…you’d be looking at my own picture of my new toy, instead of this one. As soon as I get my batteries recharged, I’ll plug in my own picture. This one is from the shop website.

I got my first bottom whorl spindle, in a spindle kit from Maine Woods Yarn and Fiber — I love Etsy! Tons of great hand crafted stuff, including plenty of fiber artists, and my blog buddy Sarah’s shop — her bags are divine.

I really wish I knew what kind of wool the white top is — it’s lovely, and sheepy scented, fairly long staple length, and smooth smooth smooth. Partially it’s the combed top preparation – but the wool is not like anything else I’ve spun — it seems almost like Lincoln, if Lincoln were really soft. I hope I can figure it out!

I finished spinning my Cormo – here’s the final tally.

1 lb. raw Cormo fleece yielded 10 ounces of 4ply cabled yarn, approx 400 yards total. It is a heavy worsted weight, about 8WPI, and will eventually be a hat and mitten set for me. The six ounces lost is partly due to washing – this was a a very lanolin rich fleece – and partly due to sampling and leftover bits. I probably have about 10 or 20 yards of singles, 2plies, and sample skein hanging about.

And here it is:

3 large skeins, and one little one, which is ten yards, and not included in my yardage above.

I also sat down and did a little organizing work on my spinning stuff. I took a fiber sampling class a while back, and came away with a box full of top and roving samples from about 20 different fibers. With my usual laissez faire attitude, I stuck it on a shelf and ignored it, until yesterday.

Yesterday I pulled the box down, laid out all the samples, pulled out the singles sampler I had spun during the class and my little note card, and labeled everything. Now I know what I have, and can refer back to it when ever I want to know what someone else is talking about.  Gods willing, I might even refer to my samples for oh, say, designing spinning projects.

I’ve got a nice range of fiber – bombyx and tussah silks, several rayons including milk fiber, and a wide range of wools from Optim stretch merino to Lincoln (which is startlingly like dolls hair). I’ve also got some yak in there, and a bit of possum/merino. Fun stuff.

I have finished carding and spinning all the Cormo.  The last two bobbins of singles are waiting to be plied,  and once they are plied I can spin the final yarn, and then the Cormo will be done.

I have made a Navajo spindle for the Navajo spindle class I will be taking in October.  It cost about ten dollars to make,  including buying a seven dollar drill bit.

I am knitting a round pink and white dishcloth – it is the first new knitting I have done this year.  Everything else has been stuff that was on the needles in January.

I have decided to comb as much of the sweater fleece as I can, and card the rest.  That will give me two yarns, and between them I should have plenty to make my sweater.

I am trying to decide how to process the Jacob I have.   Probably I will card it, because it has a very short staple, and the black and white locks have different staple lengths.   I will blend some, and keep others black and white.

This little silence of the past few days has been due my being deeply occupied with making and playing with some new wool combs.  It’s the most involved woodworking project I’ve done in a while, and has been keeping me agreeably busy.

I decided I needed wool combs after processing the Cormo I’ve been working on –  my sweater fleece is a mixed breed longwool,  with a 4-5″ low crimp staple,  while my Cormo has a staple length of about 3″ and an extremely fine crimp.   The Cormo is pretty much ideal for carding, and having gotten a chance to work with it,  I realized how unsuitable for carding my longwool fleece is.

So,  I hunted around online and on Ravelry,  and found Loxoceles’ plan for making wool combs.    A trip to the hardware store later, I had everything I need to make a version of these basic wool combs.

An oak plank, some wood glue, some finishing nails and some epoxy.   I also indulged in a number of little wood working toys that I didn’t really need,  but wanted, like new sandpaper and some little clamps, etc.

Here is my plank clamped to the table and posing with my handsaw.  You can see the baseplate I just finished cutting next to the epoxy.

I had to figure out what size wood pieces I need, and the nail spacing for the tines. Once I had the wood cut, I matched the nail size with a drill bit, and went to work with the drill press, drilling out the comb heads so I could put the nails through them without splitting the wood. This took three attempts to make two comb heads, since I did split the first head.

Here are the nails ready to be put through after drilling, and the finished stationary comb clamped and drying. The nails are driven through the headpiece to make the tines of the comb, and secured with epoxy. I then chiseled a bed for it in the base plate, and woodglued it together.

I did the same thing for the moving comb, except that instead of a base plate, it got a handle. It’s really rough, since I just knocked it out with a chisel and rounded and sanded it a little to avoid splinters.
Here is the finished comb pair, stationary and moving.

Wool combs are pretty straightforward to use — I actually find them easier tp use then cards, because they seem to need less skill to make a good spinnable product. They do produce a lot more waste then the cards do, though. But the waste from combing is good for carding, so it’s not a complete loss.

The stationary comb is clamped to the table (I need better clamps – these ones get in the way and slow down the combing process):

Then the stationary comb is loaded with fiber, a process called lashing on.

When the stationary comb is loaded, you take the moving comb and hold it crosswise in front of the wool, and rake it across the tips of your locks in a horizontal motion. With every pass you move the comb deeper into the locks, pulling wool onto the moving comb as you work. Eventually you are sweeping the moving comb across the stationary comb touching or almost touching it (this is where my clamps got in the way – I couldn’t get so close), almost all of the wool is on the moving comb, and what is left on the stationary comb is short knotty waste.

This it what it looks like in the middle of a combing:

You then return the fiber to the stationary comb in a similiar process, but this time moving the comb in vertical strokes down past the stationary comb. Still holding the comb crosswise, and still starting at the tips of the fiber and working deeper until almost all the fiber is back on the stationary comb.

This process removes the shorter fibers from the wool by leaving them as waste on the almost empty comb — how much waste you decide to leave is up to you, so you can comb for only the longest fibers or for a more mixed blend. Combing also aligns the fibers fairly neatly, so that they will pull close together when spun, and make a single with a smoother more rounded surface but less air in it then carded fiber.

When you are finished combing a load of fiber, you then draw it off the comb in a long piece, much as if you were drafting to spin. I don’t have a diz yet, so I didn’t use one.

The prepared fiber is called top, or combed top (which seems redundant to me), and since my combs are small and make small amounts, I coil them up into little nests. This one is all ready to be spun from, and will make a fine tight worsted single.

Freshly made handcombed top is the most pleasurable thing to spin that I have ever laid my hands on. It it light and airy and flows like water through my fingers.

I’ve got the second skein of cabled cormo finished, and tucked up with the first. I wrapped this one on my 2 yard niddy, and it’s made a very pretty skein indeed.

Today is a carding day – I finished picked over the last of the Cormo last night, so it is all fluffed up and ready to card. I’ve got two bags now, one of neatly fluffed locks, and one of rough fluff. The rough will make worse rolags, so I am carding it first, and saving the pleasure of the locks for ending with.

So far, it’s going nicely – lots of neps and VM to take out, but that’s okay.

F is for Fair – the Stark County Fair:

At the Fair, F is for Fleece – which I did not succeed in buying at the 4H Jr. Fair wool auction this morning.  Did you know that a prize winning fleece can go for over $300?   Neither did I.

F is for the Full Moon, which was on Friday (F is also for Friday,  but I’m leaving that out since this is Saturday),  and not for vanilla incense.  But if it were for vanilla incense, it would be for the Ohio made incense from Rita at CommonScentsEtc.  Her incense is hands down the best I have ever used.

And finally, F is for Finished!    DasHusband’s green socks are done!

Part of the joy of having rules and guidelines is the ability to ignore. bend, break, spindle, tear, fold and mutilate them at will.   In that vein,  because it is  Tuesday, my designated knitting day,  I have been spinning.

I am still working on my Cormo,  and am working on the final re-ply of the second skein now – hopefully I will finish the spinning this evening, and be able to cook and hang up the yarn to dry overnight.

In an attempt to create a slightly more balanced and less conflicted life,  I am hereby declaring Mondays my designated spinning day, and Tuesdays my designated knitting day.   Hopefully this will let me spin and knit without guilt that I “should” be doing the other.

That being said, on to the Cormo!

I’ve been spinning a lot recently and I’m designing a sock pattern right, so gauge and WPI have been in my mind a great deal.

WPI, or wraps per inch, is the measuring standard used by spinners to determine the thickness of a yarn. The higher the WPI, the finer the yarn.

Gauge (tension in the UK) is a measure of the number of stitches in 4 inches of stockinette. To my mind, an ideal gauge swatch is 6 x 6 inches, with a garter stitch border. I generally block swatches before measuring them.

Gauge is the trickier measure, and thus decreed by fate to be the one most commonly used in knitting patterns. Gauge varies from yarn to yarn, even within the same weight category — the gauge of a worsted weight yarn may range from 16 to 20. And this before we’ve even started knitting.

Individual knitting styles add further variation – a tight knitter will get more stitches per inch on the same yarn and needles then a looser knitter will, making the manufacturers declared gauge nothing but a very rough guideline. Anna Zilboorg observes, in ‘Knitting for Anarchists’ that

“…three or four needle sizes will give me the same number of stitches per inch.”

This agrees well with my personal experience — trying to get gauge by adjusting needle size is a bitch.

It is in Ms. Zilboorg’s elegant explanation of this difficulty that gauge meets WPI. She writes:

“…changing needle size is far more apt to change the number of rows per inch then the number of stitches per inch. This makes sense. Basically, in each stitch two strands of yarn are lying side by side. The yarn continues to be the same width no matter how thick or thin the needle is. However the yarn must go up over the needle and down the other side. If it must go up twice as far and down twice as far, it stands to reason that the resulting stitch will be longer, giving you fewer rows per inch.”

“The yarn continues to be the same width…” There in lies WPI, and why you can measure wraps per inch accurately around a ruler, a spare knitting needle, or any of the lovely and variable WPI tools available to the spinner.

Practically speaking, I think that this means you’d be better off matching the WPI of the yarns when you want to substitute one for another, and that it’s probably easier to get gauge through appropriate yarn selection then through needle changes.

references

‘Knitting for Anarchists’, Anna Zilboorg

Measuring WPI, Spindlicity, Spring 2006

Standard Yarn Weight System, Yarnstandards.com

Since I haven’t organized and sorted my stuff in a while, I’m taking today to catalog my stash. First up, spinning stuff.

Tools.

I have four spindles right now, my dark brown Spinsanity, my laceweight Spinsanity, a plain octagonal Louet, and a fossil series Yorkieslave. I’ve also got a one yard niddy noddy, a WPI tool, hand cards, and a spindlers lazy kate with 4 bobbins.

Here is some of my fiber stash, being spun on the fossil spindle, and my octagonal Louet spindle. I do not know what the fiber is – it’s a combed top preparation, and was a gift from Denise.

None of the Cormo stuff is in this post because I’ve posted about it extensively recently. My main spinning project is a local fleece that I am spinning for a sweater. It is a 5.5 lb longwool fleece, from a ewe named R24 – she is a mixed breed. Her fleece is very soft, and low crimp. I’ve spun three skeins so far – a 4 ply, which I decided was too bulky, and two 3 ply skeins.

As well as the Cormo and R24, I also have a pound of Jacob that waiting to be carded and spun. I’m not sure what I will do with it, or how to spin it yet. I want to preserve the brown and white color of the fleece somehow.

I’ve also got a box full of sample fibers from a spinning class I took last year – I’m giving some serious thought to blending them all together somehow, and spinning them that way. There’s milk fiber, carbonized bamboo, several different kinds of wool, linen, and a variety of other fibers. I do have plain samples spun, so I wouldn’t be losing my reference if I spun them, though I do need to label the reference bobbin.

And of course I have a fair amount of handspun. Most of it is labeled with at least the yardage.