Just heard
Levi Stubbs, of the Four Tops, has passed away.
Which made me think of this song, by one of my most favoritist musicians ever.
Which made me think of this song, by one of my most favoritist musicians ever.
Fiber friday: Worsted vs. semi-worsted
So last week I showed you the yarn I spun up at Yarn School. One of the things that we discussed was the difference between woolen and worsted spinning, both in terms of fiber prep (which seems to be most important) and spinning technique (which is where you get the "semi"). Woolen yarn is only produced when you start with a carded fiber prep, worsted yarn comes from combed prep. Since most of the commercially available fibers come in top form (even if they are referred to as roving), 99.9% of the spinning I've done has been worsted or semi-worsted. Until I went to Kansas.
The purple and black mini-skeins were spun from hand carded rolags. The brown single was spun from a batt. The major difference between these two preps is that hand carded rolags force you to spin a woolen yarn with the fibers more or less traveling in a circle around the circumference of the single, rather then longitudinal along the single. Batts can also be spun with circumferential fibers or longitudinal. Both preps give you a yarn that is fuzzy because the ends of the fibers are free to stick out rather then being smoothed into the single and caught by the twist. You can see the fuzzies in the above picture.
This is an example of worsted spinning. The fiber prep was combed top, which I spun with a short forward draw, smoothing and compressing the single as the twist entered. The fibers in this yarn run parallel to the axis of the single, so the ends are trapped and the yarn is smooth. This is a good way to get a very strong, durable, hard wearing yarn, which was perfect for this stuff, which became my first pair of knee-socks.
On the right is the yarn I spun at Yarn School - this is a semi-worsted yarn. The prep was combed top, but I pulled off chunks and spun them long-draw from the fold, thereby jumbling the fiber orientation. On the left is the yarn I spun up from my H^4 swap fiber: spun with short forward draw, worsted yarn. Nice and smooth, no fuzzies. I'm calling it Cotton Candy for the colors, and I think Devil has designs on it for something.
Cotton Candy stats:
Domestic wool combed top from Poppy Flower Fibers, 4 oz
Spun/plied 10:1
Spun worsted style, 2 ply, ~12 wpi, 183 yds/4 oz.
One other point about worsted vs. semi-worsted. Worsted style spinning got me 183 yds from 4 oz. Semi-worsted at a similar wpi got me 83 yds/1.1 oz. So the semi-worsted spinning gets you more yardage since the yarn is less dense due to trapped air. So now I'm on the hunt for some commercial roving to buy so I can get going on some sweater yarn!
Excuse me for a moment
There are many reasons (too numerous to list) why I'm not going to vote for John McCain (Exhibit A: a VP candidate with a belief in creationism is not conducive to my productive life as a scientist), including but not limited to his inability to be on stage with his opponent for 90 minutes and keep a straight face*, but this right here pretty much sums up another good reason.
Regardless of how you feel about abortion, his cavalier attitude and dismissal of a scenario that could have killed me and my first child, and his attempt to portray exceptions to a late-term abortion ban for the health of the mother a "liberal" plot to plant a Planned Parenthood with a drive-through D&C window next to every Starbucks in the nation**, makes me want to throw up. And then hit something really, really hard. And then maybe scream a little.
I know that everyone is sick to death of the election, and it's not something you want to read about on a putative knitting blog. So I'll stop the rant here and we can move on to something more productive.
(Please let the next 20 days go by quickly!)
* Seriously dude. You'd have a better chance of convincing people you're ready to be President if you stop rolling your eyes and sneering. That's all I'm saying.
** No, he didn't actually say that - please grant me a little license here.
The dreaded "S" word
Last week at WHMU(WHSKAL), I swatched. Which is something that happens pretty rarely around here, so I thought I'd babble about it a little bit.
Usually I don't swatch. My gauge is usually pretty close to the recommended gauge on ball bands, so for things like socks I don't swatch. I don't swatch lace. I don't swatch for scarves or mittens or hats. In fact the only thing I do swatch for occasionally is a sweater.
Typically I'll start with a sleeve if I'm worried about the gauge and check that after a few inches. But if it's something that for which gauge is really important, I'll do a swatch. Or a yarn that I have no information on for appropriate gauge. Or if I'm not sure how the yarn and the pattern will work together, I'll do a swatch.
I've been wanting to do Manon for a while now (Rav link). And since it's another Norah Gaughan funky construction type of thing, I figured swatching would be in my best interests. So I threw the newly dyed Italian yarn into a bag along with three needle sizes and headed for Whole Foods.
Three needles sizes you ask? Yup, three sizes. Because nothing pisses me off more then knitting a gauge swatch with a particular size and then finding out that it's wrong. So I use multiple sizes on the same swatch and then pick the one that works best after washing/drying.
For this sweater the pattern calls for US size 9 needles. Usually I would try to bookmark the needle size (i.e. use one size smaller and one size larger), but I couldn't imagine that I would need a US 10 for this, so I took US 7/8/9 as my needle range.
Recommended gauge for this project is 18 st/24 rows for 4 inches. I cast on 26 stitches with the 7s, knit about 4 rows in garter stitch and then started working in stockinette stitch, keeping 3 stitches on each edge in garter. After a while, on a wrong side row, I knit 7 stitches. After a while more, I figured I had enough to be able to check the gauge, so I knit one entire wrong side row, and then switched to the 8s.
click for notes
The process proceeded as above except that instead of knitting 7 stitches in the middle of that stretch, I knit 8, and so on (9 stitches with the size 9s). This makes it very easy later on to figure out what needle size I used for which section of the swatch, without having to rely on an easily lost piece of paper. The swatch is finished with several more rows of garter stitch. I finished this one easily that night, and tossed it into a cold bath when I got home (although I did start the sweater before measuring the blocked swatch - thankfully the gauge didn't change!).
click for more notes
I'm happy to say that, not only was my gauge spot on with the US 9s, but the swatch didn't bleed at all, proving that my improvised solar dyeing/steam setting of the dye worked pretty well. It is slightly variegated, which looks just gorgeous when knitted up. And I've got a gauge swatch that tells me how the yarn works on 7s and 8s too, just for future reference.