WPI

As a spinner, I use wraps per inch (wpi) often. If I do a good job of measuring wpi, then the square of wpi is the grist in yards per pound. And the twist factor times times wpi equals required twist in tpi.

It works.  Mostly it is within 10% of the actual grist, and with corrections for fiber and construction, wpi can measure grist to within 2%, which is better than a yarn balance.

To measure wpi so that it indicates grist, you need a wpi gauge, you need to pack to refusal, and you need to practice.  You need to take various kinds of yarns with known grists, and practice doing wpi, until you get the correct grist, time after time.  It is a skill.

So, when a knitter says a yarn is 18 wpi, I figure the grist is 324 ypp (e.g., 18x18) -- that is like rope. Then, she gives the yarn band info of 175 yard per 2 oz. -- or 1,400 yards per pound. That is sock or fingering yarn. When I measure the wpi of that yarn, I get 37 wpi.  That tells me, and other spinners, the grist.

Packing the yarn to refusal gives a definite measure that can be made anywhere by anyone. Packing the yarn loosely so that a 1,400 ypp yarn so that it yields a wpi of 18 is not a repeatable measure of -- anything.  This approach is as much a measure of twist as of grist.  With this approach, high twist yarns will seem to have much lower grist than yarns with the same grist, but less twist - and vice  versa.

If you pack to refusal, then worsted and woolen yarns of the same grist will have the same wpi.  If you use the loose knitter's wpi, then worsted and woolen yarns of the same grist will have very different wpi.  If you pack to refusal then yarns of the same grist but different twist will have the same wpi. If you use the loose knitter's wpi, then yarns that are the same grist, but which have different twist will have different wpi.  This is silly.  What really counts to a knitter is the length and weight of the yarn.  These should be described by the wpi.  Twist of the yarn is less important.

In my world wpi and grist are related thusly:

wpi       grist (ypp)   spin count           notes

 22         484                                        Aran Yarn (traditionally was 10-ply of 10 count singles)
 24                             1
 26         676
 28         840                                        Worsted Yarn (traditionally was 6-ply of 10 count singles)
 30         900
 32         1,000                                     Gansey  Yarn ( 5-ply of 10 count singles)
 33         1,100                                     DK weight yarns
 34         1,120           2                        
 38         1,443                                    Common grist for commercial sock yarns e.g., Wooly West
 40         1,650           3                      My 6-strand sock yarn
 42         1,800                                   Single cut woolen singles         
 44         1935                                    Fingering Yarn
 48         2,303                                   Jumper Weight/ Spindrift weight 2-ply
 53         2,800          5                        
 60         3,600                                    2-cut woolen singles @ 9 tpi
 60         3,733          7                        Traditional 6-ply sock yarn from 40 count singles
 64         4,100                                     Modern lace weight
 75         5,600          10s                    Singles for warp/ 9-10 tpi  & woolen singles for weft @ 12 tpi
 80         6,700          13                      Traditional 3-ply Shetland lace plied up from 40 count singles
 105       11,200        20s                    Worsted singles that I use for my sock yarn @ 14 tpi
 120       14,400                                   8- cut woolen singles / 18 tpi
 130       16,800        30s                     Worsted singles @ 17 tpi
 136       18,000                                   10-cut woolen singles / 20 tpi
 142       20,200                                  2-ply from 80s  
 150       22,400       40s                     Traditional grist for singles used for best sock yarn/ 17 -20 tpi
 182       33,600       60s                     Traditional commercial  "fines" / 22- 24 tpi
 210       44,800       80s                     Traditional best commercial "fines"  /24 - 27 tpi

A defined ratio between wpi and grist make working with yarn easier.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that the textile industry was likely more important to defining various units of measure than the size of the king's foot or finger.
 
Twist per inch numbers reflect the firmer yarns that I am spinning since starting to spin warp. Before, my 40 count singles were only 17 tpi. These higher tpi were allowed by my move  from 25 mm to  ~50 mm flier/bobbin whorls.

And, it is all hand spinning.  Everything above is plus or minus 10%.  I calculate grist by winding hanks of 560 yards and weighing them on a kitchen scale to the nearest gram.  In the past, I used a jeweler's scale to weigh fine spinning.  Now I just weigh fine hanks 4 at a time and calculate the grist on the basis of  grams per 2,240 yards.

ETA - It is worth noting that plying takes up about 10% of the length of  the starting singles.  Thus, if one starts with 5 hanks of 10s, then one gets just over 500 yards of gansey yarn, and the grist of the 5-ply gansey yarn is is a bit more than the 5 times the grist of the singles.  This small change in grist cannot often be measured by wpi.

Spinning fine and fast in the old world

I have pointed to spinning fine and fast as a spinning standard.  So, how fine and did the old spinners spin?  How fine were the yarns produced in the arc of western culture?  We know the Old Kingdom Egyptian Pharaohs were buried in shrouds of very fine linen produced locally, and cotton of similar fineness imported from India. Thus, 4,500 years ago, very fine textiles were being spun and woven in two different regions of the world.  Two different regions at that time had talented and professional spinners and weavers with long traditions.

What then is the arc of fine textiles moving forward?

Looking at A Fifth-century B.C. Grave-Group from Karabournaki in the British Museum as described by Catherine Morgan ( 2015), we see photos of two fragments of animal fiber textile with more detail in the:
Appendix: a preliminary study of the textile
fragment on GR 1919, 11-19.8.
Joanne Cutler and Margarita Gleba
(Institute of Archaeology, University College
London)

And, I quote: 
The textile remains were examined with a hand lens
and a digital microscope (Dino-Lite). The fabric is
a weft-faced tabby (tabby is the simplest form of
weave, in which the weft thread passes alternately
over and under one warp thread) with a count of
11-12 threads per centimeter in the warp and 48-52
threads per centimeter in the weft. Although no visible
edges are preserved, all unbalanced tabbies of
this period found in Greece are weft-faced. The warp
threads are z-twisted and tightly spun (with a twist
angle of more than 45°), with a thread diameter of
0.25-0.3 mm. The weft threads have a thread diameter
of 0.22-0.33 mm (a very similar range to the
warp threads)98, although unlike the warp threads
they have no clearly discernible spin99. The fibre in
both thread systems is also very similar in appearance
(ca 20-30 μm in diameter) and very uniform.
Both wool and linen textiles of this type dating to
the first millennium B.C. are known in Greece100.
Preliminary SEM analysis indicates that the fibre
is of animal origin101.
The fineness of the thread used is consistent with
the majority of published Classical textile remains
from Greece (mostly from Attica), which have a
thread diameter of 0.2-0.3 mm102. Many of the Classical
textile fragments analysed are balanced tabbies
(with approximately the same number of threads of
similar thickness in both the warp and the weft).
However, a number are weft-faced tabbies, with weft
thread counts that, as at Karabournaki, can reach
ca 60 threads per centimeter103. A few fragments
from Kamatero, Kalyvia, Marousi and Kerameikos
have even higher counts (the fragments from Kamatero
and Kerameikos have up to 120 weft threads
per centimeter) and are woven with extremely fine
threads, some less than 0.1 mm in diameter. Nearly
all of the Classical textiles analysed are made of plant
fibre, mostly linen, although this probably reflects
differential preservation factors since most were
found in association with bronze objects which generally
favour the preservation of plant fibres. The
vast majority of these Classical textiles are woven
with single z-twisted fibres in both the warp and the
weft. The lack of obvious spin in the weft of the
Karabournaki textile is unusual, but it is also evident
in the extremely weft-faced Classical textile fragments
from Kamatero and Kalyvia104.
The Karabournaki textile is an important addition
to the current corpus of Classical textile remains.
It provides a comparandum from a northern
Greek context to compare with the more numerous
textiles from southern Greece and with the Vergina
textiles of the second half of the fourth century B.C.
(which include a purple textile in the tapestry technique,
and a balanced tabby, possibly cotton, with
ca 25 threads per centimeter)105.

This tells us that the Classic Greeks were spinning combed wool at grists of 10,000 ypp (20 m/gram) to  22,400 ypp (45 m/g) for fabrics. We see that some of the wool was as fine as wool from modern fine wool breeds e.g., 20 micron, and that it had been well graded and sorted. Tools for such spinning are more sophisticated that what are typically used by Classcial Greece period en-actors.  And, the spinning skills of the period were higher then typically seen in Classcial Greece period en-actors.

