Spun to weave...

I get more spinning time than weaving time nowadays, but I often have weaving ideas for my yarns.

In the past couple of weeks I have been spinning:
Castlemilk Moorit fleece spun longdraw from rolags;
Cotswold fleece worstead from combed fleece;
coloured Merino longdraw from carded rolags.

The Castlemilk Moorit is not quite as soft as it looks due to having two types of wool fibre, a soft wool undercoat and some stiffer longer hairs. I might knit a jumper or jacket, if I have enough. If not enough to knit I could weave with a different wool for contrast in colour and possibly a longer fibre wool to add strength (the fibres in the fleece were around 3-6cm) or a softer wool for comfort.

The Cotswold, centre in photo, I could dye and weave into a firm twill fabric suitable for a jacket or for upholstery.

The Merino, bottom in photo, is lovely and soft. I have also spun blends of this with alpaca. It would make warm, soft woven scarves and would also be lovely to knit into a jumper or scarves, hats, mittens. It was a large fleece and I have plenty.

J C Rennie & Co, wool spinners

I have just enjoyed a blog post by knit designer Kate Davies about visiting the Scottish wool spinners J C Rennie and would encourage you to read too and enjoy the lovely photos.

J C Rennie's own website is here. The business was set up by two brothers in 1798, spinning locally grown wool for weavers working in their homes.

I have shade cards from J C Rennie as their wools are suitable for weavers, although I haven't used them yet due to the rather large stash of weaving yarns I acquired within the first few months of loom ownership which I have yet to work my way through!

A handspun, madder-dyed weft.

I could ask you to guess what is pictured below:
For most people this is an unsual sight and unexpected, probably not a fair question.

This is the underside of my Ashford Traveller spinning wheel.

Ever since I got this wheel I was trying to track down and eliminate odd creaks and groans from the wheel. I tightened and replace many screws. In spite of my efforts it was getting more creaky, and becoming very hard to treadle, especially I discovered on un-carpeted floors - a clue here. With a bit of investigation I discovered that every time I pressed the treadle one of the legs moved sideways. I found the leg is fitted in with a screw, and unlike the other three legs it was loose. When I undid the screw I could easily take it out, but I could not get it to fit back in without wobbling as the hole it fitted into was oversized. What you see in the photo is a shim of old Christmas card taking up the spare space. It does the job, no more wobbly leg.

However, there was still a groaning from the treadle. I found that every single screw in the treadle needed an extra half turn. Having sorted this out, I oiled everything and went back to spinning - wow! it's like a different wheel. Tip for anyone with a grumbling & groaning wheel: check all the joints, tighten all the screws, oil all the moving parts.


So, what have I been up to with this spinning wheel? Spinning a weft yarn to weave another scarf on my table loom. After I finished the handspun, handwoven scarf at Christmas I was filled with the joy of weaving and thought "another!". I pulled a pretty multicoloured Noro yarn out of a stash box for weft, prepared the warp, warped the loom, but then I was stuck. I just couldn't find a weft to match it. I tried cotton, I tried wools in different colours, I tried bright colour and I tried neutrals.

It dawned on me that the weeks I spent thinking about colours and weave pattern for the handspun & handwoven scarf I'd just finished were not just idle thinking but very important creative planning and design time.

I stopped to think.

One thought I had was that I have many different fibres to spin and I have dyes and I can create the yarn I want. I looked at some different colours and found I had Shetland wool fibre dyed that I had dyed with madder last summer and the orange-red colour was just what I needed for this warp.

So, weaving had to wait while I spun a new weft yarn.



I had spun all the madder-dyed wool I had, but didn't even have one full bobbin. I know a bobbin holds about 100g of yarn which is the amount I have used in the past for weft in a scarf like this.


Spinning had to wait while I dyed more wool.


I managed a reasonably close match, one ball is slightly more red, the other slightly more orange so I'm weaving alternately with the two yarns in two shuttles.


The pattern I've chosen is my favourite 4-shaft undulating twill, as you can see in the header row bellow. I wove the header in high-contast thick white yarn so I can see what is happening in the warp easily. As the straight edge shows, I needed to adjust the tension on some of the warp. Towards the right of the photo you'll see the white weft yarn doesn't quite reach the straight edge, although it does on either side. Looking at this I know that means I have some tighter weft threads in that area. The weft yarn packs up closer in tight sections so the edge of the weaving dips towards the weaver, whilst in a loose section the warp threads would bulge away.


It's good to be fussy and slow when you start a piece of weaving and correct little errors like this, I have learnt that leaving anything I'm not entirely happy with at this stage is likely to mean that later on the problem has become magnified and I am unhappy with the cloth. When I was a new weaver I rushed the loom set up, but after various different disappointments I learnt that being relaxed about preparing the loom and fussing over little things would save heartache later.

I'm delighted with the colour of my madder weft. Maybe I've spun it a little thick, but we'll have to see how it is when it comes off the loom.

Just to finish up, these are some of the wefts I tried that didn't work! The first was a green knitting cotton, as I like green and orange and though the shiny cotton yarn might be a good contrast with the Noro wool. It was not good.

I also tried neutrals, a grey and a soft brown.

I much prefer the madder-dyed yarn!

Linen yarns

The message has been passed around weavers in the UK that a company called GTM Sales Ltd. in Stalybridge had bought up the end of stock from an Irish firm, William Ross, which closed recently.

A couple of weeks ago I enjoyed an afternoon out, I drove over to Stalybridge (not far from my home) and found their office on the ground floor of a wonderful old mill (note: this is not the building pictured on the web site). It's one of those superb, grand Victorian mills where you enter via a brick archway into a cobbled yard. Nowadays the mill is home to a number of small businesses, one of which is GTM Sales who have an office on one side of the yard and large storeroom on the other. If you follow the link above then you can see a rack of shelves in the storeroom. They are selling pure linen two ply yarns and two ply yarns of linen plied with yarns of other fibre.

