Bronka

Day 166: Here she is, my Bronka, my dream wheel, and she has already spun a few yards of fine wool thread, whisper-quiet and smooth as glass. Named for a dear friend who passed away earlier this year and who shared her Polish origins, she is a Kromski Minstrel, and represents years of longing on my part. She is currently set up with a single drive and Scotch tension, but operates as well with a double drive. I found her on consignment at one of my regular fiber suppliers at a price substantially below retail even for a used wheel of her breed, and although bringing her to live with me has grievously pinched the grocery budget for the next several months, I knew the opportunity would never come my way again. My weaving buddy Ed picked her up for me to save on shipping and brought her to my door today, complete with an additional niddy noddy for skeining the finished yarn.

Spinning My Wheels

Day 318: I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels, and for at least a portion of the day over the last several months have been doing exactly that in one form or another. The current project on my Louët is reddish-purple Corriedale top, spun at a fingering weight (i.e., 18-22 wraps per inch). That's kinda my default diameter for Corriedale, and I tend to spin Merino somewhat finer on this wheel. On the other hand, when I'm using a drop spindle, my default for Merino thins down to 26 WPI. I seldom spin heavier yarns these days, largely because commercially produced fine yarns have become prohibitively expensive in recent years. Besides, if you spin your own, you get double the pleasure of working with fibers, and I do prefer to knit with fine yarns. That said, I'd hoped to upgrade my spinning wheel for September Morn this year, but was knocked out by several hefty financial setbacks at the start of the year. Oh well, Louët and I have been friends for fifty years now, and as long as I am able to find replacement parts when the inevitable breakdowns occur, we'll keep the partnership alive.

Contraption Connection

Day 240: It didn't take me long to figure out that the book charkha really wasn't designed to accommodate plying, i.e., twisting two strands of spun cotton together to make a heavier, stronger thread, but I figured that since it had a built-in "lazy Kate," it should serve some purpose. Several attempts with the parts in various positions only resulted in tangled or broken threads, and YouTube was no help at all. I spoke with the seller and was told that my original assumption was correct, that the charkha was meant to spin singles. Therefore, it was up to me to devise a way to achieve a two-ply thread. I tried putting the tahklis in separate tall glasses. The threads still tangled and broke, and in the process of trying to untangle them, I impaled my hand with one of the points. Then I tried using a test-tube drying rack. That worked somewhat better, and although this solution was improved even further by the addition of twisted wires to hold the tahklis in place, it was still far from perfect. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was approaching the problem from the wrong side. Maybe I didn't need a different "lazy Kate." Maybe what I needed was a different means of controlling the single threads.

My Louët wheel (standard spinning wheel) does not spin fast enough to spin a cotton single, even when geared at its lowest tension. It was designed to spin wool or other long fibers. However, when threads are plied, the direction of spin is reversed, an action which to some minor degree "un-spins" each single. It occurred to me that this might be exactly what I wanted for a plied cotton thread: minimal untwist. With some degree of trepidation at the thought of possibly ruining my hard work, I set two tahklis up in the charkha's "lazy Kate" and hooked them up to the Louët. After spinning a few inches, you might have heard me shout, "Yes! Perfect!" when I realized my connection of contraptions was producing the exact result I'd wanted. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. Move over, Rube Goldberg.

Spinning My Wheels

Day 183: The pandemic has left me feeling as if I'm spinning my wheels. Oh, hang on a mo'...that's exactly what I've been doing. In addition to my other fiber-arts projects, I have not only been spinning woolon my 40-year old Louët, I've taken up the new sport of turning cotton into thread on a charkha. Not only did I finish up 42 ounces of "cinnamon twist" (white Corriedale plied with a cinnamon-coloured lamb's wool), I polished off a pound and a half of silver-grey Gotland over the last month. Now I have moved on to a lightly washed raw fleece I call "Honey-lamb" for its golden overtones. It was a gift from another spinner, and I've felt guilty about not getting to it before this. While I normally card my wool into batts and spin directly from them, Honey-lamb seems to want to be processed into rolags in order to achieve a smooth yarn, perhaps because it is a very long-staple fiber, measuring out at 5.5-6.0 inches on average. I spent last night and part of this morning filling my basket with rolags, wool which has been carded and formed into loose rolls. Tonight, I will spin up as many as time allows. And so it goes: card and spin, card and spin. Sometimes spinning your wheels is a good thing.

Wheels Within Wheels

Day 74: The wheels have been turning a bit more slowly these last two weeks while I've been dealing with tooth issues, but now my engine has begun to rev up and a bit more progress is being made. I'm finding that I'm going to need to ration quilting time in order to have anything left for the Feathers & Fur Quilting Tour to do when they arrive (date still undetermined), although if it came right down to it, I have another quilt partially done which I could quite easily pop back on the frame. As for spinning, even once the Cinnamon Twist is finished and I take up turning it into a sweater, I still have grey Gotland, more white Corriedale, black Shetland and a huge bag of silvery-tan, long-staple Romney fleece to keep my fingers busy. For those of you who are curious, my wheel is a Louet S15, bought before they began manufacturing models with a balanced flywheel (hole in the big wheel). I do not regret my choice. The slight difference in balance has not been an issue (it's easy to learn to compensate with the treadle), and it allowed me to paint a Tree of Life design on the face. The Tree of Life has been incorporated into each of my homes in the last 50 years in some form or another and always contains at least one bird among a welter of botanical diversity. Some of the figures have personal significance; others are simply drawn from fantasy.

