Spinning Experiments

For my birthday, I signed up for a new Fiber Club. Or should I say, Fibre Club, given that the packages are posted from my current fair city. In contrast to the Hello Yarn fiber club, which feeds my ever growing need for a fix of gorgeous handdyed wooliness, this one comes with assignments. And directions. And gorgeous handdyed wooliness. Win-win-win. It's a bit like online spinning school, I guess, but without any deadlines.

In any event, the first installment of Spintelligence was a pile of the softest BFL I've ever felt, and the instructions to spin a bunch of small samples of singles yarn, varying the ratios. The idea was to demonstrate how just changing the ratio on the wheel can affect your singles/yarn.

Let me back up, just in case anyone reading isn't familiar with the mechanics of spinning wheels. There are a number of different types of "drives" for spinning wheels - aka, different mechanisms to introduce twist into the fiber and then wind the resulting yarn on to the bobbin. But, no matter what sort of drive system you have, there are different ratios for adding twist, which alter how much twist enters the fiber per treadle stroke. The "ratio" refers to the number of times the flyer or bobbin moves (introducing twist) per single rotation of the drive wheel. On my wheel (which is a single-drive, Scotch tension system), the ratios are changed by shifting the drive band from one sized whorl to another.

You can see in the above picture that the drive band is going around the smallest whorl on this particular flyer assembly - that gives a higher ratio then the larger whorls.

So, armed with the BFL and two flyers with six ratios between them, I set off to do my Spinning Homework.

I set the brake tension and spun all the samples at that tension, with a short forward draw without smoothing, and just changed the ratio, going from 6:1 at the top of the picture to 17:1 at the bottom. The obvoius result of this was as follows: higher ratios mean thinner singles with the same drafting and tension. Eureka!

Ok, maybe not Eureka!, since this is what was supposed to happen. The only misstep was that the 9.25:1 single had a wpi of 32, while the 12:1 single had a wpi of 28. However, that could easily be due to operated error in measuring wpi. It could also be due to the fact that the 9.25:1 ratio is the smallest on my regular flyer, while the 12:1 is the largest on my high speed flyer, so changing the flyers may have altered the tension a bit.

As the ratios went up (and more twist was added per treadle), it became really hard to draft quickly enough to keep the single from getting overtwisted. The sample on the left is 7.5:1, middle is 12:1 and right is 17:1. You can see that, particularly in the 17:1 sample, there's a bit of overtwist that wasn't taken care of in the finishing process.

The second part of the assignment was to pick one of the yarns and spin up a bunch of it to knit a swatch. I picked the 7.5:1 sample as my favorite, and spun up about 8 grams of fiber into an unknown number of yards. I picked a US 3/3.25 mm needle for my swatch, by virtue of doubling over my spun yarn and seeing which hole it went through on my needle gauge.

I knit a bit in stockinette, with a garter border, then did a couple of cables, and then a bit of lace. I was pleasantly surprised at how little bias there was in the stockinette section - singles yarn is inherently unbalanced, since it's not plied, and you can end up with biased fabric in stockinette. For that reason, singles are usually best knit up in stitch patterns that combine knit and purl, or in lace.

The cables were, unsurprisingly, pretty flat and mushy, and the garter stitch wasn't too good. The lace looked pretty good, although I think I would go up a needle size to make it a bit more fluid - this needle size made for a slightly too stiff lace fabric.

The second installment of the club arrived Saturday morning, and I'm itching to get the currently-being-spun bobbin off the wheel so I can get to work on it. The assignment this time is another singles yarn, but this time in some gorgeous handdyed alpaca/merino from The Thylacine.

I've been cheating

I made The List with all the best intentions. I was going to prioritize the projects for the fall, write them down in (virtual) pen, make myself accountable to all five people who read this blog (not counting my mother) and Get. Things. Done.

Well. That was before this. I made the mistake of going over to take a look.

And I found three (!) sweaters that I liked. Three sweaters that I even have the yarn for. Three. And I realized that knitting up some of the sweater lots in my stash would clear out some space. Which is always a good thing, right?

That giant thud you just heard was The List getting tossed to the bottom of the rubbish bin and buried under the moldy leftovers I cleaned out of the refridgerator. Temporary insanity is my excuse. Insanity and an overwhelming desire to knit with cotton/angora yarn. In the autumn (part of the insanity thing - it doesn't get that cold in London in the winter, but it's definitely colder then cotton/angora). That's the only explanation to explain why this

is now taking over all of my evening knitting time. I was hoping to maintain my speed and get it done in a week (2 girl sweaters = 1 porpoise sweater, right?), but sadly, I'm now into the stockinette body, and even though it's on US 10/6.0 mm needles, it's taking quite a while. Maybe two weeks, and then I can get back to The List.

I promise.

Quarter Three Output

Right, a cheater blog post for an extremely busy Wednesday:

Knitting
Annis #5 and #6
Aran Necklace Tank (not blogged because it's not quite wearable yet...)
Two handspun hats
One pair of socks
Norberta (sadly gifted before I took a finished shot)
Mittens for Nana
Girl sweaters

Spinning
The Tour de Fleece
4! Oz! Challenge spinning
Pencil roving

Now back to the frantic guilty knitting (I cast on for something not on the list, because I just couldn't help myself).

Nana cheated

She opened her birthday present early. Of course, we were talking on Skype, and she did ask me if it was ok. After ascertaining that it was cold enough in the mornings to need some hand covering when she walks the dog, I said it was ok.

Pattern: Triskele Mittens by Violet Green
Yarn: Knit Picks Palette in Rainforest Heather and some unknown color of Jamesons Spindrift taken off of knitlet's hands in a stash swap back in Houston. Maybe 1/3 of a ball of the Palette and 25 gr of Spindrift? Not sure, but not much yarn at all.
Needles: US 2/2.75 mm bamboo dpns
Start/finish: 5 Sept - 13 Sept 2010
Comments/mods: A really nice pattern - reasonably quick for colorwork, and interesting enough to take some attention. I could work on them while watching TV as long as I didn't need to pay attention to every second of whatever was on (or even most seconds). I used fingering weight yarn instead of the DK weight indicated in the pattern. But Mom has small hands, so that worked out ok - I could get them on, but there wasn't any extra room in there.

I love the wavy palms, and the mirroring of the pattern in the left and right mittens.

Now that these are done, I'm ready to jump in to another pair of colorwork mittens, only this time with handspun. Yee haw!

FF: One week, two sweaters

Sweater #1:

Sweater #2:

Not surprisingly, Devil was uninterested in modeling her sweater, although I have managed to get her into it voluntarily. But Boo was happy to put her's on for our grey and drizzly Sunday visit to HMS Belfast.

Both sweaters: top down raglans a la Barbara Walker.
Needles: US 10/6.0 mm for bodies, US 8/5.0 mm for ribbing on the Technicolor Dreamsweater
Yarn: handspun from girl-dyed top (colorways Mermaid and Clown Barf). I used all of the Mermaid yarn and 95% of the Clown Barf.

These were great fun to knit, and have only increased my conviction that I will be much happier when I do most of my knitting from handspun rather then commercial yarn. It's so satisfying. I am also pleased that Boo's dye job ended up as a very bright, but perfectly 3-year-old-appropriate sweater. She loves it, and it makes it really easy to keep track of her in a crowd!

I've got to go back and fix the collar I think - add ribbing all the way around instead of doing a little Peter Pan deal - but then it will be time to move on to the next project. Spinning seems to be falling by the wayside these days, in favor of actually using up some of the stash. I think the next sweater should be the IM Aran, but a new Knitty (and a new Norah Gaughan pattern) is very tempting!