The yarns I bought are two ply linen/linen, linen/cotton, linen/wool, enough to keep me happy weaving for a year or two I should think, unless I want more of a particular colour. The colours are lovely, see for yourself:

I had a great time choosing these and enjoyed a good chat and a cup of tea with Sandra, who has the task of marketing these yarns. Hi Sandra! Sandra's not a yarn expert, if you look at the company web site you'll see they used to refurbish spinning mill machinery, however, she's learning from her customers - and commented how friendly weavers are. She's happy to send out samples for anyone who can't go along in person. They are selling per cone (mostly weighing at least 1 kg) prices from £5-£10. (Sandra, I hope your boss is impressed by the advertising space you get for one cup of tea and a friendly chat!!)

Here I am surrounded by cones of yarn and thinking, right, what shall I weave? I have put away the mixed yarns for now, and am looking at using the two ply linens. I think all the yarns are eminently suitable for fabric to be used for clothing. They may be less suitable for upholstery or towels because the yarn is not tight twist, but I suppose that depends on the length of the flax used in spinning this yarn. I haven't pulled a thread apart to find out the length yet. I know another of Sandra's customers is a machine knitter. I also like the idea of trying these out for inkle weaving.

The next day I asked my boyfriend - the keen woodworker who often says "what shall I do with all these odd left over bits of wood" - to make a nifty gadget like the one I saw on Amelia's blog for trying out yarn sett. If you're in the U.S. you could buy one from Halcyon Yarns.

Coincidently, this is left over syacamore wood from building of the stairs you saw the yarns sitting on above! What a craftsman!

The sett tool indicates that 30 epi will be good for plain weave. I could calculate the thread twill density for twill from that, but as I was having fun I decided to weave another little sample. This time I used a couple of lollysticks tucked in the warp on the back of the sett tool to take out as the warp tightens up.

I found I'm not a very neat weaver like this, the plain weave was easier than a pattern. however, it's a useful indication of sett and appearance.

Other details - the weaving shuttle was a tapestry needle and I used the tips of 2 or 3 sock knitting needles as a comb to push the threads in tight.

Weaving with sock yarns

A couple of weeks ago I wearily escaped from the work on Friday afternoon just before the shops were closing, and there across the street was the wool shop. I could walk past and go and find my car.. or I could walk in the shop. Hmm. I walked in and bought some sock yarn because I liked the colours. They are Noro Kureyon and Sirdar Town & Country.

I just looked at the combination of yarns and thought "point twill weave scarf" - yeah!

This was woven over the weekend on my new Leclerc Voyageur loom.

I found it easy to warp and weave. I used the 1/4" raddle I made for my floor loom and a couple of home-made lease sticks to get the warp on neatly.

This next photo is one I took to show something that's very different about the table loom, compared to my Toika countermarch floor loom. When the shafts are at rest, they actually pull down on the warp threads.

Half the shed is already there, before any shafts are raised, here's another photo with a shaft raised, ready to put the shuttle through:

Its a neat little loom and a neat shed, but I have found I need to wind on about every 1 1/2 woven. I don't mind this, as I kind wind on without having to walk around the loom, but all the same I've got a pivoting beater on order so that I'll be able weave a bit further from the shafts.

The Kureyon yarn kept twisting around itself, I wondered if this would cause a problem, but the finished scarf shows no evidence of unbalanced yarn, although the fringes twist gently.

Most of the scarf is woven with shaft lift 1-2-3-4, it's a 1/3 twill. The threading includes straight sections and points. I tried some diamond sections, but don't think they worked well. the face of the scarf is o.k., but on the back it's made a bumpy texture.

Here's a section of the face of the scarf with no diamonds:

What the photos don't show is how lovely it feels, smooth and soft. Being sock yarns I know it's practical to put this in the washing machine on a 30 degrees wool-wash setting. I washed it by hand when it was finished, and then pressed it.

I think these photos should have been the other way around, this one is showing the front of a pattern section.

I am very happy with my new scarf, and so last Friday afternoon I went back to the wool shop - wearing it. The lady in the shop greeted me and asked how I'd got on with the socks - so I had to confess that I'd made something else - I took my scarf off and handed it to her. I watched her face as she suddenly saw that this scarf was those same yarns, she broke into a sudden big smile of amazement. The owner was there and she called him over, they loved it. What fun it is to surprise people like this - I should explain that weaving is an extremely unusual hobby in the UK.

It just so happened that they'd been to their annual trade show recently, and taken advantage of an offer to buy 50 different balls of sock wool (normally sold in packs of ten balls all the same). They tipped several bags out onto the counter and helped me with the following selections:

The last is possibly my favourite, not sure, I like the browns as well - oh actually I like them all, but I chose to use these next. And this weekend, another warp on the loom, another twill weave. Having learnt from the previous scarf I choose to use a balanced 2/2 twill so there is no face/back to this scarf, and I wanted long points as I looked at the orange weft yarn and thought of flames.

Here it is on the loom this morning, with spring sunshine coming in the window to pick out those rich colours.

And what is this? Another loom?
I'd better explain what I'm up to. I am intending to weave some rugs on the floor loom, linen warp and carpet wool weft. However, I'm not sure whether to sett the warp at 4 ends per inch or 5. I wove a sampler a couple of years ago at 4 and it drew in more than I thought it should, so think I might use 5 (I do have both 4 & 5 epi reeds). I decided the easiest way to test would be to use a tapestry loom and see how the weft settles into the warp. The cross piece is a tension bar - the warp warps around this and then it is separately lashed to the frame, the lashing to the frame can be loosened to compensate for warp take up. This avoids the tapestry piece being narrower at the top than the bottom. At least, that's how I expect it to work, not done this before!

p.s. the weave pictures in this post can be enlarged if you double click on them.

Silk

In writing my bibliography I was startled to discover I had not written about a very, very good book that I discovered last year on silk. I did write on "Silk: what every weaver should know", with details of other books, so I must have purchased this particular book after I'd published that entry. I also wrote last May on the local history of silk spinning and weaving.

I was hunting high and low for information about silk as I wanted to know all about silk production so I could understand the yarns available, and also because I like to see the things in my life as part of a bigger picture. A yarn has more meaning if I know and understand: where does it start and where will it end?

Yes, I am turning philosophical now - I think it is important to know because we all make decisions that effect other people, and the sequence - what we acquire, how we use it, where it goes when we are finished - is a process that contributes to shape the world we live in.