Moreover, the looms were more sophisticated.  Nobody can weave on a warp of 120 wool warp threads per cm with a simple 1-beam vertical weighted loom.  If you think otherwise, show me useful quantities of wool cloth that you have woven at 120 warp threads per cm from handspun! -  using low twist weft!!  They wove  "himations", a very large rectangle of fabric.  OK, not as large as a Roman toga, but not something that can be woven on a single beam loom using the threads described above. We know the Greeks traded around the world, and 2-beam looms for weaving fine fabrics were known in Egypt, India, and the Fertile  Crescent.  The Greeks had them also.  We know this by reverse engineering the fabric.  

It is not just me. See for example ( https://www.academia.edu/13430688/_Aegean_Bronze_Age_Textile_Production_Techniques_-_Spinning_and_Weaving_2nd_Experimental_Archaeology_Workshop_in_Warsaw_15-19_June_2015_short_report ) 
They tried, and did not get the fabrics discussed above.  And they were not even using hand spun.  The kicker is the low twist weft - it is hard to handle in a single beam/ weft weight loom.


The loom on the urn?  Symbols in art persist for centuries after the technology has been superseded.  We teach the history of technology better than we teach current technology.  How many modern hand weavers cnd sit down and draw the mechanics of a modern Full Electronic High Speed Rapier Loom Machine with Mechanical Dobby?  Not many!  At Lambtown, 3 "dads" pointed to my spinning wheel and told their kids that I was using a "loom".  Artists do art for dads and their kids.

The timeline for textile technologies that has been shouted at me over and over is wrong.  Classic Greece had textile workers with great skill, and the tools to display those skills. In particular, they had good 2-beam looms.  These folks were not making the kind of coarse fabrics that can be made on the single beam loom w/ weft weights used by subsistence weavers in more recent times.  The Classic Greeks had talented professional spinners and weavers with traditions reaching back hundreds or thousands of years. 

I have said that "competent spinners" could spin wool at its spin count. I have said that "spinning fine and fast" was a skill highly  praised. I did not say everyone had to spin fine and fast. I did not say that everybody should learn to spin wool at its spin count.  

I  said that I like textiles made from yarns with fine singles.  I said, that judging by the fabrics and textiles in places like Target, Costco, and Needless Markup, others also like fabrics and textiles produced from fine yarns.  Catherine Morgan /Joanne Cutler and Margarita Gleba tell us that the Classic Greeks also liked fabrics and textiles produced from fine singles.

Why I am not like a real knitter or real spinner

When  Cold Fusion was reported, I went down to the metals lab, got some titanium, and in a week had replicated their results right down to the anomalous explosion without ionizing radiation.  That is me, I go try things even when the expected results is everything blowing up.  I had set the experiment up in my Berkeley apartment, and it did make a mess of everything.

Real knitters and spinner do not do that kind of thing  They read. They buy commercial available knitting and spinning tools. And, they buy books of patterns. They do not set up experiments in their apartments.

For example, Mary Thomas's Book of knitting discusses knitting sheaths and hooked knitting needles.  It has been widely and easily available for a very long time. How many real knitters bothered to make and try knitting sheaths?  In the last 7 or 8 years that I have been knitting with a knitting sheath, I have only met 2 knitters that had used a knitting before I sold or gave them a knitting sheath, and I have heard of 5 or 6 others.   The book is out there.  Knitting sheaths are easy to make.  Why have not hundreds of knitters that have tried knitting sheaths?  They might have tried them and not found a knitting sheath helpful, but it says something about knitters that they have not tried them.

Alden's Big Book of Handspinning has been out for a long time and is widely available.  In it are a number of pictures of spinning wheels with accelerators.  Why haven't more real spinners tried them? They might try accelerators and reject them, but why not try them?  Why have not more spinners tried differential rotation speed (DRS) controlled flier/bobbin assemblies?  It says something about spinners that they have not tried either technology.

Regarding cold fusion, I had seen the explosion exactly as reported, but by the time I had cleaned up the mess, I knew with a visceral certainty that it was just a hydrogen explosion, rather than cold fusion.  It would have taken a long time to get that kind of visceral certainty from the reticent language of peer reviewed papers.  If I had not tried the experiment myself, it would have taken me years to get over the fear that the fossil fuel done a cover up.

