The "anonymice" want to chew on the notebooks.

None of this was about science.  It was about technology.  This is the kind of technical development that most companies do, and which they keep private as trade secrets.  Go to your cell phone company, and ask to see the data on how they developed their last model.  Then, see what kind of a reception you get.  I am a nice guy. :  )

Just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of the knitting is in the wearing. No pile of numbers can inform you as to just how warm a hand knit garment can be. The only thing that can give you the gut feeling of how warm a hand knit garment can be is to wear an ordinary knit garment in the rain until you are cold, (and I mean the kind of cold that hurts,) then while still in that cold rain, then put on a good tightly knit gansey. In a few minutes, you will understand just how warm hand knit wool can be. Numbers cannot tell you this. However, it is easy to make your own samples to touch and feel.

You can prove the effects with some cheapo metal #1 DPN and some tightly spun gansey yarn or MacAuslands. You whittle/drill a knitting sheath or stick - crude works - directions are in this blog. Total investment less than $10. Videos of the knitting process are in this blog.

Then, you knit some swatches. Do you like the firmer fabric? - that is all that counts.

Early swatches

I started by knitting tiny swatches, from 800 - 1,000 ypp yarns, very tightly on # 1 circs, and blowing air through them.  Yes, they blocked air flow and thus should be warm, but I did not see any practical way to knit such fabrics. Knitting them with circs was too hard on my wrists. The early data was crap because the fabrics were crap. It only told me that tighter was warmer, and that the relationship was not linear.  As I knit tighter and tighter, suddenly the fabric was much warmer.  The curve relating fabric density to warmth has a sharp bend in it.

 I spent months trying various combinations of long DPN to knit tighter fabrics, and mostly just poked holes in my wife's living room furniture. It was months before I figured out how to use a knitting sheath. Then, the fabrics were much better.

Second Generation Swatches

Blowing air through and pouring water on the Second Generation Swatches gave me the courage to knit some sweaters at those gauges and in those patterns.  The interesting thing to come out the second generation was that some stitch patterns were much warmer than other stitch patterns. This caused me to think incorrectly that the cable patterns were somehow connected with additional warmth.  This was clearly one point where I got things wrong.

I knit the first real gansey from the old Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool.  (The production of this yarn has been moved to China, and it is now very different!)  In those days it was 5 finely spun plies, loosely plied to together.  I knit the sweater on gansey needles with a knitting sheath in about 30 days while I was taking time off to rest my wrists from too much computer work.  This is the warmest garment that I have ever knit.  It is good for skiing on cold days and taking naps in the snow.  It was knit in white, worn and tested, then dyed blue to see if blue sweaters were warmer.  They are.  Note that this is an odd yarn.  You are not going to be able to replicate anything like this gansey because this kind of yarn is simply not available.  On the other hand, this is a very important data point for the hand spinner because it tells us that yarn structure is very important in the warmth of the fabric, and that yarn plies can rearrange themselves within the fabric structure to fill in gaps.  Such rearrangement is not possible with more tightly plied yarns.  Thus, there is more than one way to make a very warm fabric.

The second gansey was knit from MacAusland's three ply (Aran weight). It was knit on #3 steel DPN.  This I call my "gardening gansey" and has been worn until it is going thread bare and no longer has as much warmth as it had that first year.  Then it was worn while I pruned my mother's apple orchard in a week of freezing rain and wind.  The only other guys out that week we the power company's emergency linemen repairing the power lines that kept icing up and blowing down.  I still did not understand how special a tightly knit sweater could be.

One cold rainy day, I put a couple of ordinary fisherman's sweaters that we hand purchased in Canada and the two sweaters that I had knit tightly in my backpack and I went went for a long walk.  I would put on one of the commercial sweaters, and in 15 minutes, I was cold, wet, and freezing.  I would put one of my sweaters on, and in 15 minutes, I was warm, dry and comfortable.  This was an Epiphany! Numbers based on swatches did not hint at the warmth of the entire garment.  These inter-garment comparisons have been done over and over, as they are the only way to get a measure of the truth about how warm a particular garment construction is.

Moreover air flow through the fabric is a minor part of the effect.  The critical point is getting the fabric tight enough to block drops of liquid water.  Fabrics that block the movement of liquid water through the fabric are much warmer than fabrics that do not.  This is true even when it is not raining because the body produces a lot of water vapor that tends to condense on the outer surface of  clothing in cold weather.  Convention knit fabrics are so loose that these droplets tend to be redistributed back toward the skin with any motion of the fabric.  Then the droplets wet the skin or under garments (often linen or cotton, which wicks the water against the skin), the water absorbs its heat of vaporization from the skin (cooling the skin), and the water vapor moves outward through the fabric, condenses on the outer surface of the clothing, and is transported back to the skin again.  Thus, the liters of water released by the body each day can transport huge amounts of heat away from the skin because the water recirculates through the clothing system.

Laying a gansey on a table,  pouring a bottle of water on it, and having no water leak through to the table is more dramatic that any notebook full of numbers.  It says, this sweater is different from any sweater you have ever worn.  There are photographs in this blog of sweaters on the patio, with water on them.  Yes, those sweaters are different from anything that you know.  They are weatherproof.  However, seeing that a sweater is weatherproof  still does not convey how warm the garment is.  One problem is that we do not have words for the "warmth of garments" in common English, and most people do not have experience with the technical units (i.e., R value, suits).

It turns out to be very easy to knit stuff that is way too warm for ordinary use. The only people that need gear that warm are professionals - crab fishermen on the Bering Sea, electrical linemen working during an ice storm, guys installing tire chains, and so forth. Most recreational sailors, hikers, skiers, & bikers do not venture out in really bad weather.