I was also motivated by having bought some yarn of a quality that I thought was rather poor for expensive silk. More exploration showed I had bought relatively cheap, maybe this was part of the problem. It was full of knots and all wispy at the edges. I queried with the seller whether it really was thrown silk, as claimed, they told me they had it checked by an expert and and that it was (but there was no written report, so I don't know quite what the expert said)... and I thought thrown silk was made from long continuous filament and shouldn't have wispy ends protruding. So I hunted high and low on the internet to learn more.

This book which I found is about the big picture, it is:
Global Silk Industry: A complete source book, by Rajat K Datta and Mahesh Nanavaty, published by Universal Publishers, USA, 2005, ISBN 1-58112-493.
I found and bought it via Amazon.com, it was inexpensive - at a time when the dollar-pound exchange rate was more favourable!

The authors are well qualified. Rajat K Datta is a retired director of International and National Sericulture Research Institutes in India (author of 300 scientific and technical papers) and Mahesh Nanavaty has worked for over 30 years in the silk industry, in the USA and India. The foreword is written by Xavier Gavyn Lavergne, as Secretary General of the International Silk Association.

As regards the content of the book, the preface has this neat summary

"Here are gathered, indeed, the main information and anaylsis regarding the history of production and trade of this exceptional fiber, from the origins of silk to the 21st century, covering the important changes in the silk scenario notably in the course of the 20th centruy, which explain today's situation and enlighten the future."

So we have history, we have a chapter looking at silk in relation to other fibres, an overview of the global silk industry today, and several chapters on silk production. There are reports on current and developing technology, and on the uses and market / marketing of silk.

However, this is not a heavyweight textbook, it is a paperback, 352 pages plus appendices and I found it a good read. Not only that, it filled in many gaps for me, I'm happier now that I understand how to find the quality of silk, and type of yarns, I want to buy, and where my use of silk fits in to the big picture.

Dyed with home-grown nettles

We have a large garden where there's spaces for interesting weeds to lurk. This means I can always find useful dye plants, such as nettle, dock and bramble.

Early this summer I dyed some Shetland wool tops with nettles from the garden. I have learnt by this experience and consequent advice from more experienced dyers that if you put combed wool tops in the dye bath they felt a bit. Oops!

Fortunately this was an inconvenience rather than a disaster. I had to tease the wool apart with my fingers, then I used hand carders to get the wool ready to spin.


I'm very pleased with this yarn. You can probably tell it is not the best, most evenly spun yarn, but it's not too bad and certainly good enough for it's intended use in a knitted hat to wear for gardening in the winter. I'm thinking of using some other natural dyed yarn colours and natural black Shetland for contrast.

I mixed the two colours on the carders, they aren't totally blended as I wanted a marled yarn. rather than a blended shade. The mordant in the original dye bath, to get the yellow, was alum (10%) and cream of tartar (8%). Then, after removing half the wool I added a pinch of iron to modify the colour and give green.

I wish I'd had more time for using natural dyes this summer, but summer was gone before the sun came out this year and many garden things did not get done.

Yarn calculations

Yesterday I wanted to plan a yarn order. There are two particular projects I have in mind. The first is to weave a twill sample blanket, following instructions in Janet Philip's new book, Designing Woven Fabrics.

This requires 6/2 and 12/2 cotton yarns. Most helpfully she gives weights of yarn required in her book. I am going to alter the colours slightly. The two main colours she uses are white and navy. I have done a lot of samples in white and navy recently, so I have chosen to work in primrose yellow and royal blue instead. This still gives good strong contrast to show the weave patterns.

Project two is a lace weave cloth in mercerised yellow cotton for my sister's dressing table. She has a beautiful Victorian chest, french polished, and is concerned that it might be scratched by the bits and pieces she keeps on top of it. Yellow is far and away her favourite colour, and will go well with the yellow-orange-red colour range of the patchwork quilt I made for her wedding.

For project two, I needed to do calculations to find out how much yarn I need. This is something new for me. I went to Janet Philip's first book, The Weaver's Book of Fabric Design, pub. Batsford in 1983. She gives equations for warp and weft calculations.

The amount of yarn needed for warp is the ends per centimetre x width in centimetres x length in metres x Tex number of the yarn, divided by 1000.

What is the Tex of my yarn? This information is not given by my supplier. I know it is 12/2, what exactly does 12/2 mean, does it help for working out Tex? I found a definition of Tex: the weight in grammes of 1 kilometre of yarn.

This looked like a very difficult task. It took me some time, and plenty of digging around my books and files for information. Along the way I found various bits of information I thought needed keeping together. I started a new folder for yarn information, including things like sett ranges for different yarns, reed sley charts (I found I had 4 different ones!), notes on yarn counts and project planning sheets. It's a bright red folder so hopefully easy to find when I need it.

I discovered that my 12/2 cotton yarn means that the yarn is 2 ply, and the 2 single yarns are both of cotton count 12. This seems to be an imperial measurement. I found in notes from another weaver that the cotton count is the number of hanks of yarn of 840 yards which weigh 1lb.

The yarn count didn't seem to help with Tex. However, then I found notes I made from the SI/Metric website. The purpose of this website is to assist with Standard Imperial to metric conversions. There isn't much on yarns, but I found in my notes I had put information on yards per pound / tex together with an article by Rosemary Brock from her website called "Amount of Twist". The yards per pound of 12/2 cotton - 5040 from SImetric gives a tex of 98 in Rosemary's chart (for which she gives credit to Peter and Jacquie Teal).

I decided to check this against my own yarn. I measured out 10 metres of yarn and weighed it on my scales (which are accurate to 0.01g). The weight was 1.1g. This would be 110g of yarn per kilometre - Tex 110. That's reasonably close to 98, my yarn must be slightly fine for it's count.

So, now I could make the calculations. I just had to convert ends and picks per inch to ends and picks per centimetre. The sample I wove that I want to base the cloth on was at 24 epi. I recalled that an inch is about 2.4cm, so decided to work with 10 ends per centimetre and picks per centimetre.

This was taking a fairly long time to work through, but next time I will know what I'm doing.