By then, it was very clear that the  public relations groups working for the tobacco industry had perfected techniques to throw doubt on good science.

My results are that knitting sheaths are powerful tools that are well worth their cost and the effort to learn to use them very well.  Likewise DRS.  Likewise accelerator wheels for spinning. The cost and effort in every case is significant, but very worthwhile.

Spinning

Spinning and the textiles it produced was essential to civilization.

The modern spinning community has divided into various fractions.  Most spin as a pastime.  Some spin as a form of political protest.  Some spin as ritual at social occasions. Some spin as an art form. Very few spin as the craft that has always been essential to civilization.

Is spinning still essential to civilization?  I think the spinning community should work very hard to make (and keep) spinning relevant to civilization.  Those who spin as a pastime often seem intent on being rude to those who do not accept the Victorian Lady school of spinning.  They tell us that we do not need to spin that fast, or we do not need to spin that fine.  They tell us we do not need those tools or those skills.

Machine made pottery is cheaper, but potters keep their craft alive and relevant. Good potters earn enough that they can afford to spend enough hours doing ceramics to keep their skills honed.  

Do you want to admit that potters are better a their craft than spinners are at theirs?

Halloween

The tool of choice for spinning the weft is the AA#1 fast flier with the big bobbin Alden supplied and the 1.05 DRS flier whorl that I made.  That whorl works best with a 2-handed drafting technique.  However, last night I wanted one hand free, so I used the stock flier whorl that Alden Amos supplied.  It has a DRS of 1.2. This DRS  (with drive band slip), works much, much better for one-handed long draw.

That flier/bobbin setup and long draw is a more pleasant way to spin than my normal rig. I admit it.   If I was just spinning as a pastime, I would use the flier/bobbin set as it come out of the box from Alden Amos. My whorl turns hand spinning into real work.

However, I spin because I want the yarn.   I am willing to work so that I get yarn faster.

With the AA stock rig,  my no-load bobbin speed was the same as always.  However, under load, the speed dropped to about half of the speed that I get with my DRS flier whorl. Both have ~ 20:1 drive-wheel to bobbin ratio. It turns out that the advertised drive-wheel to flier ratio means very little, because these ratios say nothing about how much drive band slip occurs.  What counts is actual flier/bobbin assembly speed. Actual flier/bobbin assembly speed can be easily determined with an inexpensive tachometer.  If you do not have a tachometer, you will not understand why you cannot spin as fine and as fast as I do.

If it takes me 70 hours to spin my weft with my DRS whorl,  it would take me ~140 hours to spin it with the stock Alden Amos High Speed  (#1) DD  Flyer. It would be a pleasant 140 hours, but I want my yarn faster. Then the AA HSF is ~15% faster than my Ashford  (ST) lace flyer, so it would take me 160 hours to spin this project on the  Ashford lace flyer, more than 200 hours to spin it on the stock Ashford DD flyer/bobbin, and on the close order of 250 hours to spin it on my standard Ashford Scotch Tension flyer. This is not to say anything against Ashford, because I do not know of another wheel that would have been as easy to modify to increase its speed. (And, I did spin 5# of 5,600 ypp worsted singles on the stock Ashford DD flyer/bobbin Assembly.  That was 28,000 yd.  Then, I spun  a lot more as I started modifying the whorls.)

This little weaving project only  requires 25,000 yd of  (warp+weft).  Thus, on this one project alone, the modifications to my Traddy stand to save me ~ 130 hours.  A faster wheel allows me to do 3 projects in the time it would have taken me just to spin one project.  Tools matter.   Today, I see that if I am starting with a stock Ashford Traddy,  it will save me time in the long run to have a good fast wheel.  I understand that it is worth putting in a hundred hours to make my wheel run faster because I will make it up in one project.  I understand that it is worth the effort to make a faster drop spindle is worth while because I will make it up in one project.  On the other hand, I never let "perfect" be the enemy of good.  I seek better tools, not perfect tools.

If I had started with an Louet or Majacraft  wheel, I would not have the kind of speed that I have today because they are harder to modify and customize.  This is not "sour grapes, this is understanding the engineering and performance compromises inherent in such power transfer systems.

I have done these kinds of  studies before, but every time I calculate drive belt slip on typical modern spinning configurations, it is a little scary.

