Rushen Knitting

There has been some discussion here about how to knit for cold weather.  : )

Here is my "Rushen" solution.

For patknitter, it is done with US 3 knitting needles.
For purplespirit1, it is warm enough for snow camping in the Gulag.

 The yarn is Wool-Ease thick and quick by Lion brand. Suggested gauge is 9 stitches per 4 inches and 12 rows, using 9 mm needles. My gauge using US 3 (3 mm)   is 18 s per 4 inch by 26 r per 4 inches.

It weatherproof, and it is fast to knit.  An object knit from this yarn and at this gauge is well suited for a movie set, as it is warm enough for Siberia.  However, it is not durable enough for a serious tour of the Gulag.  In the long term, knitting real 10-ply saves knitting time.  Aside from swatches such as above, I do not knit objects from such yarns, because it is too fragile.  On the other hand I think you will find that purplespirit1 and patknitter have trouble knitting even such little swatches.  They do not have the right tools.

Noils and carding

A while back, I needed a very fine fleece.  I asked Anna Harvey to go through her stock and send me her "finest fleece".  It was very fine.

Now, everyone knows that I love my drum carder and when I die, I will likely have a tight grip on that drum carder handle.  Yes, they will have to pry my drum carder out of  my cold stiff fingers.

However, that fleece always tended to develop noils when carded on the drum carder - not surprising as fleece that are finer than the breed normal tend to be fragile.  In those days, I was drum carding everything, and when I got the noils, I just set the last half of the fleece aside.

However, I have been spinning woolen from Rambouillet, and  there was that bin of tender, snow white, super fine fleece.  I had the cotton cards out, so I tried carding it on the cotton cards and it works just fine.  And yes, when I run through the drum carder, it gets noils.

I spin it at about 5,600 ypp and 12 tpi, and do not notice the singles as being particularly weaker than the fiber from other  Rambouillet that I have been spinning.

My take away is that there are fleeces that do better being hand carded rather than drum carded.  Anyway, I have 4 or 5 pounds of this stuff and making up a thousand 2 gram rolags is a good way to get very good at making up little rolags.  On the other hand, the bats from the drum carder can be spun rather finely semi-worsted and the noils flicked off of the single with a finger nail before it enters the orifice.  This is an approach that  works for weft and some knitting yarns.

As 3-ply fingering, it knits easily on 00 or 000 to make a soft fabric at 8 spi.  It is not the kind thing that I would knit for myself,  As a 5-ply sport weight, it is a much softer yarn than the worsted yarns that I have been spinning, and  knit it makes a very soft, very very warm fabric.  With all that twist holding it together, it should be a much more durable fabric than any 2-ply mill spun of similar grist.

Is undyed wooI warmer than dyed wool?

Short answer: Most of the time:  No.

On a cloudy day in Ireland, the difference is detectable, with dyed being warmer.  Here in California, the difference is huge. On a cloudy night, there is little difference. On a clear cold night, then white wool is warmer.

I put a lot of effort into looking at the research on the topic a couple of years ago, and I have written about it before e.g., http://gansey.blogspot.com/2008/07/knitting-warm-woolens.html

I knit hundreds of swatches and tested their thermal properties. I started by making a little blower and blowing air through the samples and measuring air flow. I tested the samples for radiation absorption, transmission, and emission. And, I tested for conduction. I made holders (bras) for the fabric samples and compared "skin feeling". I knit entire garments in natural yarn, measured their warmth, then dyed them and remeasured their warmth. I knit similar garments from dyed yarn and undyed yarn. Then, I went walking in the rain changing sweaters every 15 minutes. I went downhill skiing, and changed my sweater after every run.

My results were similar to those developed years earlier by the US 10th Army, US Army Cold Weather Research Lab (at Aberdeen Proving Ground,HTTP://www.army.mil/info/organization/apg/), Gerry Cunningham, and Holubar Mountain Sport.

The primary path of heat loss through fabric is heat advection via air flow and water vapor. Air molecules and water vapor molecules are tiny compared to the distance between wool fibers in an ordinary knit fabric. Thus, most of the air and water vapor molecules moving through the fabric do not directly interact with the wool fibers in any way. Small changes in the surface of the fiber as a result of dying *do not* affect heat advection through the fabric. Larger changes in surface texture as a result of "super-wash" treatments have a small effect (allow increased flow/ reduced warmth of the fabric).

Small changes in the surface of the fibers *do* affect the ability of  liquid water to move from the outside surface of the fabric to the inside surface of the fabric. This is because there are hydrophilic sites on the wool fibers, and many dyes bind to these hydrophilic sites, and then the dye molecule presents a hydrophobic tail to any liquid water that contacts it. The presence of these hydrophobic tails tends to prevent water from wetting the wool fibers. Then, the water under its own surface tension forms a droplet. Motion in the fabric then tends to push these droplets outward, where they are able to drop off the fabric. The practical effect is to make fabric more weatherproof and warmer.

Water vapor passing from the inside to the outside of the knit fabric tends to condense on the outer surface of the garment. A blue fabric will absorb more light energy, which slightly warms the surface of the fabric, thereby reducing condensation. At the latitude of Ireland on a cloudy day, the difference between a natural white wool sweater and a navy blue sweater amounts to 0.3 watt per meter^2 per hour. This does not sound like much but it is enough to keep the outer surface noticeably dryer and warmer. However, on a cold, clear night, the white sweater will emit less radiation, and its surface will be warmer and dryer. If worn under an oil skin, the oil skin controls radiation, and different colored sweaters have the same warmth.

If you can hold a sweater up to the light and see points of light through the sweater, then heat (IR radiation) from your body can travel through those same holes.

Conduction is mostly an issue in socks and the inside of mittens. Even tightly felted wool holds plenty of air to retard heat loss by conduction.

Bottom line: Sailor's "ganseys" were blue, because blue sweaters were a good bit warmer. Arans were not dyed because that was cheaper, and in the rainy areas where they fished, they wore an oil skin, therefore, the color of their sweater did not matter.

Shetlands and other primitives produced colored wools, that reduced the need for dying these wools. The fine fibers with a high scale count of these breeds allowed spinning yarns that trapped air. For example Shetland lace yarn was 3-ply at about the same grist as English 2-ply. Thus, even their lace yarns were warmer. In addition, the stranded knitting produced very warm fabrics.

It is worth noting that the fine wools are better at trapping air, but in modern useage the wool fibers are too far apart to be effective at trapping air. If you want to effectively trap air, the wool fibers should be about 40 microns apart. That is a much tighter fabric than anything modern knitters are accustomed to knitting. On the other hand, such a tightly knit fabric is too warm for modern heated environments.

I was Senior Scientist at the world's largest engineering firm. My physics and chemistry are excellent. I have served on ASTM technical committees developing standard testing procedures. I understand testing procedures.

How do I account for all of the anecdotes that undyed wool is warmer? Skin feel is a very tricky thing. It can be very accurate if one is doing many inter-comparisons over a short period of time (and logging them carefully). However, over periods of a few days, the quality of the comparisons falls off dramatically. And, it there is not diligent contemporaneous logging of results, then the memory is going top play tricks on the results. It would take an extraordinary body of work for me to disbelieve the physics and chemistry of the situation. It would take an extraordinary body of work for me to disbelieve the US Army on this topic. No, my work, the Army's research, Gerry Cunningham's work, and Mrs. Holubar's work all confirm the physics and chemistry of the situation.

I suggest that many samples of undyed wool contain traces of potassium salts of lanolin fatty acids that tend to bond with the hydrophilic sites on the wool fibers and which then present hydrophobic tails to liquid water. This would temporarily give these wools the same water transport properties as dyed wools.  However, lanolin is not a stable molecule.  It will oxidize, and the wool will lose this virtue. see for example http://journal.scconline.org/pdf/cc1966/cc017n03/p00157-p00169.pdf  

Moreover, it does not give them the same radiation absorption characteristics

In the Begining

I wore a very nice hand knit fisherman's sweater, and I about froze, so I asked the question, “How did the old fishermen stay warm?”

As late as 1844, it was hand knit sweaters. Why were their sweater warmer then our sweaters? I tried different wools and stitch patterns. None of theses were particularly warm. Then in 2004, I came across Gladys Thompson, Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys, & Arans. Careful reading showed that all the patterns were knit much, much tighter than any of the modern hand knitting patterns.

In those days, I knit on circs – Addi Turbos. However, the Gladys Thompson gauges were so tight they were very difficult for me to knit. So the question became, were those very tight fabrics worth the effort to knit. Were they so much warmer, that they would be worth effort?

I knew from the literature and basic physics that advection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advection, Air is a fluid that can advect heat ) was a major source of heat loss through clothing. I set out to measure air flow through knit fabrics. I took an old vacuum cleaner and made a little device to measure the pressure drop across a small sample of fabric. I also turned an old water bed heater into a heat source to measure conduction across small samples of fabric by measuring how long it took to melt a standard ice cube. Then I knit and tested hundreds of samples. I tested commercial fabrics and products.

The results were fairly straight forward.

1. Tighter was warmer. (in the range possible by hand knitting)
2. Some stitch patterns (in very tight knitting) dramatically increased the warmth of the fabric.
3. Hand knitting could produce fabrics that were as warm as the best commercial products.
4. Knitting such tight fabrics on circ needles was not practical. (Yes, it could be done but many who tried it, ended up requiring wrist surgery.)

Since science is the systematic collection and organization of information by the making of observations, formulation of hypothesis, and testing of those hypothesis, this was good science. However, there were nothing here that was any more deserving of a peer reviewed publication than any high school student's assigned science lab exercise. This had all be done, and published long before. My work simply calibrated my materials and techniques.

The early posts of this blog describe how I then worked out (un-vented) the old knitting sheath technologies so that I could easily knit much tighter and faster without damaging my wrists. The various garments that I have knit, tested, and used confirm and validate all of the testing that I did on the swatches. The proof of my swatch testing is the garments I knit on a daily basis. The proof of that swatch testing is when I do a demonstration; and, the oldest and most experienced knitters in the room, squeal, “Oh, My God! How do you knit such objects?”

People that have not seen my fabrics, simply do not believe such fabrics can be hand knit. And, they call me a liar, or worse. It is slander and liable, but I know they are just ignorant. And, it is OK! As long as they disbelieve, I know I am knitting much better than they are. If they started believing, they would use these techniques to produce objects that are better than anything I can dream.

The a view of the other side of my world is at : http://climatecrocks.com/2010/12/08/more-ben-santer/