I multiplied: 10 ends per centimetre x 46 cm wide x 1.2 c.m. long x Tex 110, divide by 1000. I got 54g. Plus 54g for the weft calculation. Only 128g? I was surprised. Then I started to think about loom waste. I realised that my loom needs 1.5m for loom waste (that's slightly generous) and I want some extra for sample length in case I need to make changes or adjustments before weaving the piece. Say, 2m extra. Well, that about doubles the yarn needed. I got my boyfriend to check all my calculations for me. He did, and then pointed out that weaving on a loom like mine is a production method - it's for producing large amounts of cloth. I'd better think again and weave more than one small piece of cloth! After all, she might need at least two so she can wash one from time to time.

Now I can order some yarn.

Thrown silk - and the Macclesfield Silk Industry

I've been lent a most readable history book, East Cheshire Textile Mills, published in 1993 by the Royal Commission on The Historic Monuments of England, now, sadly, out of print.

I live in the west of Derbyshire, close to the Cheshire border, and one of the mills featured is a watermill only 20 minutes walk from our house. This book brings together places and buildings I know with the story of the local textile industry, hence there is much to interest me.


WATER POWERED TEXTILE MILLS
The textile mills of east Cheshire came about because of water power - the streams and rivers running down from the pennine hills made mill machinery possible, and the first mills were built in the 1700s. The silk industry in this area pre-dates the cotton industry.

Silk throwing pre-dates the mills and was carried out in this area in the 1600s to meet a growing demand for luxury and fancy goods. However, the throwing techniques used were not capable of producing organzine for warp threads and until Italian methods of throwing (using water-powered machinery) were introduced in the early 18th century, only the lower quality tram thread (used for weft) was produced and organzine had to be imported from Italy.

The first mill producing organzine was built in Derby (in Derbyshire, not Cheshire) in 1704, on the banks of the river Derwent . It is thought that this was the first powered mill in England.

It was 1744 when Charles Roe, a button merchant, put up the first silk throwing mill in Macclesfield.


THROWN SILK PRODUCTION
So how was the tram thread produced before mechanisation? There's an amazing account taken from an 1841 Parliamentary enquiry:

"... He (the boy) takes first a rod containing four bobbins of silk from the twister who stands at his 'gate' or wheel, and having fastened the ends, runs to the 'cross' at the extreme end of the room, round which he passess the threads of each bobbin and returns to the 'gate'. He is dispatched on a second expedition of the same kind.... "

The twister's wheel was turned to twist the threads, and the threads then wound onto a bobbin. The room the boy ran up and down was between 25 and 35 yards (23 - 32 metres).

When I read this description, it fixed in my mind a clear understanding of what thrown silk actually is, and how / why it is different to a spun yarn.


THE SPINNING OF SILK THREAD
The process of producing thrown silk - reeling and winding silk from the cocoon, cleaning and throwing - was inefficient and the waste silk from the process was estimated in 1765 to be around half of all the silk. As silk was so valuable, and as the industry increased, there was a great need to find ways of using this silk.

Here there is a link to the cotton industry (for which nearby Manchester and Lancashire are famous).

Machinery created for cotton spinning was adapted for silk. To begin with, the silk was cut into short staples, 25-50 mm in length, which could be spun on cotton spinning machinery.


A HIGHER QUALITY SPUN THREAD
Then Gibson and Campbell of Glasgow obtained a patent in 1836 for a machine for the spinning of long staple length silk, up to 250mm length. This enabled production of high quality yarn from the better quality silk filament waste. Silk spinning became established in Cheshire, in mills at Macclesfield and Congleton, by the early 19th century.


MACCLESFIELD
Macclesfield, Cheshire had not only mills for production of silk thread, but also was a centre for weaving. During the 18th century there was a thriving handloom industry, with weavers either working independently or as outworkers. For example, in 1818, one silk manufacturer, Henry Critchley, employed 140-160 weavers. 50 worked at his factory premises and the rest were outworkers, weaving in garrets. Garret houses were specially built with the top (third) storey having large windows to make good workshops, and two dwelling floors below. Some of the houses were built in terraces with one long garret above several dwellings. It is easy to spot many of these distinctive houses today.


TO LEARN MORE..
If you have an opportunity to get there, you will find some excellent museums in Macclesfield.

The publications in the late Ralph Griswold's Online Digital Archive include Silk by H. Gaddum of Macclesfield and Luther Hooper's book, Silk: Its Production and Manufacture which I mentioned in my previous post. Use this link for the publications on silk.

A Fine Book

I have a new book, it is A Fine Fleece: knitting with handspun yarns, by Lisa Lloyd,just published by Potter Craft in the U.S., ISBN 978-0-307-3334683-4. I'd seen a couple of brief reviews of this book and thought that I'd buy it on the basis that if I didn't like it I could probably find another home for it without too much trouble.

It arrived a couple of days ago, from Amazon U.K. (for £12.59 it was the last copy in stock, and now strangely they now suggest it isn't yet printed - weird?) and I'll be keeping it. I like it. It's basically a patterns book. Did I need a patterns book? No, not really. But I think this book is a bit special. It's also about preparing and using handspun yarns and about choice of yarn for a particular design.

The author is an experienced knitter and knitwear designer learnt to spin quite recently. That's just about the opposite to me – I learnt to spin so had to re-learn knitting!

It's not a book about spinning, but she does give her thoughts on spinning the yarns for the projects in this book, and I found it good to read. I love good writing, I adored Shakespeare at school and then studied English Language and Literature at University. Nowadays I find that too many books seem to have been written in a rush, barely edited and don't read well. Lisa Lloyd doesn't use words just for effect, every word has meaning. She has interesting things to say about spinning and knitting and there's an underlying sense of good humour. She seems to love her subject and also love writing about it. She sees herself as a storyteller, punning on the word “yarn”.

This is from her introduction to the book:

“After more than thirty years of knitting everything from acrylic to buffalo, I know one thing: It's all about the yarn. And so my storytelling begins.”

This is the right book for me at this time because I'm working at understanding yarn and fibre choices for knitting and weaving. I'm also interested in planning better – thinking more about the end purpose before I start spinning.

If you need help with learning to spin, you need to work through an instruction book (or class) first. However, anyone who has mastered the basics of spinning can prepare their own yarn for her patterns as the yarns she uses are basic 2-ply semi-worsted. She uses some blends of fancy fibres for some of the patterns and provides good information on how to blend fibres and on her own fibre choices. One idea I liked was adding a little angelina fibre to fine wool for a lace scarf, giving a delicate sparkle.