This is hand knitting. A dab of hand lotion changes the tension and hence the warmth of the fabric. Different batches of yarn are blended from different kinds of wool and thus generate different insulation values. Nothing is standard. On the other hand the skill of the knitter allows the production of consistently warm objects.

The vagaries of hand knitting are not big deal if you just want to knit a fabric that is warm enough to keep a sailor warm. You simply test your own materials and knitting technique.  If you knit a garment that fits rather snugly, and you knit it tight enough that you can lay the swatch (or the garment) on the floor, pour a bottle of water on it, and 20 minutes later the floor is still dry, then that (swatch) garment is weatherproof and will keep a sailor warm. Another test is to hold a single layer of the fabric right in front of your eyes as you face a bright window. If you cannot see the outline of the window, then that garment is weatherproof and will keep a sailor warm. Two different tests and they both work.

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

Knitting sheath with clew

A very functional knitting sheath with a clew to hold the yarn.

The wide hook of the clew was made to hold the big center pull cakes of yarn from my jumbo winder. Clews to hold other shapes of yarn balls have other shapes.  Clews to hold yarn balls being unwound from the outside need swivels.   

The Spinning News

With my fixed DRS, I have to spin a little (couple hundred yards) and then wind off or my twist changes too much.  Thus, speed of winding off affects my rate of production.  I tend to wind off onto a storage bobbin set into my wood lathe. I use a little wooden jam chuck so the storage bobbin can be easily stopped, while the lathe continues to spin.  Yesterday, I seem to have had the bobbin set a bit tight and it grabbed 2 spinning bobbins off of the holding rack and smashed them to pieces (in different wind off operations).  This is why I do not buy $30 spinning bobbins. Until I turn new bobbins, I am stuck spinning frog hair, and I hope the frog hair is not strong enough to pull that last bobbin off of the wind off rack.  On the other hand, I did not expect the 9,000 ypp to be strong enough to pull a bobbin off the rack either.

Mostly I spin coarse long wool such as Cotswold, Romney, Jacob, and Shetland.  By modern hobby standards (NOT http://www.bothwellspinin.com/spinin/files/LongestThreadResults_2011l.pdf ) I spin fairly fine.  Recently, a LYS owner applied the correct reverse psychology to get me to buy a couple of bags of Cormo. That kind of changes the rules.  Makes me think about an ultra fine bobbin and spinning finer.

Last fall, I made some of Amos's drive band dressing.  It helped at lot. It gave me more speed and my DD drive band has spun at least 30,000 yards of singles and is still going strong.  Anyway, I gave the last of that batch of belt dressing away not too long ago.  Thus, I had to make some more.  I buy blocks of bees wax from bee keepers at the local farmer's market.  I buy the little pouches of powdered rosin that are sold in sporting goods stores for baseball players.  Then, I melt  2 oz of bees wax in a double boiler ( I use an old can  set in a skillet of simmering water.  Paste a 1/4 cup of the rosin with a tablespoon of turpentine, and mix into the melted wax.  I pour the mix into little plastic portion containers, and let cool.  It really works.  I had been spinning at ~2,200 rpm, and with fresh belt dressing, I was back over 3,000 rpm - with less noise and vibration.  And, it had only been a couple of weeks since I had put dressing on that drive belt.  With a cotton belt and no dressing, I am lucky to get up to 1500 rpm.  This is the process from Amos' Big Book of Hand spinning.  He has more detail and some extra cautions.  Basically, the process will make a mess.  Wax that gets above ~212F will start to degrade and become very flammable.  And, making drive band dressing is a good time to recycle (and discard) old cans.

Warmer Yarn

Last night I was in Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft store and a 100 gram skein of  Kashmira by Sensations jumped  in my basket.  Sensations is a house brand for Jo-Anns, so I was not too thrilled.  How could something like that appeal to a yarn snob like myself?

It is about gansey weight - 260 meters for 100 grams - nothing special there.

Is is 10-ply!, constructed as 5 x 2-ply.  Ya, it is special.

The fibers are about as fine as those in Frangipanni and Wingham's, but are longer.  Long fibers are good. The wool has some luster - that is good.

The density is high enough that it is a very warm yarn, but not so dense that the fabric is heavy.  This yarn produces the warmest fabric for its weight of any yarn that I have tested. On my #1 needles it produced about 7 spi, and that is how I would knit it.

If you want to knit a garment that is very light weight, but very warm, this is the yarn.  I do not know how fabrics from this yarn will stand up to life, but it is an amazing yarn.

______

Edited to add on 8/29/2011: I have not been observant.  I have been spending too much time spinning and not enough time shopping for yarn.  There are a number of (new??) highly structured yarns (lots of fine plies) that should fun to knit and provide outstanding fabrics.

More on knitting for fishing

I keep coming back to the question of when seamen and fishermen started wearing knit upper body garments. I open the topic of "Traditions of Commercial Fishing in Great Britain", and folks bring up anecdotes about herring and salmon fishing in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. No!, I want to go back to when British fishermen were developing the skills, tools, ships, and systems that allowed them to “fish out” the waters around Britain by 1300 AD. When people talk about “traditional” fishing from the coast of England in the 19^th Century, they are talking about fishing in waters that had been fished out for 600 years. They are talking about the last embers of a long dead industry.

Read *Cod* by Mark Kurlansky (ISBN 0-08027-1326-2) very carefully.  Look at the bench ends from St. Nicolas' Chapel near Norfolk, England in the Victoria and Albert Museum  in London that were carved circa 1415. These bench ends depict English ships in the Icelandic Cod Fishery. They went to Iceland because they had fished out home waters. 

