…the more they stay the same.

From the pages of the magazine “English Mechanic and the World Of Science,” we have this letter regarding something published in a prior issue:

COTTON SPINNING

Sir –
“Harmonious Cotton Spinner” has not penetrated very deeply into the mysteries of cotton spinning if he has not yet discovered a draught between the feed roller and lap roller of a carding engine. He says there is not nor ought there to be a draught here and asks of what use a draught would be. That there is a draught the letter of E Slater, Burnley, on the same page as his own 183 will perhaps convince him; as to its use, I may tell him that it is to keep the lap stretched between the two rollers to prevent its bagging, which it otherwise would do, causing irregularity in the feed. His other assertion about there being no draught but a “Contraction” between doffer and delivery roller is rather Inconsistent with a statement made by him to “Factory Lad” on draughts in the same letter in which he Speaks of a draught of 125 and 2 in the draw box of engine, which of course is between doffer and delivery rollers.

E Halmshaw, Gomersal, is wrong in stating that I said It is immaterial whether tbe bobbin leads the flyer or tho flyer leads the bobbin In tho roving frame. I offered no opinion on the two methods as there was none called for. I merely attempted to describe the *working* of the cone, sun, and planet wheels, and reversing motion, which was all that was asked for by the correspondent who requested an explanation of these parts, and I said It was immaterial to the description which of the two methods was taken to illustrate the matter as the mechanism was alike in both cases, the ouly difference being in the arrangement of the gearing so that when the bobbin led the flyer of the wheel would revolve In the same direction as the wheel, and in a contrary direction when the flyer led the bobbin (for “wheel a”) in the sentence, which in this case revolves in the same direction as the wheel.

I am not aware that there is any superiority in the make of the thread when the bobbin leads the flyer. The roving is more compressed, consequently a greater length and weight can be laid on the bobbin. There is also less waste made as the roving is not thrown off from the bobbin when the end is broken as is sometime the case when the flyer leads the bobbin, but these advantages are more than counterbalanced by the extra power required to drive and the extra wear and tear of machinery.

–BWR

Apart from a lessening acceptance of lengthy sentences and some slightly flowery phrasing, this surely could come from many a forum we’ve all read in the modern era, couldn’t it? Even better, the next letter:

SIR –

*Draft of Carding Engine* — Our new correspondent, “Harmonious Cotton Spinner,” seems to understand his business. He is perfectly right in stating that there is not, or ought not to be, any draught between the lap and feed rollers; it would not only be of no use, but would cause irregular feeding in proportion to the draught of pulling out of the lap.

The callender or delivery rollers should be so arranged as to take up from the doffer without being slack or very tight. If slack, the slivery probably enters the funnel lumpy; and if very tight, it would be stretched unevenly. Let the rollers take up properly, and there will not be any material draught between the doffer and the rollers. This decides the question of draught to be between feed rollers and callender rollers (not doffer).

*Draught of Drawing Frame* — There are four replies to this question, including one from myself, page 162. The one from “BWR” I think is rather too keen in the preparing draughts. With regard to Mr. Slater, or Burnley, there must be some mistake, judging him from his two lengthy communications. I must give him credit for knowing better than equalling the three draughts. Surely he is not in earnest in advising people less informed than himself to wet rollers as he is represented to have stated.

I cannot now drop on the question of E. Habergham respecting weights, but the following may prove serviceable to many readers….

(the following being a lengthy set of responses, graphs, charts, documents, and math)

– “Factory Lad.”

We just can’t thank you all enough for your tremendous support for Stringtopia. We are so lucky to be part of such a wonderful community. So we wanted to take a minute to start saying thanks to some of the fine folks who are donating door prizes and treats for the goodie bags. In no particular order:

Schafenfreude Fibers
The Spinning Loft
DyakCraft
Spunky Eclectic
The Painted Tiger
Yarn Hollow
Goodies Unlimited
Imbued Fibers
Cedar Creek Farms
Homestead Wool and Gift Farm

And that’s just the beginning! There’s still more to come — if I haven’t listed you yet, it’s probably because I don’t know what URL you’d like me to link to. If you’re interested in donating something for prizes or goodie bags, just drop a line to both of us (abby@abbysyarns.com, shelly@abbysyarns.com) and we’ll give you all the details.