Strangely for a pattern book, this book is about breaking rules. It's about how to make choices and decisions for yourself, whether you buy a yarn or spin the yarn you want for a particular project yourself.

"The first rule of knitting is that there are no rules." (p.14)

Each pattern is shown knitted in a handspun yarn and in a commercial yarn, emphasising the freedom to chose. Yarn characteristics are properly described – how much yarn, the weight and length of commercial yarns used so it is easy to make substitutions. She makes it clear that the most important thing – whether you use handspun or commercial yarn - is to knit a swatch not just to check needle size but also to make sure the yarn looks right in the stitch pattern.

"Classic design never goes out of style". (also p.14)

The 26 patterns are traditional in style: cabled sweaters, a couple of lace scarves, a hat, socks, cardigans, jackets and vests (waistcoats). The styling has little contemporary touches and the stitch patterns have a fresh look to me – traditional and yet a bit of originality about them. They look simple, but a bit special at the same time. All the patterns are graded for intermediate beginner, intermediate or experienced knitters and she explains clearly what these categories mean by giving examples of the type of garment you might have knitted before. I'm just about “intermediate” – this is exciting progress, 12 months ago I was definitely “beginner”.

The resources section at the back of the book is very good for book recommendations, but the suppliers listed and commercial yarns are all U.S. If you are in the U.K., and don't spin yourself, then here's a little list of interesting spun yarns for traditional knits offered by small businesses:

UK Alpaca (yarn from fleece of Alpacas farmed in the U.K.)

Garthenor Organic Pure Wool (organic wool yarns from named sheep breeds).

Moondance Wools (spun from natural coloured fleeces from their own multi-coloured flock of Shetland sheep).

Wingham Wool Work (take a look at the Aran weight yarns from British sheep breeds and 5 ply gansey yarns).

For sources of fleece for handspinners in the U.K., and sources of spinning wheels and tutors, see those listed by Chris Jordan at her handspinner's resources page.

On silk yarn - what every weaver should know!

I was going to write about this very useful book a couple of months ago, I took the photo but didn't get much further than that. At the time, there had been a discussion on the Weavetech discussion list about identifying what type of fibre was used in a yarn by carrying out a burn test. This book includes burn test information.

It is:
Handbook of Textile Fibres, by J Gordon Cook B.Sc.,Ph.D.,
published by Merrow Publishing Co. Ltd, first published 1959, 2nd ed. 1960.


I found my copy at a secondhand book fair, and bought it because it looked useful, although I had not heard of it. My copy has parts 1 (natural fibres) and 2 (man made fibres) in a single volume, I just looked on the Abebooks web site and found that some of the copies offered are just part 1, or part 2, and that it seems to have gone on to a 5th edition (1984). Prices start low, at around £4.

This book is a superb reference book. It's a great book to dip into, or to look something up, but there's so much information in it that it's not the kind of book that it's easy to just sit down and read. Because of that, I'd had it a while before I really got to understanding and appreciating it's value. In fact, I do recall at one time wondering why I'd bought it! But I did buy it a few years back, some time before I started spinning and weaving. Now, I find it is invaluable.

Why? Well, for example, there are 35 pages about wool . There's a brief history of the wool trade in England then all you might want to know about wool production and processing, physical properties and behaviours, chemical structure and rather more besides.

For example, did you know that "Wool... can be curled by coiling it round a rod. If it is placed in boiling water and cooled it will remain in the form of a spring. It is acquired a permanent set."? This happens because water attacks wool keratin and can cause changes in the chemical structure. Did you know that as wool absorbs moisture it generates heat? And that it releases the water it has absorbed very slowly and gently, which means that you don't get sudden cooling?

There's also extensive information about insects that attack wool, about shrinkage and felting (what happens and why) about washing. Here's some information on washing wool - the ideal temperature is about 100 degrees fahrenheit / 38 degrees C, and the best technique for washing is a process of soaking and squeezing - avoid agitation, tumbling and stirring. And another notable fact - handknitted yarns benefit from a residual tendency to felt, helping the knitted garment to hold its shape.

There is similar information in the book about other fibres, so it's good to compare and contrast and for understanding the relative properties and uses of different fibres.

By now you will be wondering why on earth the title of this post is silk yarns!

Answer, it's because this is what I was looking up last week. I needed to find out about: the different types of silk yarn, how they are made, what their different properties are, what might make a good warp yarn.

I also referred to:
A Silk Worker's Notebook, by Cheryl Kolander, pub. Interweave Press 1979, revised edition 1985

Silk, Luther Hooper, Pitman's Common Commodities and Industries Series (1930's? no date given)

From Fibres to Fabrics, Elizabeth Gale, Mills & Boon Ltd., London, 1978 edition.

These are all good and useful books. Cheryl Kolander's book strikes me as rather a slim volume for everything she wants to include, and sometimes I wish she had taken more space and written more. It is a lovely guide book to have covering basic information of history and use, handspinning, caring for silk, and has appendices with notes on weaving and knitting.

Luther Hooper's book is about silk production, from the moth(s) that produce silk to factory processes, going through to weaving. It is a lovely and useful book, although I am writing more about the others today.

Elizabeth Gale's book is a text book, written by a textile designer, for use in schools and colleges, "to assist those who wish to know about textiles without going into the technology of the subject in great detail". It was this book sitting on my shelf that inspired my blog name!

From Cheryl Kolander, I learnt that there are two types of silk yarn, reeled and spun. The reeled yarns are "thrown". She says "throwing is the process of twisting the unspun filaments of reeled silk." Thrown silk produces fabrics "stronger and more durable than comparable fabrics of spun silk". She says the two most important types are organzine, a tightly twisted and plied yarn, and tram, which has only enough twist to hold it together and is used for weft.

She says that spun silk is comparatively modern, a means of making use of the waste from thrown silk, which had in former times been used as wadding to provide insulation. The machinery for spinning wool and cotton made possible the spinning of silk waste into yarn:

"Spun silk yarns go by many names, some refer to the fiber-length, some to the fiber's character, and some to the yarn's spin."