Iceland was cold. It was a longer voyage. And, it belonged to the Hansa. A British ship caught fishing in Hansa waters was in trouble. Fishing Icelandic waters was the result of British fishermen being so good that they had taken all the fish closer to home. The St. Nicolas' Chapel bench ends tells us that those British fishermen were good enough to make a great success of the Icelandic Fishery, despite its great difficulty. The bench ends tell us that they had mastered the concept of the square-rigged ship. Thus, by 1415 they had all the tools, skills and systems to make square-rigged ships work in an open ocean environment. That is not when they started developing those systems, that when all of the systems were in such good working order that  they had already made a lot of money.  It likely took generations and generations of seamen and fishermen to develop those skills.

This was consistent with what was going in English maritime trade. From *A history of the administration of the royal navy and of merchant shipping in relation to the navy* by M. Oppenheim (1896) or *The Royal Navy* with Some Notes on the Costume of Sailors by Swinburne (1907).) we discover that the English navy and the English merchant trade developed together, and thus must have shared a large number of ship management skills and tools such as how to feed crews, how to keep crews warm, sleeping arrangements, as well as the obvious sailing and navigation skills and tools. The maritime trade overlapped with the fishing industry and they shared the same management skills and tools.

On page 342 of *The Royal Navy*, I note a reference to G. Chaucer (1343-1400), who spent several years as a special royal envoy to textile merchants in Flanders, and later Italy, prior to writing the referenced passage. Thus, Chaucer knew his fabrics and had spent time on ships, when in latter life, he wrote his great poetry. The term "falding" from which Chaucer's sailor's "sea-gowne" was made included knit fabrics. This is all consistent with the History Chapter in Priestman's (1921) *Principles of Woolen Spinning*.

Considering the trade and fishing record, we look to *A history of Newfoundland from the English, colonial, and foreign records* by Daniel Woodley Prowse (1895) to find discussion of Cabot's voyages derived from -- Spanish Archives. The last paragraph on page 15 and the first paragraph on page 16 are key to understanding the history of English fishing fleets. That is, from *Acts of Parliament* we understand that English fishing fleets actively and continuously fished these (Newfoundland) waters, but there is little mention in other histories. This is not unlike the situation where a history dismisses the discovery of the New World in 3 lines and gives Anne Boleyn a hundred pages. Fishing and knitting do not get much space in popular histories, and even less in academic histories.

*The Royal Navy* establishes that by G. Chaucer's time, English sailors had traditions of knit clothing to keep themselves warm. This is consistent with what we know about knitting on the Channel Islands. The Channel Islanders had been great fishermen, but by the end of the 11^th century they had fished out their waters and had turned to spinning and knitting for export as a source of income. By the end of the 12^th Century, the Channel Islands had become a knitting production center, in part because of the quality of their spinning. Soon, the Channel Island knitting industry out stripped local wool production and the Channel Islands turned to importing raw English wool. Somebody was buying a lot of "Guernseys" and "Jerseys".

Then, I look at other indications of sea faring. One such is the ceramic pots for transporting goods by sea made in in the7th and 8th centuries in what is now Southern Turkey. A large number of these pots, are found around old Irish monasteries. Thus, it was likely that there was extensive trade by sea between Ireland and the Eastern Mediterranean at that time. Remember that we have very early knitting with knitting needles from just south (Syria) and just East of the place where those those shipping pots were made.) Just east was the path of the Silk road. Just south was the route used by the Arab traders bringing goods from India to Europe. Southren Turkey was where goods from both trade routes were repackaged for transport by sea. Thus, there was a direct trade route by sea from Ireland to a place where we know there was knitting.) Ireland was likely knitting sailor's “sea-gownes” of some type by the 8th century. I have thought for a long time that The Origins of Knitted Fabrics by Braham Norwick made cogent argument that the Irish knew about knitting in the 8th century. He goes on to layout similar evidence for the knowledge of knitting in Scotland in the 8th to 9th century. Ireland as the Western Terminus of a sea trade route to Southern Turkey makes this more plausible.

Have you ever reefed a square rigged sail in a rain squall? ( As the ship rolls, you are bounced against the yard (spar). If the deck is moving a foot as the ship rolls, you are going to move a yard during that roll. Top-men (sailors working highest third of the rigging) get thrown around with 3 times the acceleration that the crew on deck experience. (Fortunately, tall ships tend to roll more slowly than your little motor boat.) And, top-men are up in the wind. If the deck is subject to 15 knot of wind, 90 feet above the deck, a sailor is likely subject to 30 or 45 knots of wind. If you try reefing square rigged sails in squall while wearing a woven garment, you will come away bruised and cold. If you have to reef several sails in a single watch, you will be very bruised and very cold and unable to work for a couple of days. However, if you are wearing a well knit Filey, the cables will have padded your chest and you will be able to go back on deck in 4 hours. And, working in the cold, until exhausted, getting 4 hours of rest, and going back into the cold was the life of a seaman. They did not have weathermen, they had seamen that could work in any weather. And, the seamen had their tightly knit woolen garments.

You cannot understand a seaman's clothing unless you understand his work and environment.

Moreover, life at sea in a ship without an engine is very different from life at sea in a ship with an engine. Don't believe me? Ask Capt Douglas on the Shenandoah, 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdtallships/4188347110/in/photostream

(Somehow, in this picture he looks older than he did in 1979)  See also

(http://www.theblackdogtallships.com/ ) 

the only tall ship left without an engine. And, even on the Shenandoah, most sail management can be done from on deck. Crew on the Shenandoah do not have to brave the roll of the ship and wind of the upper rigging for routine sail management.