We made it past Halloween, so Happy All Souls Day!

One Yarn Project.

About spring thaw, I went  looking to buy a loom, and visited a loom dealer that had put a loom aside for me. We ended up sitting in the back of my truck with her poking through a bin of my knitting swatches. She said, "Dang!, These are unbelievable! We need to take these up to the house. You know he was a great knitter."

He pawed through them, and said, " Kinda grubby!  No hand spun here!"  Thus, was born the hand spun gloves project.

I chose the knitting tools, and sampled hand spun yarns from the stash. No joy. I  made up samples of  other possible yarns from hand spun singles in the stash.

   

 
      No Joy.


I then took some Rambouillet :

 washed it with soap flakes and borax,





 and blended it on my Clems carder with some navy blue combed Romney from a gansey yarn project to produce a lavender color way with white neps for accent.  This is my first "art yarn" (neps!). The Rambouillet makes it soft, the Romney gives it good wear at the finger tips.  Over all the blend gives reasonable wear without being too harsh.

The bats are sprayed with spinning oil, torn into lengths, and wound on my distaff to facilitate spinning. I spin singles at 4,800 ypp (9s) using the spinning technique shown in videos on this blog,
( http://gansey.blogspot.com/2012/01/another-video-of-spinning.html )
but with the gang whorls on the flier.  

My typical spinning wheel bobbin rotation speed as measured with a digital tachometer is 2,300 rpm. Compare that to the 800 rpm that a stock Ashord Traddy can do.  Even with a lace flyer, Ashfords do not go much faster than 1,400 rpm. Most espinners are limited to 1,600 rpm.  Twist is DRS controlled to just over  8 tpi.  Net spinning rate is around 300 yards per hour. I note that there is nothing on my wheel that a 15th century spinner in Flanders could not have had. I very much doubt if I spin as fast as the spinners in Bruges, 500 years ago.  Over all,  "spinning" is a tiny part of the project.

I am sure that I do not spin as well as the spinners in Bruges, 500 years ago.   They were trained pros with elan.

Singles are wound off onto reels using an electric drill to drive the reel, washed (with shampoo),  dried (blocked), and then wound onto smaller plying bobbins. Singles with spinning oil on them need to be washed within a month. Last fall when I was working with hanks of fines, I  found wet skeins to be problematic, and moved to washing singles on reels. I made enough reels that I can wash and dry singles faster than I can spin them.

 

Once the yarn is clean (and loosely wound) on a plying bobbin it can be stored.  I have many yarn storage/plying bobbins.

Current plying technique is to put the plying bobbins on a bobbin rack or lazy Kate, feed the singles through my tension box, and ply with the same gang whorl flyer as used to produce the singles.  If I was making gansey yarn, I would use the Ashford jumbo flyer so that I could produce knot free, 8 oz hanks.  However, the (smaller) high speed flier is much faster and  each glove only requires ~2 oz of yarn in 5 pieces, so smaller yarn packages are acceptable.

 
The full plying train of Lazy Kate,          Tension Box,  and                            Wheel with high speed flier.

A tension box used on blocked singles really is an advance on Alden's Four Great Principles of Plying. Tension boxes are simple to make, and worth their weight in hand spun yarn.

The finished yarn is wound off the wheel with  a cake winder, to produce :

3/4 ounce of 1,500 ypp, 3-ply,  glove yarn

(~70 yards)

Knit, the color matches the lavender buds I was putting in the wool bins at the start of the project, and which inspired the color for this yarn. It is warm, durable, and comfortable.

The swaving pricks are the same 1.5 mm used for the cotton sock fabric in the last post. The semi worsted yarn knits easily at 12 to 14 spi. to make an elastic fabric.  Yarn for final objects will likely get a final  blocking with steam. 

Final objects will get washed again.

A New Twist on Lace Fliers

I came to spinning not as a spinner, but as a person interested in yarns that I could not get from commercial sources. As a good student, I asked, “What is the best way to spin fine, high twist singles?” The conventional wisdom that I received was to use a “Lace Flier”.

Lace fliers are Scotch tension flier and bobbin assemblies ostensible designed for the rapid production of lace singles. They tend to be “balanced”, and have low friction bearings to allow them to spin at very high speed. They are flier lead and have small whorls resulting in “high ratios” so that they can turn very fast with a limited treadle rate. Or, at least that is the conventional wisdom.