I am particularly moved by the way people are donating prizes, and what they’re sending. For instance, Barbara, who is a friend to many of us, can’t make it, so (among other things) she pulled out a favourite spindle of hers that she got at her first SOAR, started some fiber on it, and is sending it along to ride here with Morgaine. And Melissa, a regular at our yarn nights here in town and a new spinner for whom this will be her first fiber event ever, is hand-stitching a lucky someone a little something pretty, and you should see the beautiful things she makes.

The point is, everything is about the work of our hands, and us as a community, both locally and globally. I am so moved.

The Question:

You’re working with industrially-produced Blue Faced Leicester (BFL) top, and you find that the yarn you’re producing makes a stiff, dense yarn. Is there any way to make it loftier?

The Short Answer:

Probably. Many spinners — some people would even say most, these days — default to a drafting method that tends more to the worsted side than not. This means methods like the short forward draw, or many two-handed drafting methods that focus on keeping twist well out of your drafting zone and potentially smoothing and compressing your fibers as you ease the twist into them, forming your yarn. These methods tend to produce a denser, smoother yarn; one whose tendency is to drape and lay sleek and stand a lot of wear. If you’re working from combed top, spinning from the fold with a long draw method will produce more loft than any other option.

The Long Answer:

If you want a lofty yarn, with lots of air trapped in the fibers, there are various ways to get it, but for now we’ll skip much discussion of the ones that deal with fiber selection (choose a fiber that has a lot of bounce, like a high-crimp wool) and preparation (use a carded preparation, instead of a combed one), and focus specifically on how to get more loft from an industrially-produced combed top — something that looks like this:

Most of the fiber being sold ready to spin in the developed world is exactly this type of preparation — an intermediate stage in big-mill production of yarn. It’s not, at its roots, a handspinner’s preparation, but it is widely available, affordable, and generally speaking, pretty easy to work with. Many of today’s indie dyers buy this type of prepared fiber as a base for their wonderful dye work. Few dyers work with carded roving, as it’s generally harder to source, more expensive than industrially combed top, tends to compact significantly in a dyebath.

The last thing I’ll say about this for now is that if you want a lofty yarn, your best bet really is smart to choose a fiber and a preparation that lend themselves to that well. Your second best bet is to choose a fiber that lends itself to that, and a preparation that doesn’t so much or that could go either way. Your least ideal bet is to seek out a fiber that isn’t lofty by nature, in a preparation that is also not loft-inducing. With BFL top, we are in that latter situation: it is going to be harder to get loft out of that fiber, prepared that way.

On the other hand, it makes a decent example of why drafting method matters.

Here’s the top we’re starting out with.

A fairly typical example of this type of product, this BFL top is from Louet North America, and it’s naturally coloured, not dyed. This, and product like it, can be dyed, and we’ll talk a bit about that later. Here’s a tuft of the top a bit more than a staple length long.

As you can see, the fibers are all aligned parallel, the hallmark of a combed preparation. In a carded preparation, fibers would be going every-which-way.

I took chunks the size of the above — about 4 grams each — and spun three quick samples.

The first I spun with a short forward draw, from the end of the top. This means pulling out from my fiber supply exactly the fibers I need to make yarn the thickness I desire, keeping twist out of the area where I’m drafting, then smoothing it back in. Draws are in the vicinity of one half the staple length to 1.5x the staple length of the fiber; opinion and experience varies about this and people’s short forward draws will vary too, but generally stay within that range.

The second sample I spun by first stripping the top 6 ways…

and then further predrafting it out into tidy little nests. I didn’t predraft it to the point where I would only be adding twist and feeding it onto a wheel; I spun it with a medium forward draw, which is like the short draw, except less religious about keeping twist out of the drafting zone and with a drafting zone that usually starts at longer than a staple length and goes to 2-3 times the staple length sometimes. For beginning and intermediate spinners who commonly engage in this type of splitting and predrafting, this is a method I have seen used by many.

For me, this is not a lot of drafting at the wheel. I don’t use this method often because ultimately it is more time-consuming and harder to control thickness, and it really doesn’t bring anything beneficial to the mix except in cases where the fiber has a problem, such as being a little felted or stuck together from a sub-optimal dye job, or if there is a specific colour effect desired from a multicolour top.

The third sample I spun from the fold with a supported long draw — one hand up by the orifice moderating the takeup and twist, drafting back against active and fast-moving twist, with a drafting zone that quickly goes from about half a staple length to 2-3 feet (say 60-100 cm). This is an entirely different method of drafting, one which is truly required by short-stapled fibers like cotton and short down fibers, but which can be used with longer ones to address exactly the question asked at the start of this article.