I knit ganseys, and wore them fishing and sailing to see how they functioned. I was very surprised to discover how differently the various stitch patterns performed. This is most notable when when the fabric is knit very tightly. And yes, some patterns of ganseys are better for some jobs, and other patterns of ganseys are better for other jobs. If the sailor is heaving a capstan, he needs padding (cables) across the chest. If he is carrying his boat and/or spars on his shoulders up and down the beach, then he needs padding on the top of his shoulders. A deck worker hoisting 300 pound dories on and off the rolling, heaving deck, needs as much padding as he can get, because eventually one of those dories is going to swing over and hit him. If the fisherman is going to be rowing, he needs extra ease in the shoulders. One could give ease for rowing by knitting loosely, but then the garment would not be as warm, so one gives ease with moss or seed stitch. Some of the dory fishermen on the Banks survived weeks of being in an open boat, so we know their garments were very warm and tightly knit. Some rowed thousands of miles so we know they had ease. On the other hand a whaler in the Azors or South Pacific does not need such warmth.

Some English ports tended to specialize in particular kinds of fishing. This was reasonable, because good fishing takes a lot of very specialized knowledge that changes fairly rapidly. It takes a good deal of continuous effort to keep track of where fish are being found. The different fisheries were found in different climates – cod in Iceland, whales around the Azores, and herring in the Baltic. Thus, the different kinds of fishermen needed different weights of clothing. Thus, ganseys worn by fishermen doing a particular job in a particular fishery are going to wear similar ganseys, because those fishermen all need a similar level of warmth and padding.

And, skills and jobs were passed from father to son. A port that produced a large number of top-men, would have mothers, wives, and sisters that knew how to knit the kind of garments that would protect and help top-men survive and be successful. With the right kind of gansey, a young seaman was likely to live to marry and have his own son. With a poorly knit gansey, a young seamen was likely to perish of the cold. Thus, good knitting enabled good seamanship.

If the fisherman is standing in a barrel of straw (to stay warm while fishing from deck of the ship) then the stitch pattern does not have to go to the bottom of the sweater. This tells us that some of the sweater traditions go back before ~1500 AD when fishermen moved from fishing from barrels on the deck to fishing from dories.

Ah, but were those fishermen's and sailors garments knit? I keep being told ( by folks that do not fish or sail) that woven fabrics, or felted fabrics was just as good - and cheaper. (And , those folks assert, “They did not have knitting that early!”

Three hundred years later, similar knit garments served the crews of the Endurance and the Star of Alaska. Such garments served the fishermen of Digby fishing out of Nova Scotia. These three groups from around 1900, all had access to woven and felted materials, and yet they all turned to tightly knit wool fabrics. Why? Because tight knit wool solved the problems of cold, wet, and durability better than woven fabrics. Or, rather a combination of tight knit wool and woven fabrics solves the problems. Woven and felted fabrics alone were not enough to solve the problems. The Endurance, the Star of Alaska, and the Digby fishermen all needed to add tightly knit wool – just like the fishermen that fished out the waters around England and the Channel Islands in the 11^th Century.

 A boat owned by my friend, Al Dring.  

I cannot seem to find a picture of Al from the days when he was captain of the Alma.

Photo ©2004 Michael Slater    May 29 2004

http://www.boatingsf.com/photopage.php?photo=184&boat=28

A sailor knits

Knitting while sailing on a wicked cold day on the Bay.

Waves broke over the bow, and soaked my knitting bag. Everything got wet, and the steel needles rusted.  However, a little polishing with a bit of crocus cloth, and they were good as new.

Note the knitting sheath - it has become an absolute favorite for knitting out and about.

The current favorite for knitting in front of the TV.

Tools matter.

The second generation of hand spun gansey yarn

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 constructed from 16 hank/pound singles (9,000 ypp).  The fine plies provide warmth, durability and a softer drape than 5-ply gansey yarn.

All of this was discovered by accident when I bought a trove of CHEAP wool yarn to use for stuff I did not want to waste good yarn on.  Then, I started knitting it, and discovered that I liked it.  I really liked it! More investigation showed that it was old stock Robison-Anton, worsted at 900 ypp constructed as 3 x 2-ply with ZSS twist.

Not a yarn construction that I had thought about.  It takes some care to get a balanced yarn, but it is worth the effort.

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.

DIY: high speed production wheel for high grist singles

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 singles are about 5,600 ypp grist.)  After some thought, I bought my Ashford Traditional (Traddy) in April 2010.  By August, I wanted more speed.  The Ashford Lace Flyer Kit was a step in the right directions, but I wanted more speed. The Ashford DD Kit actually provided more speed.  However, it became clear that belt slip was the big problem and at higher flier speeds, was the dominate issue. Then, I became interested in higher grist singles and the problem became acute.

A very careful reading of Chapter 8 from Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning, suggested that the solution was a "one-yarn"  double drive wheel, where a precise relationship between the size of the flier whorl, the size of the bobbin whorl, and the diameter of the bobbin core allow the use of a tight drive band with limited slip.  Thus, in this setup of a DD wheel, there are two drive bands suppling power to the flyer/bobbin assembly.  Such wheel setups were common from circa 1600 until WWI.  However, they are notably absent from the famous "Canadian Production Wheels."  And, such DD setups are not offered by any of the manufacturers that mass market spinning wheels. That is because they take some skill to setup and keep operating correctly.  However, that extra effort is repaid with real spinning ease and speed.