The list she gives includes tussah (wild silks), meche (soft, long staple, regular twist), shantung (slighty slubby), cord (twisted and plied), flourette (long staple, spun from combed fibres) bourette (short staple, spun from carded fibres of 1-2" length).

Elizabeth Gale says of spun yarn that "Long raw fibres are cut to a maximum length of about 30 cm and are spun as for worsted, and short lengths are spun like cotton."

I remembered Peg wrote recently about the behaviour of two different skeins of yarn she had dyed, one was oraganzine - so a high quality thrown yarn - and the other bombyx - possibly a spun yarn? This might explain very different behaviour, the two yarns are probably very different in construction and from very different fibre lengths.

I'd look after that organzine carefully, Peg. Cheryl's book tells me that "thrown silk yarns are rarely available to handweavers. This is partly due to their expense... partly due to the fact that thrown silk yarns are usually very fine, much finer than most of us are comfortable with."

Indeed, I have here my catalogue and price list from H.T.Gaddum & Co. Ltd, a specialist silk importer in Macclesfield, England, (tel: 01625 427666) generally regarded as the best source of silk yarns for handweavers in the U.K., and they offer only spun silks - which range from £40 to £64 (per kilo, excluding V.A.T. ) and textured silks.

(Another good source of interesting spun silk yarns is Texere Yarns, of Bradford, England.)

So, what about my little Handbook of Textile Fibres on the subject of silk? There's 20 pages, so it is not as easy to summarise as Cheryl Kolander's book. It even includes a short section on "spider silk"!

Looking at the types of silk yarn, however, thrown silk (the name coming from the Anglo Saxon word "thrawan" meaning to whirl or spin) is made from "multi-filament strands.. twisted together to form heavier threads", although sometimes weaving is done from the filaments as they are, without twisting them. I was interested to learn that the "natural gum, serecin, is normally left on the silk during reeling, throwing and weaving" because "it acts as a size which protects the fibres from mechanical injury". The weight of the woven fabric may reduce by a third when the serecin is washed out! The cloth before the serecin is washed out, which is dull in appearance, is known as "hard silk" and when dugummed as "soft silk".

The extra information about thrown silks in this book tells me that tram is made from two or three strands of silk, and could be low twist with 2-3 twists to the inch, or high twist with 12-20. It is of moderate strength. Oraganzine is very strong, 2-3 strands are twisted together and then the compound thread is twisted 9-30 times to the inch in the other direction. Very high twist yarns, 30-70 twists to the inch are known as crepe.

There's an interesting section on the spun silks:
"....the throwster is fortunate if he can make use of half of the available silk in filament form. The rest of the silk is unsuitable for reeling, and is know as 'waste silk".

"This waste silk is much too valuable to throw away, and it is used for making the yarns we know as "spun silk"......"
".....After dugumming... The silk is opened and loosened in a machine that delivers it in the form of a gauze-like blanket or lap. The fibres are then combed and sorted into length-groups, and then draw into rovings and spun by twisting so that the short fibres hold tightly together."

The section on silk ends, as with other fibres described in the book, by giving details of effects of sunlight, age, moisture, heat, chemical properties, electrical properties, effects of acids, alkalis and solvents.

Did you know...

- Silk can take up 1/3rd its weight in water without feeling wet to the touch,

- and wet strength is 75-85 per cent of the dry strength?

- It has less elastic recovery than wool, but better than that of cotton or rayon.

- Once stretched by 2% of original length, it will be permanently stretched.

- It will stand higher temperatures than wool, but decomposes quickly at 175 degrees C.

- It is a poor conductor of electricity, and gets a static charge in dry atmosphere.

- Silk is so costly that fabrics are often "weighted" with metallic salts to create artificial density, a moderately weighted silk could contain 25-50 per cent salt, heavily weighted 60 per cent. Weighted silks are not as strong and can deteriorate rapidly - e.g. perspiration will cause rot. But I don't think handweavers will be using this technique!!

Balancing a plied yarn

Last week I had spun and plied a fine grey Shetland yarn, when I had wound a skein and removed it from the small niddy-noddy, it twisted over on itself, as shown.


My heart sank at this. I'd spent a couple of evenings preparing this yarn, spinning one singles one evening, the other and plying on the next. I hoped the problem might be solved by washing the yarn and then drying it with a weight to pull it straight. This was not to be - oh no - no such happy resolution. Nothing like. I dropped the yarn in a bowl of hand-warm water and it straight away seemed alive. It squirmed.

I leant over the bowl of water and stared at the skein anxiously, it didn't look right at all. It had kind of curled up in the bowl, like my cat in his basket. Skeins don't normally do this. They normally kind-of stretch out and float, like when you return a strip of seaweed to the sea. I pulled out the unhappy little skein, I hung it over a rack and dried it with a weight, but even with the weight hanging from the wet skein, it wouldn't straighten out.

Do you see its fancy twirls and squiggles? Not the sort of yarn I wanted. Not as good as my previous attempts at a balanced, fine yarn. One of the oddest yarns I've produced.

It reminded me of another skein, tucked away in a drawer for a couple of years.

No, this is not knitted! Yes, it does look like moss! I was trying out an idea, plying a yellow yarn with a green, thinking of knitting a sample square to try out a jumper yarn. When I took it off the niddy-noddy, my beautiful yarn turned into the strange coil you see above. It's very elastic, makes a nice warm neck collar, but will never be knitted!

How was this achieved? I had plied the yarn the same way it was spun. Normally, to ply a yarn the spinning wheel direction is reversed. The twist in a singles yarn gives it kinetic (stored) energy. The straight fibres fight against the spinning. A singles yarn can be set, just like curling your hair with old fashioned curlers: wash and dry under tension. In a plied yarn, two singles spun the same way are plied with opposite twist. The plying "balances" the energy in the singles with a twist that pulls the other way.

I remembered that Mabel Ross's Handspinner's Workbook had a section "Balance in Yarn Spinning". Very much aware that I really don't understand properly how plying works, I went back to this book. She describes how a balanced yarn needs to be plied, and being a mathematician, she gives an equation.

To summarise, plying a yarn the opposite way to the twist in the singles, removes of half the twist from each of the singles yarns.

To achieve balance,
the twist per inch in the plied yarn
must be equal to
the sum of the remaining twist in the singles.

