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.