It looks like an ordinary "Traddy", but it is wicked fast.


Procedure:

Understanding "DRS", as the term is used by Alden Amos in his Big Book of  Handspinning (or Preistman's discussion of Saxony Wheels in  his 1925 Principles of Worsted Spinning) is critical to making this work.

An  Ashford high speed flyer whorl and bobbins made for yarns in the 5,000 to 10,000 ypp range.

I started by turning new bobbins to work with the high-speed  Ashford DD whorl at specific DRS for specific yarns with twist calculated for the bobbin cores.  These did not have any bearings, so they chattered and were noisy. However, they proved the concept and allowed me to spin 560 yard hanks of 5,600 ypp single in about 4 hours, which was  faster than I had been spinning such singles with the Standard Ashford High Speed DD kit, and was faster than I had been spinning those singles with the Ashford Lace Flyer Kit.  Moreover, the spinning of such singles on a one-yarn DD wheel was less effort and provided a more consistent yarn.   I was hooked.  What opened my eyes to the possibilities of the technology was a bobbin that I made with a DRS of 1.02 that allowed the effortless production of 30,000 ypp singles.  Yes, it was slow, taking a full 8 hours to produce a hank, but still, it was not something that I considered to be within the range of a first year spinner.  It was an epiphany.

Then, one of my Ashford flyer whorls warped and I had to replace it. Afterward, I knocked the warped  wood off of the steel core and epoxied a piece of walnut burl onto it and turned it down to a (flier) whorl with a diameter of  0.6275", which gives a flier ratio of ~35:1. However, the bobbin whorl diameter for a DRS of 1.02 is 0.61" for a bobbin ratio of ~40:1.  Since this setup is run with a taut drive band I get a useful 2,200 twists per minute from the bobbin, which allows spinning a 560 yards of firm twist 5,600 ypp in a couple of hours or 560 yards of firm twist 9,000 ypp singles in well under 3 hours.

Ashford DD flier with whorls and bobbins to produce yarns in the 5,000 to 10000 ypp range with firm twist. These have a wheel to bobbin ratio of 40:1.  They are very fast.

Tools:
The required wood working tools are a small drill press, a small wood lathe, and turning chisels.  I cut the bottom of the flier whorls with the back of a skew chisel, and the bottom of the bobbin whorls with a skew chisel that has been rounded into a scraper.

The last sets of bobbins have either  plastic bearings from Ashford or sintered bronze bushings from my local industrial hardware store.  Both work, and I have not made up my mind yet as to which is better.

I wind off when there is half or a third of an ounce of single on the bobbin, and thus the bobbins do not need a large capacity, and there is a relatively small change in the bobbin diameter as a result of accumulated yarn on the bobbin to change inserted twist.  This program is for fine singles.  I have a little bobbin winder that supports very rapid wind off without taking the spinning bobbin out of the wheel.

My Traddy has vibration at about 1,600 rpm.  I put on a set of better hinges under the MoA, and I use a white rubber vibration damper under the tension screw, all of which help but do not solve the problem. I can either loaf along at less than 1,500 rpm or treadle hard and get the rpm over 2,000, when vibration dies down again.  Thus, I have a sweet spot for bobbin rpm between 2,000 and 2,200 which is fast with little vibration.

I had some problems with a prototype bobbin whorl swelling in unseasonably wet weather to the extent that it changed the DRS.  However, when both bobbin and flier whorls are made of similar materials (wood) , similar dimensions,  have similar finishes (oil/varnish);  then they expand and contract at similar rates and to similar extents and this ceases to be a problem.

In summary, this is an old, but recently neglected spinning technology that requires a good bit of knowledge and skill to implement.   However, it offers a way to easily spin very soft and very fine yarns that are very difficult to spin with any other technology, and it offers a way to spin  fine yarns very consistently and very fast.

9,000 ypp worsted singles and DRS

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 these singles likely also got plied up into yarns for knitting.  I wondered what such yarns would be like for knitting.  I thought I would make up some such yarns and find out.  It has been harder than I thought.

And, I did not think that I would take so much criticism for trying to learn to spin better.

I had been spinning for (only) 9 months, and was having no trouble spinning singles from Cotswold ( a coarse wool)  to a  grist of 5,600 yards per pound (10 hanks per pound). I thought, "How much harder could 9,000 ypp be?"  Well, the local spinning teachers were not teaching spinning that fine, so I was on my own.

First, I tried finer fibers rather than the coarse, long wools that I had been spinning.  9,000 ypp was still very hard.  So, I reread The Big Book of Handspinning by Alden Amos because that was the only modern text on spinning that I had, which addressed spinning fine.

He talks about differential rotation speed (DRS) as an aid to finer spinning.  In fact he spends a lot of space on DRS.  He thinks it is important.  So I took it to heart, and I learned the math.  Then, I went into the shop and I applied the math to making flier/bobbin assemblies - over and over.

The "Spinning Police" said, "Forget about all that DRS crap.  Just learn spinning skills"

With finer fibers and my flier/bobbin assemblies providing the correct DRS, I was able to spin 9,000 ypp singles. Soon after, I was able to spin 32 hanks per pound ( 18,000 ypp), and then with well prepared Shetland I was up to 50 or 55 hanks per pound (~30,000 ypp).  Today, I would say that kind of spinning is not really difficult.  Those singles need a lot of twist, so it is a bit tedious, but it is not really difficult. The correct DRS makes the process much easier.

