Supported Spindle

Day 171: In typical Crow fashion, I learned support spindle spinning from the "top down," i.e., starting at the advanced level using a tahkli and cotton, a notoriously short and difficult fiber to spin. I soon came to love the method: slow but portable, and a meditative practice for stressful times. It must be said that I have never mastered the allied art of drop-spindling despite having learned to spin on a regular wheel before I was of kindergarten age. I found using a drop spindle tedious and too cumbersome to be enjoyable. On the other hand, supported spindling is performed identically to spinning with a tahkli, albeit on a larger scale, so when all thoughts of upgrading my spinning wheel were squelched when my heat pump died, I bought a supported spindle instead. I've chosen to spin my "Ice Caves" blend with it. This is a Tibetan style spindle, 10 inches in length, weighing 23 grams with a whorl diameter of 1.5 inches, perfect for my purposes.The bowl is the one I use with the tahkli, not optimal but serviceable until I find someone with a lathe who is willing to craft one to spec.

Bobbin Along

Day 168: Just call me Red, Red Robin 'cuz I'm bob-bob-bobbin along! This week's spinning projects included finishing up a second bobbin (4 ounces) of a Merino wool/bamboo blend and allowing it to rest for a few days alongside a fully loaded companion. A short nap improves its disposition when it's time to ply. Most spinners prefer to let the fibers relax into the twist imparted in spinning for a day or two before plying. Call it "fiber yoga," if you will, for after having bent into contortions, the fiber now needs to maintain its pose to achieve the greatest benefit. In the meantime, I broke out a manual tahkli and a free sample which came with an order of wool top, a luscious moss green blend of Merino and alpaca. The freebie yielded a whole 16 meters of double-ply lace weight yarn, just enough to add a few rows to the top edge of sock cuffs. That said, it's not a fiber I would care to spin on a regular basis, the alpaca having a tendency toward fuzziness like Angora. I sneezed a lot during that spinning session, despite the fact that alpaca fiber is hypoallergenic. With a few days under its belt, the wool/bamboo blend is ready to be plied now, but must wait in line until I am finished with another colourway of the same product currently on the wheel.

Rookie Mistake

Day 150: To put this essay in the proper perspective, you must understand that I learned how to spin before I entered kindergarten. Admittedly, I could only make a simple and lumpy single strand, and I was unaware of the nuances in the twist (S versus Z), but I feel I can still claim to knowing how to spin for most of my many years of life. However, I am fairly new to spinning cotton. Nevertheless, that doesn't excuse making a rookie mistake.

I sat down yesterday morning to ply from two full tahklis, thinking I'd perform the task with my regular spinning wheel as I usually do. I tied the ends together on the leader and began treadling. Almost immediately, one of the strands broke. That's a common problem with cotton which hasn't been sufficiently twisted, and because I was at the end of the strand, I thought that was the cause. I re-tied and tried again, but had only spun a few inches before the strand broke again. Then I noticed something. One of the singles was twisting, the other untwisting. Both should have been untwisting slightly as they plied together. I looked more closely, and discovered the problem. One was twisted Z, the other S. Apparently when setting up the charkha wheel, I had inadvertently reversed the direction of spin for the second tahkli. At this point, I had a couple of options. I could spin more of each twist on two fresh tahklis, or I could wind off all the S-twisted thread and ply it with itself. I decided to follow the latter course, and began winding a "plying bracelet" on my hand.

What is a plying bracelet? I knew someone would ask. I have to say that the primitive person who came up with this seemingly impossible piece of engineering was the Einstein of their times. Basically, it's rat's-nest of single-ply thread, wound around fingers and palm in a complex pattern and then slipped onto the wrist, a tangled mess (or so it would seem) which feeds from both ends simultaneously to ply with itself. The principle works very well with wool, but with the much more fragile cotton thread, I wasn't convinced I'd be able to salvage my work. In fact, I was unable to ply from the bracelet using the spinning wheel, and thus resorted to putting it on a manual tahkli. The process of plying 38.5 meters of thread took over an hour, as I constantly had to remind myself to twirl the tahkli counter-intuitively. I achieved my goal without any breakage, in itself a milestone in the art of spinning cotton.

Alike But Different

Day 149: As I mentioned yesterday, spinning wool and spinning cotton require two separate skill sets. Both are alike in some regards, but also quite different from each other in the same manner, one might say, as barbering is to dog-trimming. In this case, the overlap is in the fact that fibers are being twisted together to form a cohesive strand of thread/yarn by using a rotating spindle of some sort. That said, the difference lies in the length of the fiber being spun. If "wool" is defined as coming from sheep (as opposed to rabbits, goats, etc.), almost any type is considered "long staple," i.e., having individual fibers an inch or more in length. On the other hand, cotton has a "short staple." Its individual fibers are roughly half an inch long. This means that more twist has to be imparted to a cotton thread than to a wool thread or it will come apart. Cotton is spun with a great number of revolutions of the spindle on which it is wound, even when the resultant thread is the same diameter as one spun in wool. In comparison, the wool fibers in that lovely multi-coloured top are about five inches long. Now you might suppose that it would take longer to spin 50 yards of cotton thread than it would for wool, but in fact because the spindle (tahkli) rotates so much faster, the time is fairly close to being the same.

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.

Spinning Cotton With A Tahkli

Day 171: Looking at the top photo, you might think, "Oh, she's spinning yarn with a drop spindle," but the bottom photo puts my latest fiber-arts adventure into a different perspective. The spool of thread is there for size comparison only. I thought you might miss the needle without something to draw your attention to it. I am spinning cotton using a "supported spindle" device known as a tahkli. It works on the same principle as a drop spindle, but as you can see, the resultant product is much finer.

Cotton is a short-staple fiber, which is to say that the individual fibers are much shorter than those found in wool. Consequently, the device on which cotton is spun must be able to impart a lot of twist in a short distance. Some spinning wheels have a ratio which is high enough that cotton can be spun on them under low tension, but mine is a relatively "slow" wheel and isn't capable of supplying the necessary amount of twist to thread before it is drawn onto the bobbin. There are wheels made expressly for spinning cotton, the most common being the charkha as seen throughout India (-cough- waiting for the stimulus check to arrive...).

The tahkli is the simplest form of "spinning wheel" possible. Spin is imparted to the shaft by the fingers with the pointed end resting in a bowl. The whorl (in this case, a brass disk) at the base keeps it spinning for a long time while it is held upright by the newly forming thread. The loose cotton fiber is held in one hand and drawn out slowly until it reaches a comfortable arm's-length and then is pinched while the tahkli is spun several times to add twist. Then the thread is wound onto the shaft and the process repeats.

Even with my years of experience at the spinning wheel, it took me the better part of an afternoon and about a quarter ounce of cotton before I was able to make a satisfactory thread. I watched a dozen or so YouTube videos, most of which offered at least one clue into the device's operation. None covered the full process adequately. How to start the thread was discussed by one presenter, how to remove slubs by another, how to wind the cone by yet another. I was struggling and getting a little frustrated with how frequently my thread pulled apart or got too thin or too thick, but finally I hit on one description of how to hold the unspun fiber ("loosely"), and that simple suggestion provided the key to being able to spin a realtively consistent strong and fine thread. I won't say I have the technique perfected yet, but at least I'm well on my way to being able to spin my own cotton threads for incorporation into some very special weavings.