Saturday, July 30, 2011

The second generation of hand spun gansey yarn

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I have stopped hand spinning 5-ply gansey yarn. (Mostly !) These days, I spin 6-ply.  Construction is 3 x 2-ply. I like knitting yarns co...
4 comments:
Friday, July 22, 2011

The trail to 9,000 ypp

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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 ...
4 comments:
Thursday, May 19, 2011

DIY: high speed production wheel for high grist singles

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Background: In 2009, I decided that commercial gansey yarns were not as good as what they could be and that I should spin my own. (These si...
9 comments:
Wednesday, April 20, 2011

9,000 ypp worsted singles and DRS

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Last winter, I decided that (in the old days), there were spinners producing 8,960 ypp singles for weaving into cloth for garments and that ...
4 comments:
Saturday, April 16, 2011

Supporting your work

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Basically, large objects get supported on the lap, whether you are working with circs, 3+1 x 14" DPN with a Shetland knitting pouch, 4...
5 comments:
Sunday, April 10, 2011

History of a knitting sheath

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In the last post, there is a photo of some knitting sheaths and the top one is an open twist design - and one of the prettiest knitting she...
Friday, April 08, 2011

Belts

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A knitting group that I belong to teases me about my having more belts than Imelda Marcos has pairs of shoes. Yes, I have a lot of belts. ...
3 comments:

knitting sticks in the Dutch Style

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knitting sticks 1Q10 , a photo by agres@sbcglobal.net on Flickr. Tucked into apron strings, knitting sticks were used with short needles fo...
Monday, March 21, 2011

More Plies

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How many plies does it take to make a good knitting yarn? More! Modern knitters have forgotten that more plies are warmer and more durab...
1 comment:
Monday, March 14, 2011

A gansey by any other name

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I have been going through old sources on knitting, looking at what they made, what the material was, and what they called it. The results ha...
Sunday, February 27, 2011

How long did it take to make a Seaman's sweater?

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When I first asserted that knit "sweaters" were a regular part of a seaman's regular wear, I was told that they took too long ...
Friday, February 25, 2011

Cable needles and knitting sheaths

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Single point needles and cable needles do not work with knitting sheaths. At one point, I put a lot effort into thinking about ways it co...
5 comments:
Friday, January 14, 2011

Virtues of Scotch Tension

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Previously, I noted that Double Drive (DD) spinning wheels can go faster because they have two drive bands to transmit that power from the d...
9 comments:
Sunday, January 09, 2011

A New Twist on Lace Fliers

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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...
9 comments:
Monday, December 06, 2010

Modern Knitting as Art

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Back in art school, I learned that: Art is something that makes people think about their world. In general, art is a non-functional represen...
5 comments:

In the Begining

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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...
3 comments:
Monday, November 22, 2010

I got it wrong on spindles

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I looked at videos of Peruvian spinners, and thought they were using the Berber spiral groove on their bottom whorl spinners. They were not...
1 comment:
Sunday, November 07, 2010

The state of yarn

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Knitters talk about how warm a lace shawl is -- that is silly.  Lace shawls are only "warm" in the context of a very mild environ...
8 comments:
Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Drop spindles do gansey yarn

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Spindles for testing A friend, who is a very experienced spinner with a large collection of good spinning equipment, "demanded"...
7 comments:

Why 5-ply?

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Alden Amos says in his, Big Book of Handspinning, that there is no reason to spin 5-ply yarns. In fact, 5-ply yarns are more supple for th...
2 comments: