Spinning Plant Hair

Day 153: Many of my fiberarts crafts tend to be seasonal, depending on the amount of available natural light and the colour of the material with which I am working. When spinning wool on my Louët wheel, it's a simple matter to change the contrast by laying a lighter or darker piece of fabric across my knees. However, with the charkha wheel, I'm working against a backdrop of grey carpet, so at least with tan cotton fiber, I need more "window light" on the developing thread. I put the charkha away last fall, and it sat on the bookshelf for the dark months of winter. I pulled it out a few days ago, spun a few chunks of roving just to be sure I hadn't lost my touch, and then it occurred to me that making my own punis (a miniature version of the rolags familiar to wool spinners) would allow me to spin longer without having to fuss with prepping another bit of cotton. I had not spun from a puni previously because they are rarely (if ever) available in any colour other than white, and at a much higher price per ounce than dyed roving. Having worked through the many quirks of spinning with cotton told me to beware of lumps and to roll the "mini-rolags" loosely, both easy to achieve by manually loading the roving onto a 2" x 4" section of a single cotton carder. Then, with the tips of the cotton fibers pinched between two knitting needles, I rolled the batt off the carder teeth. It was much easier to do than anticipated, and in no time, I had a boxful of punis ready to be spun. After making a few tweaks to the way I handled the feed of unspun fiber, I found to my delight that spinning from punis was a huge improvement on spinning from roving. After an hour or so, I had a full tahkli spindle, ready to ply with the thread on the one I'd put away last fall.

Twice As Full, Twice As Fast

Day 153: After spinning cotton onto two tahklis in opposite directions, I redeemed one by making a plying bracelet so that I could ply the thread back onto itself. That's the skein in the photo. However, my attention is not on details lately, so when I filled a new tahkli to match the remaining one and sat down to ply them with the spinning wheel, I discovered that they were spun with an S-twist rather than my customary Z. I would have to ply them backwards to my usual manner. This is not a fatal mistake by any means. However, I will have to use the finished thread in separate areas of any project so that a casual glance won't show a difference. Not a problem! I'll just use them on different ends of a towel. That said, once I had spun up enough on a second tahkli, I was ready to ply on my regular spinning wheel. I've found this is the best way to handle cotton. With more than twice as much single-ply thread to work with, I sat down at the wheel 8:15 last night, thinking I'd have it done in half an hour, 45 minutes tops. That proved to be an ambitious estimate. I finished all but the last few feet which needed to be bracelet-plied at 9:15, double the thread in the same amount of time it took to ply the skein on a manual tahkli. I have now made a little note to myself, stuck to the inside of the charkha, showing the direction the drive band needs to go over the pulley so that the thread twists in the appropriate direction for a double strand plied S. "Spin Z, ply S." That's the formula I prefer.

Gettin' My Gandhi On

Day 290: Seeking to broaden my spinning skills earlier this year, I purchased a small kit which included a tahkli spindle, its bowl and several ounces of cotton. Within a few days, I was hooked despite the fact that I was making some rather lumpy and thick thread. In another leap forward, I bought a book charkha, essentially a fold-out spinning wheel in a wooden box the size of a hefty hardbound novel. By the time I had run through the two least appealing-colours of kit cotton, I was achieving a thread suitable for weaving. There was one problem: the charkha was designed to spin singles, not to ply, so I cobbled together an arrangement whereby I could create a two-ply thread with my standard spinning wheel with the singles mounted in the charkha's spindle storage holders. The system worked quite well and in fact, allows me to put more single-spun thread on each tahkli, and therefore more yardage in my finished skeins. Here you see two fully loaded spindles. To give an idea of scale, each cone of thread is roughly 2.5 inches long. While I'm not sufficiently ambitious to think that I will ever spin enough thread to weave and sew into a whole garment, I'm still gettin' my Gandhi on.

Ideal Weight

Day 212: I am getting very close to achieving the ideal weight in my handspun cotton. The green thread crossing the skein is a commercial 8/2, the type I normally use for weaving tea towels, and although my handspun is too soft to use as warp, I believe it will hold up well as weft. I spin cotton in two ways: with a hand-held tahkli (spindle) or using a "book" charkha wheel. I find I can get a finer, tighter thread with the tahkli which, it must be admitted, probably does not speak to my expertise as much as it does to my patience. I get in a hurry with the charkha, feeding a little too much fiber through my fingers as I draft it back. The hand-held tahkli requires greater focus and consequently, the end result demonstrates more attention to detail. That said, the threads I am producing by either means are a vast improvment on the first lumpy, fragile attempts I made less than a month ago. Almost every day, I see my skill at manipulating the fiber becoming more refined, and I've learned a few tricks along the way for talking pesky slubs into thinning down before being wound onto the spindle as a length of finished single. Cotton is a delightful fiber, if perhaps not the easiest stuff to spin.