9 tpi in each of two singles, plied 6 tpi the opposite direction, leaves two singles each with 3 tpi. 2 x 3 tpi = 6, the same tpi as the plying, and so a balanced yarn.

O.K. this is not the simplest concept in spinning. But Mabel Ross has done what no-one else seems to. She looked at what happens, analysed it, and made a description that if you can follow it enables you to ply a balanced yarn every time.

Big sigh. I had to stop, think, calculate, but it was worth while. I got some black Shetland, just a little (I didn't want another whole skein going wrong!), and prepared a couple of short lengths of singles yarn, then plied, putting in 2/3rds the twist of the singles. It worked.

What is more, it's a good fine yarn. I didn't spin enough to see how many times it would wrap around one inch of my ruler, but there were 20 wpi in the half inch.

Wools from rare sheep breeds

I recently ordered a book and a new weaving shuttle from Scottish Fibres, and, because I like to try out different wools to see what they are like for spinning, I ordered 100g of Gotland , 200g white North Ronaldsay and 100g of black North Ronaldsay. The North Ronaldsay is very special, as the sheep live on the island they are named for, and a major part of their diet is seaweed. Attempts to keep them away from their island home have failed, because these sheep have adapted to filter out the high levels of iodine in seaweed. Take them away from this food source, and they are unable to absorb enough iodine from other less intense sources.

Here is the wool, in the box it arrived in (it was one of those lovely moments like finding the sugar mouse, 10p coin, and the satsuma in the toe of your Christmas stocking...) do you see the lustre of that grey Gotland? It's silky soft. The North Ronaldsay is so, so woolly soft. It seems to be carded, not combed, has a short staple and spins a lovely soft, bouncy woolen yarn with a few little neps.

Here's a close up of the Gotland, showing the range of colour in this "grey", from light and silvery to odd black fibres, it is more than plain grey, I think you can see this in the photo of the yarn I have spun. It is soft enough to wear next to skin, finer textured than many of the other lustorous wools.





A favourite reference book, "In Sheeps Clothing", by Nola and Jane Fournier, (pub. Interweave Press) warns that it felts easily, so this might be something to bear in mind when using the yarn. Maybe I should have a go at one of those garments where you knit slightly oversize and then deliberately felt? Would it loose it's sheen? Best way to find out is probably to knit a sample square and put it through the wash.

So, today I have been spinning yarn from the white North Ronaldsay on my efficient double treadle Timbertops Leceister wheel, and on my older single treadle Timbertops wheel I've been spinning fine yarn again, this time from grey Shetland wool. I have have to concentrate hard to spin fine at the moment. The aim for a lace yarn is 12 strands of fibre in the singles, and then to decrease, but at present I'm comfortable at about 22 strands - I say about because I wasn't using a magnifying glass when I squinted at the end of the yarn and tried to count!

I am being very careful now to watch how much twist goes into the wool. I discovered that half-an-inch is a bit less than I though it was... hence I was calculating wrong and that maybe why the yarn didn't work out right when I plied.

This is a handicap with having grown up with two systems of measurement. The official switch from imperial to metric happened when I had already had about 4 years in school. I think I am familiar with cm and inch - but in truth I am slightly confused as I swap back and forth between them. The Mabel Ross lap apron with marked measurements (see my previous post) is very useful.

Here's a little picture of the North Ronaldsay on the bobbin to end, and a link to Cally's blog, as she is also enjoying spinning this special wool.

Fine spinning again, with Shetland wool

I've been working at my lace yarn spinning. As the Wensleydale yarn turned out looking a bit hairy, I picked up some white Shetland wool that was near to hand. I bought this as "combed tops", however, to make sure I had the right quality of fibre and the longest staples I combed it with the same fine tooth comb I used on the Wensleydale. I was interested to discover that about 1/3 of the fibre was half the staple length of the longest fibres. These shorter lengths are still very good quality and I have put them to one side for spinning a woolen yarn.

I changed whorls to give an 8:1 ratio and then I worked carefully, aiming to spin for one treadle (8 twists) per 1/2 inch of fibre. I was very pleased with this:It's very fine, but still has some softness and bounce to the yarn. I spun a small amount on two bobbins, and then plied. I am not happy with my plying technique yet. I need to plan this carefully next time. I got too much twist in when I plied, so that when I took the skein off my niddy-noddy (skein winder) and held it by one end, the skein gently twisted over onto itself. I had tested a few times, by plying a length and then letting the tension between where I was holding the yarn and the flyer orifice go slack, so that the yarn was hanging down in a loop. This generally shows up over plying because the yarn twists around itself instead of hanging down in a simple loop. However, I am spinning on a double-drive wheel. As the yarn draws on to the bobbin with double-drive, it gains extra twist. This doesn't happen with a scotch tension wheel. The effect on the double drive wheel is extra ply in the yarn, so this needs compensating for by having the yarn slightly under-plied before letting it wind on the bobbin. I haven't cracked this yet, but I'm sure that once I get it right I shall get a feel for the technique and be able to spin good yarn.

To show how fine my spinning is now, here are the coloured Wensleydale and white Shetland yarns by a ruler:
The Wensleydale has plied to a yarn of 39 wraps per inch (wpi). The Shetland is less fine, at 30 wpi.

Janet has sent me an instruction sheet she's written, with the aim of getting to spin a yarn with as few as 5 fibres twisting together in each single thread. It says aim for 12 to begin with, then reduce to 5... [pause for thought......] this is quite a challenge I have taken on.

I just wanted to show you the very useful lap apron that I was given when I bought my second hand Timbertops Wheel. The lines on it indicate half inch and inch. This side is white, the other black, giving good contrasting backgrounds for handling light / dark fibres.

This apron is clearly marked copyright Mabel Ross. She's the author of four superb books on spinning, two are in print and readily available: The Essentials of Handspinning, and The Essentials of Yarn Design.

Two others, just as good and useful, and containing information not available elsewhere, are out of print. These are:
Encyclopedia of Handspinning (the price of this 2nd hand is getting a bit silly) and
Handspinner's Workshop: Fancy Yarns (very difficult to find a copy, I searched for 2 years before I was lucky. If anyone has a copy for sale, please let me know as I know someone who wants it.)