After learning to spin finer with the aid of the right DRS, I am now able to spin rather fine, using Scotch Tension or Irish Tension.  This morning I was using an Irish Tension flier to spin a single from Cotswold wool  to a thickness of about .007".  That comes out to more than 125 wraps per inch, putting it in the range of  16,000 ypp.  Knowing DRS helped me learn some spinning skills.

How many students, studying under the Knitting Police learn those skills in their first year?

That single that I was spinning this morning is thin and strong, but otherwise, it is not "pretty".  It will get plied up into a multi-ply yarn, which will hide its imperfections, so I do not care.  If a pretty yarn was important, I would use a DD flier with the correct DRS.   Today, I can spin singles at 32 hanks per pound using ST at over 150 yards per hour. With a fairly fine wools, I would not even call such spinning difficult. However, the singles that I spin DD are higher quality for much less effort.  And, I doubt if ST will ever let me spin more than 50 hanks per pound with any wool.

No, that is not quite right.  Today, I just do all my spinning on DD with the correct DRS for the yarn being spun -- because it is a lot easier. I am lazy.  I am not even going to try spinning more than 50 hanks per pound using ST.  I would just spin it the easy way.

The moral of this tale is to choose your teachers with great care.  And, sometimes, a book is better than a classroom.

And, let's face it,  professional spinners have a financial interest in making spinning seem difficult and arcane. It increases their value as teachers, and it increases the value of their spun yarns.  Amos is not a spinner, he makes spinning wheels, thus he wants to make spinning accessible. What I really want are good woolens at a reasonable price.  Thus, I want to make both spinning and knitting accessible.  I want higher quality for much less effort in both spinning and knitting.

PS
The old Shetland "Lace weight" yarns were based on singles spun at 16 hanks per pound or ~9,000 ypp.
Modern commercial  "cobweb" lace is a single ply of ~7,000 ypp, thus the modern 2-ply Shetland lace is ~3,500 ypp.  The old 2-ply lace was ~4,000 ypp and the old 3-ply was ~ 2,700 ypp.  The English knitting lace weight yarns were based on singles of 5,600 ypp, so that English 2-ply lace weight was ~2,500 ypp or very similar to the Shetland 3-ply. However, a 3-ply yarn is a warmer and more durable yarn construction.  Shetland lace yarn was better.

The point is that you can spin really nice lace yarn without trying to spin "fine as frog hair".

Supporting your work

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+1 x 18" gansey needles, or 6+1 x 12" Scottish needles.

If you are knitting a gansey or rug for the Queen, then it helps to fold-up the completed work, and hold it together with a few stitches of waste yarn so it is easier to turn, and to keep it from dragging on the floor.

Very large pieces can be hung from a hook on a swivel attached to a belt, at or just below the waist or the bottom of the knitting sheath.  Again the object in progress is held in a compact shape with a few stitches of waste yarn.  This works for things like shawls and lace table cloths.  However, this is awkward, and you may have to adjust the yarn path or or switch to continental knitting, but it does allow working the edge of an object that is several feet in diameter and where the row you are working on contains thousands of stitches.  Normally, a modern knitter would think about doing such a object on circs with long cables (tucking the center bulk of the object into a bag to facilitate handling.)  

However, DPN with a knitting sheath allow finer and faster knitting, that cannot be sustained on circs.  And, the weight of the object hanging from a hook suspended from the bottom of the knitting sheath helps to counter balance the weight of the object on the needles.  If museum collections are any guide, then at one time such counter balance devices were fairly common.  Of course, if you are just knitting socks, a clew hanging from the bottom of your knitting sheath, will keep your yarn out of the mud as you knit on the quay and counter balance the weight on the needles.

I had better stop.  I have written too much about too little.

History of a knitting sheath

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 sheaths that I ever made. The open twist design was an effort to reduce the weight of the knitting stick.

It gets tucked into apron strings or a waistband. There are needle holes in both ends.

Originally it was used with 6",  #1 needles.  However, it has been rebored and now fits #2 and #3 sock needles.   It gets used with wooden or bamboo needles.

The open twist was not turned, it was just whittled with a knife from a piece of black walnut firewood, some years ago.  In those days, people were telling me that knitting sheaths were not used in the old days because knitting sheaths were too  much trouble to make.  Thus, I did a long series of knitting sheaths to compare how much labor it took to make a good knitting sheath to how much labor could be saved by using a knitting sheath.

While knitting sheaths/sticks do allow knitting dramatically faster so that the time required to make a knitting sheath becomes trivial -- the real advantage of a knitting sheath/stick is that it allows the production of fabrics that cannot be produced with hand held needles.  Modern knitters, not only cannot produce such fabrics, they have forgotten that such fabrics can be produced.  When I tell or write of the fabrics I knit with a knitting sheath, other knitters do not believe such knitting is possible.

Knitting sticks with spiral designs want an "S" twist.  "Z" twist designs tend to slip out, or slide down. This is a Z twist, and it tends to slide down. There is crack on in it where I had a belt threaded through it, trying to keep it from sliding out of my apron strings.   It is not one of my more  functional designs.

Note, that many old Dutch style knitting sticks had a "X" twist.  This works even better than an S twist, but is harder to generate by hand.  There is a special tool for generating these patterns on a lathe.



Above is much more functional knitting stick.  It is not as pretty. It is  not as traditional, but much more functional. It was rapidly produced on a wood lathe from cherry and maple.

However, it really is possible to whittle a very good knitting sheath from firewood in a matter of a few hours.  If you do not have a drill, you can heat a bit of steel wire to burn the needle holes.