I spun all the samples to a rough ballpark of similar thickness, bearing in mind that drafting methods affect this. Here’s how they all look on the bobbin next to each other, from left to right.

I skeined up the samples and weighed them, writing down those specs. The first sample, the short forward draw one, I marked by tying a piece of white waste yarn around, so it would be easy to identify after washing; I knew the third sample would be obvious, so I just needed a way to differentiate the other two from each other.

After washing, then letting them dry resting flat on the shelf in my dryer, the kinky samples above looked more like this.

I measured the yardage, and the wraps per inch. Here are the results.

SHORT FORWARD DRAW
13 wraps per inch, 4 grams, 17 yards, 1928 yards per pound.

PREDRAFTED MEDIUM FORWARD DRAW
14 wraps per inch, 4 grams, 19 yards, 2155 yards per pound.

LONG DRAW FROM THE FOLD
11 wraps per inch, 4 grams, 21 yards, 2380 yards per pound.

Let’s call sample 1 our baseline. Sample 2 is a little thinner; about 8% more wraps per inch than the baseline. By weight it’s about 10% more yards per pound. All in all, those two percentages sort of cancel each other out; once we account for the difference in thickness we see that the density of the second yarn is fairly similar to that of the first yarn. I would even say within the range of unpredictable margin of error due to small sample and limitations of the measuring equipment.

Sample 3 is a different story. Compared to sample 1, it is about 23% thicker; at the same time, it is almost 22% more yards per pound than sample 1. If I wrote ad copy I would totally say “Now! 45% more loft and thickness!” If this yarn were thicker and denser, we’d expect to see fewer yards per pound; instead
we see the opposite.

ADDITIONAL FACTORS

Another consideration is that the final yarn is also lower-twist than the first two samples. This allows for greater bloom (poofing up) in the wash. Still, in the on-the-bobbin shot, the difference between the third sample and the first two is clearly visible.

Also, I’m a very skilled spinner who is readily able to use all of these drafting methods and others besides. If you are not, then chances are your first results aren’t going to be this dramatic. It’ll take time and practice.

Lastly, fiber selection and preparation type have a huge hand in this — very huge. So you would achieve even greater results by taking those things into consideration; however for the sake of answering the question as asked, “What can I do to make my BFL top spin into less dense yarn,” I’ll let this stand.

Well, not exactly, and actually, it may last at least through Wednesday.

Things started off okay. It was actually kinda pleasant even, because there were thunderstorms overnight — thunderstorms! Which can’t happen when it’s freezing cold. So that meant, you know, the weather was on the upswing and all that. Sort of. Well, you know, striving to be spring. With flood warnings and everything. And it was nice, in a funny sort of way, to wake up (even in the darkness of the brutal early mornings that are my lot until, oh, 2016) with driving rain and flashing lightning and whatnot.

I drove the manchild down to wait for the bus (because it was really, really pouring and I have a heart). When we walked into the garage, weather had changed so dramatically somehow that there was condensation everywhere, and it smelled like wet. The day started fine with plenty of coffee. I was getting tons done. I made all my lists on schedule for the morning meeting with Shelly to plan out our specific action items for the week, getting Stringtopia really rolling. Snowballing, even. We had a great meeting and things were all on track. We even stole a few moments to chat about the kids and the junior high band concert tonight and schedules of that ilk, and there were Girl Scout cookies, so how bad could it possibly be?

I made it back in time for lunch with my better half. A quick, 20-minute lunch, sure, but c’mon, that’s always a win. And afterwards, I walked out on the front porch to see how wet things looked out there what with flood warnings in effect, and that’s when I saw this.

That made me so cheerful I totally took a cameraphone picture and posted it to Facebook and got all enthused.

And then I walked inside, and up the stairs to my office, where I was greeted by

So then I spent about an hour doing all the usual things a recovered sysadmin would do when presented with that — like also posting that picture to Facebook to counterbalance that happy hopeful bulb poking up, and then further chronicling how

and everything that goes with that, like having the conversation about how I only have a Windows box in case of a dire need to indulge in some gaming, and that’s a much more legitimate reason than “I need it for QuickBooks and syncing my Blackberry.”

