ratio.  There is more to spinning than just ratios.

A bit of Jacob and Shetland singles,  plied together and wrapped  around a caliper. 

The two ply is in the 18-20 wpi range.  

Bobbins of singles in the 16 hanks per pound range.  Fibers include (clockwise from dark Jacob) Cotswold, 

Shetland, Romney (blue), grey Romney, blend (~~8,000 ypp), Shetland, Merino (blue) and CVM (10,000 ypp). edited to add:  A hank (560 yd) of the Natural Romney weighed 1.125 oz = 7,964 ypp. The others ran closer to an once per hank or 8,960 ypp. The CVM hank weighed .75 once for 11,947 ypp. I guess something about that bobbin is a little off. 

This was not a post about how fine I can spin, it was a post about learning to spin fast. Recently, I ended up with some nice Romney from Royal Fibers (http://www.royalfibers.com/).  The spinning bobbin at hand was for finer singles. I just wound it off, and in comparison to any of the singles above, it is very fine.

Two spinning bobbins and their flier whorl.  The  different sized whorls on the two bobbins tend to produce different sized singles.  The one  on the right tends to produce singles that run about 16 hanks per pound and the bobbin on the left produces singles that run about 20 hanks per pound. The difference between the two is a few thousandths of an inch. I have another spinning bobbin that tends to spin at 50 hanks per pound.