Belts

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.  Having the right belt for for your knitting sheath or knitting stick or having the right knitting sheath or stick for your belt is critical.  And, just as there is no knitting sheath, that works perfectly on all belts, there is no belt that works perfectly with all knitting sheaths.

If you are working with very stiff needles, then the knitting sheath should be able to pivot. Examples include Dutch knitting sticks:

 

and Yorkshire goose wings

used with stiff needles.  Here apron strings or an elastic waist band or a nylon belt work very well.

On the other hand, a Cornish fish 

used with long gansey needles wants a good leather belt to hold it in place.  However, shorter "Cornish fish" made so the needle placed less leverage on the belt work very well with lighter, narrower, (and slipperier) nylon belts.  For example, this:
 

worked well with leather belts, but very poorly with the nylon belts.

Your knitting sheath and your belt need to work together as a team.

My favorite belt for use with knitting sheaths that hold the needles firmly: 

My favorite belt for Dutch style knitting sticks and Yorkshire goosewings used with rigid needles:

I just warp it around my waist and knot it in place.

I buy leather belts from LL Bean (and every outlet mall), wear them with my jeans and knitting sheaths get tucked into them or threaded onto them.  Knitting sheaths that thread on to belts are a pain to put on and take off, but they do not get lost.

knitting sticks in the Dutch Style

knitting sticks 1Q10, a photo by agres@sbcglobal.net on Flickr.

Tucked into apron strings, knitting sticks were used with short needles for knitting small objects such as socks and mittens

More Plies

How many plies does it take to make a good knitting yarn?

More! Modern knitters have forgotten that more plies are warmer and more durable. If you are going to put that much labor into something, make it good! I came to spinning, because I wanted better yarn.

Modern mill spun is prepared for knitters that knit in accordance with Yarn Craft guidelines (http://www.craftyarncouncil.com/ ). Such knitting is loose. There are gaps between every each stitch and the next. No matter how warm the yarns, heat is going to escape between the strands of yarn, so there is no reason to make the yarns warm.   In other words, if you are going to knit loosely, then there is very little warmth advantage from putting in the effort to spin all those plies. And, spinning more plies is does cost more. Knitters have price-points and the yarn industry is very competitive, so the mills cut cost by designing yarns with as few plies as possible. The existing, competitive, yarns then become the standard for most knitters . 

However, I want better yarns.  In the yarn life-cycle of sheep to to sock,  while finer plies do take extra spinning time, it is not a lot considering overall effort.

How fine a ply? I aim for about about 1/3 of the spin count. For example, Cotswold has a spin count of 30+ hanks per pound, so I aim for 10 hanks per pound (5,600 ypp) for my singles. (Five such plies gives you to 5-ply gansey yarn @ 1,000 ypp.) Jacob has a spin count of 48++, so I aim to spin my Jacob singles at 16 hanks per pound/ 9,000 ypp.

Ok, the 2 ply takes 6 hours to spin and the 5 ply at the same overall grist takes 16 hours to spin. However, whether I knit with 2-ply or 5-ply of the same grist, a pair of socks takes 20 hours to knit. The 5-ply lasts much longer. So by investing an extra 10 hours spinning (or about 25% of total yarn preparation time), I can save myself several days of spinning and knitting replacement socks. This goes double for an elaborate fisherman’s knit-frock. This becomes an overwhelming factor for fine lady's gloves with fancy patterns that might require a hundred hours to knit.

I assert that 9,000 ypp singles are good for weaving garment weight fabrics. Thus, for the last thousand years, spinners have been spinning linen, silk, worsted, and woolen singles at grists near 9,000 ypp for the use of weavers. Some of these singles would have been diverted, and plied up into knitting yarns, well because, knitting yarns with fine plies really are warmer and more durable.  It makes a nice  knitting yarn.  In the context of traditional spinning, 9,000 ypp just is not a big deal.

The other day, I ran across an old pattern for Shetland Shawls. There was a center panel of tightly knit fabric (Shetland 2-ply lace weight (22 wpi) knit on UK #16 needles) that was actually much warmer than any of the fabrics produced from the patterns in Knitting Ganseys with Beth Brown-Reinsel.  I find it funny that the old lace shawls were warmer than the modern fisherman’s sweaters.

A gansey by any other name

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 have been eye opening.

I started with Weldon's Practical Knitter, The Delineator, and the resources of the Rutt library (http://www.soton.ac.uk/library/bopcris/wsa.html ).  This does not go back as far as I would like as some of the resources in Rutt are more recent than the dates on the homepage suggest.

The first thing I noticed was how many things were knitted from wool.  Convention is to assume that undergarments named in old inventories and wills were woven linen. This may have been the general rule, but Weldon in particular makes it clear that "gents drawers",  gent's and lady's under vests, knickerbockers, gent's, lady's & children's vests, baby's dresses, Spencers, chest protector, lady's under sleeves, girl's and lady's petticoats, lady's under bodice, lady's leggings (for riding), and various chemises were all knit from wool on occasion. While these sources are 19th century, it would seem that that they reflect older traditions.  

Then, I looked at what various garments are called. Fishermen's sweaters knit of wool are called: Jersey Jacket, Sailor Jersey, short-waisted jacket, Guernsey frock, fisherman's Jersey, Boating Jersey, Boating Sweater, and warm undervest.  Again, I expect  that these reflect older naming traditions, and when we see these any of terms in older wills and inventories, we can not be sure that they do not refer to a knit fisherman's garment -- a gansey if you will.

I found it most interesting that the term "gansey" for a fisherman's sweater came into circulation in Great Britain about the time the old Guernsey knitting technique called gansey died out.  And, of course, modern books on ganseys and gansey knitting do not instruct on  the old Guernsey knitting technique.  This is a bit sad.