To my credit, I only screwed around with it for an hour before heading to MicroCenter and

coming back with a Windoze upgrade that I knew was coming down the pike, and that old standard, the 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda in $whatever_size_is_on_sale. I had just enough time to pull all the other drives, give the box a once-over with the canned air, shove the new drive in there, shove the Windows 7 Professional 64-bit whatever bla bla bla DVD in the DVD drive, boot, start the install, and leave to go pick up the manchild from his after-school writing thing. And then homework and the mail and dinner and trash day and more poking new Windows with a stick and cursing at it and making sure the band outfit was good to go and piling in the truck and a band concert (which was quite good, let’s hear it for music education) and you know, so much for my list of things I was definitely going to have done today.

Today was perhaps not entirely my day.

Here’s hoping for tomorrow.

I was recently asked about Peruvian low whorl spindles and where to find them. I both love and hate this question because it’s full of simple answers… and not so simple ones.

The easy answer is: you get ‘em in the markets in Peru. Not the tourist markets, but the ones where regular people, generally country people and not city people, shop. Usually, the folks selling wooden spoons and turned wooden bowls and things like that will have them, if they’re carrying country-people stuff. They’re just another utensil. You could say it’s the equivalent of going to the aisle in the supermarket where there’ll be wooden spoons and potholders and that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, this may also be the hard answer, because if you don’t happen to be in Peru, it may be hard to get to your basic everyday market in Peru. Beth at The Spinning Loft in Michigan makes every effort to have them on hand, but what that means is either she has to go there and buy a bunch, or she has to a) have a pal in Peru b) who she can talk into going to the market for her and c) buying up all the spindles he or she can find and d) getting them to her in the USA. Since neither of these things is entirely trivial, when she has them, they tend to sell out fast.

Lord knows anytime I’m in Peru, I buy a few. I mean, you can never really have too many, can you? I also tend to pick up wooden spoons, because, you know, same thing. Anyway, these aren’t fancy spindles — they’re plain, utilitarian objects. And you need to have lots, especially if you’re in the habit of teaching people to spin or teaching techniques that are really for this type of spindle. This is all the more true because when you compare these spindles to the ones we’re able to buy in the USA from all of our wonderful spindlecrafters, well, let’s face it, these Peruvian ones are pretty basic.

They’re not made from fancy wood; they’re just whatever’s around, which in Peru, usually means eucalyptus unless you’re in the jungle. The whorls are simple lathe-turned chunks, generally undecorated unless they’ve been ornamented with a woodburning tool by the lathe person, or drawn on with a marker. The shafts are sticks that are more or less straight, peeled, whittled straighter, with a slight widening under where the whorl will sit, pointy at the bottom.

There’s none of this business with making or finding or putting in fancy hooks, or turning the shaft prettily, or making fancy grooves and notches and whatnot. Nope. You get the whittled end of a stick. It’s usually pointy when you get it, too. With time, it wears down. Or you can grind it on a rock if it’s too pointy. And the shafts can be splintery. Indeed, I had pricked my fingers this way so many times before I ever actually read about Sleeping Beauty, that when I first heard people musing about what part of the wheel she might have used for pricking her finger, I was flabbergasted. I mean, to me it was obvious: the story says she pricked her finger on a spindle, and seriously, everyone knows that happens all the time. A wheel? Seriously? You’re kidding, right? I mean the story isn’t that newfangled, and besides, it says “spindle” right in it.

That said, I don’t think I ever have pricked my finger on a fancy post-industrial style spindle. I mean, there’s sandpaper. And machined dowels. And people who spend time turning shafts by hand. But that’s not what these are.

At right, a newer spindle that I picked up about 3 months ago, and have barely had a chance to put any yarn on yet. At left, a well-used, well-worn-in spindle that belonged to Nilda Callañaupa for a couple of years before we swapped spindles in 2008. It’s well-used, but not absurdly so.

Nobody in the developed world really makes spindles like this. I think it’s a combination of factors: first, some spinners are hesitant to go with hookless, notchless forms — they can’t believe it’ll really work well without a yarn anchor, or with the yarn slightly off center, and in some cases for some spinners that’s true. It’s also true that unless you know the techniques that go with this kind of spindle, it may seem complicated. So in that respect, there’s kind of a chicken and egg problem: what has to come first? I think people knowing the techniques, and thus creating the demand, probably has to, so that’s where I come in.