Spinning My Wheel

Day 9: When the weather's crummy, I may be just sitting here spinning my wheel. I needed a break from quilting, what with one project on the frame, one in construction and another awaiting a few lines of machine-stitching, but mainly because a friend has asked me to batt, back and hand-stitch an heirloom quilt top made by her paternal grandmother. It came in the mail yesterday, Dresden plate big enough to cover a king-sized bed, and dominated by pink prints. Yeah, pink. That little fact can work two ways. Either I will find it horribly difficult to devote myself to, or I'll work like fury at it to get it out of the house as quickly as possible. Since it's for a friend, I anticipate the latter. In any event, I wanted to have a breather from working over the frame, so I pulled out my spinning wheel and finished up a second skein of double-ply yak in about three days. I was sure I had more yak hair, but couldn't find it when I dug into my stash. That left me with three choices: creamy white Corriedale top, silky silver Gotland top, or grey fleece (a gift from a friend). The Corriedale won, if for no other reason than it's been a while since I made any white yarn. I'm finding the fiber an absolute delight to work with and had intended to fill the basket with it for this photo, but when I went to get it out, I pulled down a large bag I had assumed was fleece, but which in fact was the remaining yak. Well, nuts! Since I only have a pound of the Corriedale, I'll finish it up first. I'm betting you'd have another meaning in mind if you told someone you'd be yakking and spinning your wheel(s).

Spinning Alpaca With Cousin Itt

Day 38: Alien life form? Rapunzel? Going overboard with Mo-vember? No, it's Cousin Itt, almost ready to start spinning some heavenly soft, long-staple alpaca/Romney blend, a whole pound of it purchased at the Ashford Christmas Bazaar. A friend had alerted me to the fact that there would be fiber-arts people there and the possibility of some fleece, so I showed up right at opening time, expecting to find spun yarns, weavings and maybe a little raw wool. What I did not expect was a wall of dyed and processed fibers, some in locks, some in roving. I fingered a lot of different types, trying to make a decision, but when the booth's proprietor made an offer of $30/pound for the alpaca blend, my budgetary resolve melted like ice cream on a hot sidewalk. I'm now officially up to my eyeballs in wool for spinning. Can you tell?

Putting A Spin On It

Day 359: I have finished up the grey Gotland wool (24 ounces) except for measuring and setting the twist in the last skein. Now I am spinning "in the grease," i.e. spinning raw, unwashed wool. The lanolin in the wool makes it a sticky job and it's not as easy as spinning from roving, but I find the sheepy scent enjoyable, if a little barnyardy. So far, the cats haven't investigated, although Tip picked up a tiny tuft of wool I'd dropped and wasn't at all happy that he couldn't get it off his tongue. I only have 7 ounces of raw wool to spin, just enough for a nice stocking cap. Next up is some lovely dyed fiber I bought at the Puyallup Fair.

Llast Of The Llama

Day 284: The estimable Ogden Nash tells us
The one-l lama,
He's a priest.
The two-l llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet a silk pajama 
There isn't any three-l lllama.

It's amazing how few people realize that the "three-l lllama" refers to a fire alarm..."three-alarmer"...but then, there is a large section of society which can't get two- and three-letter words right ("to" and "too," and gods forbid that they should have to rise to the challenge of "their," "there" and "they're").

Mr. Nash aside, I am done with my two-l llama. Even as I write, the third skein is hanging, weighted with a couple of bottles of water to stretch and set the twist. It's been a long time in the making, owing to the fact that a simple plastic part failed on my wheel, a part for which it took several years to find a supplier and longer for it to be stocked for sale. It was a five-minute fix once I had it in hand, slightly longer to find where I'd stashed the remaining wool, less than a week to finish up 503 yards (roughly 8 ounces) of soft, silky sportweight double-ply yarn.

Now I find myself in limbo between projects. The llama is off the wheel, the weaving is off the loom. More wool is due to arrive this weekend (a lovely grey Gotland from Swedish sheep), and four more cones of 8/2 cotton will be here before the end of the month, but for now, I need to find a way to keep my hands busy.

Plying

Day 277: Happy to finally have my spinning wheen back in operation after months of waiting for a silly little backordered part (the footman-to-treadle connector, a flexible plastic rod 8 mm. in diameter and approximately two inches long), I had even forgotten that I had one spindle of tan single-ply llama wool already done. I spun up an approximately equivalent amount on a second spindle, and then settled into the less-demanding job of turning two single plies into two-ply yarn.

Right now, you might be thinking, "Why not just spin a single thicker strand?" The answer is simple: strength. When spinning, the twist enters the yarn in the direction of an S or a Z depending on the spinner's preference. In plying, two strands are spun separately, each with the same twist, and then are recombined as a double-ply with the twist in the opposite direction. In other words, two S-twist single-ply strands are spun together with a Z-twist. In effect, this untwists the original strands slightly and allows a few fibers of wool to become entangled with each other, binding the strands together and making a stronger, more durable yarn in the end. I almost always ply my yarns unless I'm going for a "novelty" look. In this case, the resultant yarn is a nice sport-weight, more work, but double the fun of spinning.