Ruth Gough, if you read this, I agree with Janet, I'd like to see these books back in print! Maybe some of those handy lap aprons too? Diane Varney's Spinning Designer Yarns and Alison Daykin and Jane Deane's book Creative Spinning are both very nice books, and inspirational, but no-one else gives you the very simple descriptions and formulae that Mabel Ross has in her Fancy Yarns book. (Ruth Gough of Wingham Wool Work keeps two of Mabel's books in print, under licence from the copyright holder, Mabel Ross's son).

Some people don't like Mabel Ross's approach to spinning. She was a teacher of mathematics, and so when she wrote about spinning it was natural for her to reduce the technique for spinning all sorts of yarns to simple calculations. She drew up tables for how to adjust your spinning to get exactly the yarn you want. You either love or hate this method. I love it. I used to run away (terrified!) from tables and calculations at one time, but have learnt that there's lots of things you need to do in life that are so much easier if you just face up to the figures and take your time to do simple sums and measurements.

Fine spinning - and Ashford Joy spinning wheel

Last year I attempted to spin very fine (lace weight) yarn. I had difficulty finding information about how to do this, and I wasn't very successful. My yarn was not so fine as I thought it should be and I because I'd got the idea that you needed special lace weight flyers and high speed whorls, I had difficulty controlling the spinning process and got too much twist into the yarn. A lovely soft, springy wool fibre turned into a rather hard feeling yarn.

Last night the Alsager Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers met for a spinning evening, and I managed to get there and had a lesson in fine spinning from my friend Janet who has had tuition from various experts including a lady spinning for knitting the traditional Sheltand lace shawls. (If you don't know what these look like, see the Heirloom Knitting web site.)

When I got home I had to have another go at this new technique before I went to bed! I used coloured Wensleydale fleece. Janet advised that Wensleydale is good to start with because of the long staple, it's a bit easier to handle than fine Shetland until you get used to spinning fine. We prepared the fibre by combing with a very fine tooth comb sold in pet shops for grooming cats (when I bought mine, I found I had to hunt around a bit to get one that was very fine toothed).
To spin, Janet demonstrated on an Ashford Joy wheel using a ratio of 8:1 (that's 8 turns of the spinning wheel and flyer per one treadle). She drafted half an inch of fibre per treadle, so that was giving 16 twists in the yarn per inch. When I got home I recalculated a bit rather than change my wheel set up, I had a 12:1 flyer, so drafted 3 inches fibre to two treadles.

The yarn I span at home (on the older of my Timbertops Leicester wheels) is not as fine as the thread Janet was spinning, but it is fine enough to show I have got the basic principle right and I intend to spin onto two bobbins and then ply this thread before going any finer.

There is a special little trick Janet taught me for drafting the fibre to spin very fine, in addition to taking it slow and steady, and watching the fibres carefully. This trick is that the hand that is nearest the orifice and which restrains the twist must let a little of the twist travel into the drafting fibres. Experienced spinners will know how just a little twist like this helps to feed new fibres into the yarn and prevents the fibre in one hand separating from the twisted yarn in the other!

As of last night, I'm a paid up member of the Alsager Guild. I haven't joined a guild like this before because of difficulty in getting to where any of them meet. But now I have re-arranged my working hours so I get Friday afternoon at home. This makes it easier to leave home at 6 p.m. to drive for an hour to get to a meeting. I actually spent as much time driving last night as I was at the Guild meeting - but it was well worthwhile.

You may remember I posted last month that I was going to go to the Guild meeting. I didn't get there. I had my tea early and had my stuff ready, then I got stuck because I just couldn't get my beautiful Timertops Leicester spinning wheel into the back of my small Fiat Punto. I had forgotton it only fits if the back seat is folded down and the wheel dismantled, and then extra packaging is needed to keep everything safe. It was a wet night and I didn't like having to put my wheel down on the wet driveway while I arranged the car, and I had managed to pull a muscle in my back carrying the heavy oak wheel from the house to the car (this involves a long path and a steep flight of 12 steps). I gave up after 20 minutes, it was getting late and I went back into the house for a cup of tea and a think.

I know that other people who have a special spinning wheel use a folding traveling wheel when they go out and about. I spent four weeks thinking about this, and checking out what was available. There's a really good comparison on the Woolery website which I found helpful. Then, on Monday, I decided if I was ever going to get such a wheel I should have one in time for the Friday Guild meeting. I phoned Fibrecrafts and asked if they had an Ashford Joy, placed my order and it arrived by carrier the next day. I had been a bit sceptical about the idea of wheels that fold up, but when my Joy arrived and I discovered for myself what a clever design it is all my worries went away. I took these photos for you, the first is that exciting moment of opening the box - and wondering how many different parts the wheel comes in, would it need much work to assemble?

The answer was, no, it was very simple to put together. I had to screw hooks into the flyer arm and put the scotch tension system together. These are things I'm familiar with from having owned an Ashford Traditional in the past. As well as a very good instruction book, other goodies were a "Learn to Spin" leaflet and a couple of copies of the Ashford magazine "the Wheel" with intresting articles on spinning, knitting simple jumpers, and Shibori weaving on their rigid heddle loom.
I put the wheel together in no time at all, and here it is stood next to an ordinary sized dining chair, to give you an idea of how compact it is (it's about 1/3rd of the size of my Timbertops wheels):
And here it is, in its bag and ready to go! The bag has a shoulder strap and it is very easy to carry.

It is heavier than some of the other folding wheels, this is because the wheel is extra thick and solid wood to make up for being small diameter. This gives it good momentum for spinning. It has four different ratios on one fixed whorl (no need to swop bits about, just shift the drive belt into a new groove). It runs very smoothly on ball bearing hubs, and is easy and pleasant to use.

I recommended it to a couple of new spinners at the Guild because: it is a versatile wheel with a good range of different speeds; it is easy to carry and will fold up small enough to tuck behind the sofa if you have limited space at home; it is very well made; I know from Janet's experience that you can spin everything from fancy yarns to lace weight on this wheel; a central flyer position is nice as it doesn't force you to spin in a particular way, you can easily draft with either hand and, on the double-treadle version you can use either the two treadles or just one of them, so you can swap your feet around and be comfortable.