The second factor, and probably the trickier one, is that I think these are boring for spindle makers to create. It’s just a weight and a stick. There’s nothing fancy to do. I’ve talked to people about making them, and they almost always really, really want to do something more to them — an ornamented shaft, something snazzy with the tip, a particular form factor for the bottom of the shaft, specific whorl geometry, I dunno. I’m forever hearing “Really? Just a kinda centerweighted whorl, and really just a stick? I can’t put a notch on there? You don’t want a hook? What about a knob? I mean you must want something on there. Right?” First I thought it was disbelief… but I’ve since concluded boredom must also be a factor. There’s just not a lot there with which to showcase one’s artistry as a woodworker. And you sorta need to be able to do that if it’s going to be a product you want to sell at a price-point that makes it worth making them for sale. Even if it isn’t boring to make, if you’re constantly hearing “I’m not paying $20 for that! It’s just a basic stick with a weight on it!” it wouldn’t be topping your list of things to make.

So my solution is to make my own, putting forth a little more effort than just going to the market, but not by all that much really.

I find pre-cut wooden dowels, and machine-milled wooden wheels for toys. I order them by the buttload from my local dowel mill, but you can usually find them at the craft store or big box megamart. If you can’t, there are a zillion and one online sources — just google “wooden toy wheel” and “12 inch dowel” and you’re all set. The main trick is to make sure you get toy wheels which have a hole in the middle that’s the same size as the dowels you can find. Or dowels that are the same size as the hole in your toy wheels. As to that, I like toy wheels that are 2″ or more in diameter, and dowels that are a quarter inch. Thicker than that and they’re clunky, thinner than that and they’re fragile and you can’t find toy wheels with the right size hole.

On the left, a totally unused Peruvian market spindle; on the right, one of my toy wheel deals, also totally unused.

Ornamented with woodburning, kinda pointy at the bottom of the shaft…

Ornamented with a Sharpie, the bottom of the shaft having been sharpened with a pencil sharpener.

The tips. Both will be nicer with some use on them.

Here’s what happens to that pencil-sharpener-sharpened shaft after a year or two of regular use.

I like to sharpen the bottoms because then there’s less drag when you use ‘em semi-supported or resting on something a bit, and because you can stick the point in the ground when you go to wind off, the same way they do it in Peru a lot of the time.

These spindles are cheap, durable, easy to make, and not a lot can go wrong with them. They’re great for what I think of as high-risk spinning activities: going for a walk on concrete, packing in an airline carryon bag, going places where I might lose them or break them. And they’re basically the same thing as the Peruvian ones — inexpensive, easy to find tools that aren’t too dear.

Stringtopia registration proceeds, and we’re very excited watching them roll in and finding out who’s joining us! It’s truly a thrill! We’re starting to really picture our quiet, historic downtown being taken over by spinners, and our attempts to cover all the bases and think of everything, well, I have to admit, right now they even include me having thought, “I wonder if I should go warn the antique stores that their inventory of spinning wheels may be getting a serious look-over and appraisal and they probably want to be sure they don’t have any ‘works great’ signs on any decorative ones?” and “Geeze, maybe I should have scheduled a plain ol’ spinning demo where passersby can tell us all they didn’t know anybody still did that, and ask us if we know we can buy yarn at Wal-Mart, and of course, before that, a half-hour seminar on clever answers to those usual questions so we can put them all to the test!”

Seriously, though, there are a couple of things I wanted to make sure everyone knows.

First, it looks like between 10PM Eastern (0300 GMT) and 5:30AM Eastern (10:30 GMT), two registrations came in for which the name and address data are missing. IF YOU REGISTERED LAST NIGHT AND HAVE NOT GOTTEN AN EMAIL FROM ME OR SHELLY CONFIRMING YOU, please contact us right away — shelly at abbysyarns.com and abby at abbysyarns.com.

Second, and it would be first because it is also perhaps foremost except for us worrying about missing someone’s registration, from emails that I received and comments in various places, it turns out I wasn’t clear about a very important point: you can roll your own Stringtopia experience. We tried hard to make it accessible to folks who would be traveling a long way to attend (so far the furthest anybody is coming is from Czechoslovakia) but also, to folks who are local (for instance, there’s a nice lady at our Thursday night spinning and yarn get-togethers who lives a few blocks from the Golden Lamb). We wanted to try to fit as many budgets as we could also. So there are half-day classes starting at $75 with materials included; group meals are pretty much wide open as long as we know you’re coming; you can come hang out Saturday evening and have coffee or a beer; you can come just to see what Morgaine has with her to entice you. And if you live in the area, we hope you will do at least one of those things, because part of the mission we’re on here is, well, to have the larger spinning community over for a party at our place.

Third, this weekend we’ll be letting you all know about the various places online where you can meet and interact with your fellow Stringtopians, or just drop in and live vicariously if you can’t make it. Stay tuned!