Other things that I have been reading, and which are available as free digital  editions include:

Old-time tools and toys of needlework

 By Gertrude Whiting

The rural life of England

 By William Howit

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

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 to knit to be practical.  However, I have shown that using gansey needles and a knitting sheath such a weatherproof garment can be knit in well under a hundred hours.

Then, I was told that such garments could only have been made after the advent of mill spun because it would have taken too long to spin the appropriate yarn by hand. So, I got a spinning wheel and learned to spin.  In my tests, it is quite possible to hand spin worsted 5-ply (gansey) yarn, and it takes well under a hundred hours to prepare the yarn for one good seaman's sweater.  Thus, the total time from sheep to sweater for a hand-spun, hand-knit seaman's sweater is well under 200 hours.

Assuming uncoated long wool such as Kent, this includes, a day to wash the wool, a day to dye the wool, 16 hours to comb the wool, 50 hours of spinning and plying, and 20 hours of  "yarn management".  I am confident that the spinning could be done in this time on either a flier type spinning wheel or drop spindles.  Yarn management tools in my calculation are limited to niddy-noddies and hand wound balls.  Groups working together (i.e., neighbors) could reduce the required time substantially.  For example, 4 house holds working to together could easily dye 4 lots of wool in one day, reducing that time requirement by 6 hours.  Professional textile workers or well to do households would have had other tools to  improve productivity.

Never the less, it might well have taken 800 hours of hand labor (spinning & knitting) to produce the knit contents of a 15th century seaman's bag including: 2 knit frocks, socks, mittens, hood, and neck warmer. Some of these items would have to be renewed each year, and some would last for several seasons.  Some items such as fisherman's nipper's would have been cut from old socks. And, there would have been pants made of woven wool.  Seaman required specialized clothing to pursue their trade. This clothing was the seaman's tools of the trade,  like a blacksmith's forge and tools or a carpenter's tools.

In addition, the bag would contain clothes to wear ashore, as the clothes worn on-board would have become  highly soiled.

Cable needles and knitting sheaths

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 could be done.  Then, I asked, "Why do it?"  What are the advantages of SPN and cables?

Well the cable's advantages are that it folds up and is not "pokey" in the knitting bag.  I kid you not, that is a really big advantage - for knitters that take their knitting to tea parties.  I often sit by my kitchen window, drink my tea, and knit. Then, cables have no advantage for me.  If I go out to a tea party, I take shorter needles that fit in my knitting bag without being pokey.



Pocket sock needle case that doubles as knitting sheath.
  Invite me to tea, and I will bring my knitting!

Virtues of Scotch Tension

Previously, I noted that Double Drive (DD) spinning wheels can go faster because they have two drive bands to transmit that power from the drive wheel to the flier assemble. However, you may not really need to go that fast.

If you do not have a real need for speed, “Do you want a DD spinning wheel?” I suggest, not likely.

With DD wheel, the ratio between differential rotation speed (DRS) strongly affects the kind of yarn that you spin. A set DRS can help you spin a very consistent yarn if you are working with the same kind of wool and want to spin miles and miles of the same kind of yarn (production spinning).

On the other hand, if you to work with different kinds of fibers/wools, or you want to spin a different kind of yarn, with a DD wheel you need to change the DRS. This means changing your bobbin or changing your flier whorl or both. If you want to spin different yarns with a DD wheel you need a whole set of bobbins and flier whorls.

Now, some of this can be done by working with a partially filled bobbin to fine tune DRS, and some can be done by adjusting belt tension. However, these steps only take you so far. If you do not have a bobbin/flier whorl combination to give you the DRS that you need for the yarn that you want to spin, you are going to have to fight your wheel for every inch of that yarn that you produce. This takes away from the joy of spinning. This is one reason that people have different DD wheels. Each has a (set of) different DRS, and thus different yarns that they spin easily.

DD wheels come with a very limited selection of bobbin/flier whorl combinations that allow the easy spinning of a very limited number of different yarns. If you have an Ashford Traddy with a (Fast) DD kit, you will find it easy to spin lace singles at about 5,000 ypp. However, spinning 11,200 ypp singles leads to cuss words that cannot be said in public – until you get the right whorl (custom made), and then it goes like butter on warm toast. (Oh, yes, it can be done, but it is not as easy as it is when you have the bobbin/flier whorl combination to produce the correct DRS for that yarn.) If you want to spin 22,400 ypp singles (easily), then you need a different (custom) bobbin/flier whorl combination. Thus, if I want to spin a new kind of yarn, I start by going into the shop and turning a new spinning bobbin that gives me the correct DRS for the yarn that I want to spin. And, when I am spinning ST, I put a lot of yarn on my spinning bobbin. When I am spinning DD, I stop and wind off frequently, because as the bobbin fills, my DRS changes.

Scotch tension (ST) on the other hand will allow you to produce almost any yarn that you want from almost any wool. Small changes in drafting technique, or treadle rate or brake tension are all that is required to easily produce a wide variety of yarns. Thus, Scotch tension is better for people that want to work with a variety of different wools/fibers to produce a variety of different yarns. The downside of ST is that it has lower limits on speed and it is harder to produce a very consistent yarn.

The virtues of DD are ease of producing a consistent yarn very rapidly. The vices of DD are the extreme difficulty of producing yarns for which you do not have an appropriate bobbin/flier combination to produce the correct DRS, and the difficulty of obtaining appropriate bobbin/flier combinations for specialty or unique yarns (particularly for old wheels.)

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.