In fact, at lower speeds (400 – 800 rpm) this is how lace fliers work. As a beginning spinner starts wanting to spin faster, a lace flier helps them insert more twist into their fine singles, and for the beginning spinner, it seems like a lace flier is the ultimate answer to rapidly spinning fine singles.

At slightly higher speeds, things start to fall apart. At low speeds, it takes very little power to drive the flier and bobbin. Windage is minimal. Energy to accelerate the flier is minimal. Energy going into twisting the yarn is minimal. And, (if you oiled your wheel) friction is minimal. However, windage is proportional to the cube of the speed and acceleration is proportional to the square of the speed, with the power dissipated as friction and going into twist being directly proportional to the speed. Together these represent a power consumption function. All the power to the flier is supplied to the flier and bobbin by the drive belt.

Thus, if “windage” consumes 1 watt at 400 rpm, it will consume 8 watts at 800 rpm, 27 watts at 1,200 rpm, 64 watts at 1,600 rpm, and 125 watts at 2000 rpm. This power must be delivered by the drive band. A piece of kitchen string tied with a square knot can easily transfer 8 watts, even if it is sweeping a small whorl. To get that kitchen string to transfer 125 watts (i.e., 2,000 rpm) you are going to have to ply it up into a cable and douse it in a high-friction belt compound, otherwise that belt is going to slip or break. You will be treadling like like crazy, and you wheel will be making all the noises that say it is going fast, but drive belt will be slipping against that little lace flier whorl, so that the flier and bobbin are not going as fast as you think they are going.

Wheel wrights have put great effort into reducing the windage of their lace fliers, but that cubed function for windage is against them. And, in a Scotch tension system, the bobbin cannot go any faster than the flier. In fact, the bobbin speed (and hence twist) will be between 10 % and 30 % less than the flier speed.

The truth is that a high-speed double drive system will provide higher bobbin speed and hence insert more twist into the yarn, allowing faster spinning than a lace flier. There are several reasons for this. Double drive wheels have more than twice as much contact surface with the drive band to transfer more than twice as much power. In a double drive system the bobbin goes 10 % to 30 % faster than the flier. Thus, if you have a Scotch tension wheel and a double drive wheel with the fliers going at the same speed, the double drive wheel will be putting 20 % to 60% more twist into the yarn. I did not know this when I looked at the ratios of various fliers as I prepared to buy my first wheel.

Last summer, I spun 10 miles of 5,600 ypp singles with a lace flier on my Ashford Traddy, and I guessed much of the above. In December, I got a Neiko Digital Tachometer (NDT). That confirmed my worst fears. I was wasting effort. I was treadling and my drive belt was slipping like crazy. (Despite that fact that I have long experience with drive belts in the power range of 0.5 to 800 hp, and I know how to minimize belt slip.) The bottom line is that the small swept area of the lace flier whorl is not capable of handling the power required to drive the flier at much over 2,000 rpm.

The NDT tells me that if I treadle diligently, I can insert a lot more twist into my yarn using the high-speed double drive (ratio stated as 17:1) than I can using the lace flier that Ashford tells me has a ratio of 40:1. For example, the NDT tells me that the Ashford Turbo dive band starts slipping at ~2,000 rpm. It does not matter how much tension I put on it, the band does not drive the Ashford Lace Flier faster, no matter how fast I treadle. From my treadle pace, I think my flier is flying, but the NDT is there to keep me honest.

The NDT tells me that much of what is tossed around about speed of spinning is not accurate. And, it tells me that much of the conventional wisdom about spinning is wrong.



A faster DD bobbin/whorl set for my Traddy that I made by hand.

Moreover, the industry has a odd way of calculating the ratios for DD spinning wheels.  The actual drive wheel/ bobbin ratio affecting spin insertion for the high-speed Ashford DD bobbin/whorl set is closer to 22:1.  The drive wheel/ flier ratio is ~ the stated 17:1, but in practice the bobbin turns faster than the flier, and thus twist insertion is greater than would be expected by comparing the ratios of the DD kit with the ratios of the lace flier kit.

DD is the smart spinner's way to fast twist insertion.