lee#spindleposting time
here's the progress from last night on the self-combed wool
also i hashtagged the start of this thread and yesterday's thread with #/spindleposting
so if you missed yesterday and want to catch up go there
btw hot water will do more for sweaty hands than cold water. i know that maybe seems unintuitive
just finished another big hunk o' wool
think i'll spin one more smaller hunk then probably wind it off this spindle, i could probably fit more but i find as the spindle gets more full the yarn is more likely to slip off the notch in the side of the spindle that helps hold it in place
also, parking the spindle between my knees less and less! i used to be able to walk around and talk and spin and such lol so let's get back to that
also i just realized i've just been saying "drop spindle" in my alt text
i xkcd experts comic'd yall depending on the alt text!
so, for anyone who wants further description, and also to give more info on drop spindles in general
a (standard) drop spindle is composed of a shaft and a whorl, with the shaft being, well, a stick, and the whorl being some kind of larger section on the shaft somewhere. often, the top of the shaft has a hook on it (mine does) - but sometimes there's just a little notch of some kind, and you just do a little half-hitch at the top, it varies. whorls can be top- or bottom- whorls - top ones are maybe an inch from the top of the spindle and bottom ones maybe an inch from the bottom. mine's a top whorl spindle.
the whorl 1) helps with weight and spin bc of physics magic (i'll go read respect the spindle later today and get yall more info on this, my head is fuzzy on circular object physics) and 2) gives you a place for your spun yarn to pile up against rather than just gathering on the center of the spindle. so you generally end up with kinda a cone of yarn, wide point against the whorl, and narrowing as it continues along the shaft
technically, a whorl is nonessential and you can spin with literally just a stick, but i'm not sure if you can *drop* spin with just a stick - it's at least doable in the hand though.
all this said there are other kinds of drop spindles and other types of spindles (like supported spindles!). turkish drop spindles for example look totally different.........lemme go get a pic of one actually :)
so here's a 3d printed turkish spindle
instead of just winding the yarn onto the shaft, you wind it around the legs and it creates a center pull ball which is REALLY nice for plying
you can see there's no hook on this one, just a slight indent in the top of the shaft, that's very standard for turkish spindles and you just do a half hitch at the top of the shaft
turkish spindles pack flat when not in use so they're great for travel
(i also got some "teaching" standard top-whorl spindles, they're nice and heavy which means ppl can draft pretty thick yarn and they'll still spin well)
spun a smidge with the turkish
the way you wind the yarn on is "over two arms, under one" repeat forever
think i'm calling it here, there's absolutely more space but i tend to find the yarn slips out of the notch the bigger the cop gets. plus it's the end of the day and i wanna ply before bed
ok i wound the grey and then decided i was gonna spin a second ball of grey rather than pull from both ends of the ball
so i picked up a single i plied (eta: spun, not plied, was writing too fast) literally 2+ years ago and decided to ply that
anyway
single that has sat around for along time kinda loses some of its twisty energy, and i didn't really account for that in the plying, so now it's probably overtwisted in the plying direction
woops
but hey, finished multi-year-old project
bonus niddy noddy picture
also did you know! if you get distressed over a silly mistake or problem, you can usually fix it if you just don't flip the fuck out and abandon it forever
this post brought to you by the fact that i abandoned that single years back bc the center-pull end snapped and i lost my fucking marbles
well, yeah it's a bit kinked up (same yarn, same)
but hell look at that color! I stretched it a bit for the picture to get clearer view of the color, so you can't really see the twistiness
the worst outcome is I send it to my professor friend and she needle felts with it, so I'm not horribly upset. I'll see what I can do to salvage it first though
eta: @sheepnik in the comments fuckin called it and I am a damn fool! It's been plied in the wrong direction, I misread my own single 😅
so i'll be. respinning i guess. if anyone wants me
edit: this is all irrelevant!
---
one thing i think I could do - if I hated myself, which i try not to - is basically go through and re-spin, try to balance out the twist better.
but honestly my first try might be another water bath and then a dry with a weight on it???
I've not done a lot to salvage over twisted yarn before, so these are a bit of a guess. don't listen to me too much here!
ok, so, it's plied in the wrong direction! what now?
gonna get it on a swift and spin it off from that - not gonna rewind, working from the swift should be fine - and basically unspin, and keep spinning in the unspin direction until it's "balanced"
i feel like a damn fool and i am telling myself IT'S OK I WILL NOT GIVE UP ON IT AGAIN
it's my second day back at spinning it's my second day back at spinning it;s my second day back at spinning
turns out your yarn looks better when you do it right 😅
also, photo of a swift. you take your big loop made by your niddy noddy, and put it on the swift to unwind it - usually because you're then winding into a ball
food in training@inherentlee or you put the big loop over a chair back, or your knees,, ;_;
Sheepnik
Terri K O 🍁@inherentlee one of the spinning courses I took had us intentionally overspin and make swatches and it's actually kind of fun to use "overspun" yarn, like you get a free bias-knit feel without having to do increases and decreases. Inspired me to go back and knit some of my early spins I'd thought were unusable but they made interesting scarves.
@inherentlee I may be wrong on this, but I'm inclined to think that you've plied it the same direction as you spun the singles. Try taking a short length and twisting it in the other direction, and see what happens.
@sheepnik I used to have very strong muscle memory for "single go ->, ply go <-" and this seemed to align with that, so i went ahead with it. but yknow, real rusty, so I'll check!!
@inherentlee I know how that goes. I've got some singles sat on my minispinner for well over a year. I really ought to do the second half of the fibre, but I'm not sure I'll be able to remember what I was doing with it.
@inherentlee As I said, I may well be wrong.
@sheepnik 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻 hoping so but honestly, it wouldn't 100% surprise me, wandering back into old projects can be a recipe for disaster
Elisabeth M@inherentlee if you stay away from them they simply can't
lenchen unsustainable@inherentlee
hmm since you seem quite experienced with spinning, do you think this might still work for larger, definitely over yarn sized diameters?
(ofc in that case double spun, as in z or s spin, not single strand)
kinda wonder if some thickness of cord or even thin rope could be worked using spindles instead of more traditional tools
@therealkuu i think you've lost me a bit - to my knowledge (i may be wrong), s- and z- spin refer to the direction of the spin and apply to single ply, double ply, any number of plies really.
i've never spun anything heavier than about worsted so sadly can't speak authoritatively to drop spindle spinning for heavier yarns, but my guess is that you'd struggle beyond a certain point. wheel spinning you'd likely have an easier time
@inherentlee
i know that it refers to direction but didn't kbow ply and meant ply, am just not an expert ^^
is there a word for the level of recursion of twists? so 1 for spun from carded, 2 spun from 1 spun etc? is that word already ply?
@therealkuu ply is what you are looking for i believe, yes :) and it doesn't go in powers of two - 4-ply is not made from 2 ply, it is made from 4 singles. i've made 3 ply for example from 3 singles (never 4+ ply tho, it starts to get to be quite a lot to manage by hand)
@inherentlee
uh, i think then ply is not what i meant,
say fixed ply of 3
1 for single, 2 for 3-ply, 3 for 3-ply out of 3-plies, thats what i meant with the recursive property, basically howany times a cord/rope (i guess not yarn) would have been spun
@therealkuu i'm not sure that is done, the plying action negates the twist in the single ply and then there is no further twist to ply with....
@therealkuu maybe a more experienced spinner than me know tho?
@inherentlee
i think maybe the problem is that im asking questions more in rope making direction to a spinning expert 😅
my bad, i mean i knew that i was probably a bit out of bounds here from the beginning, just wanted to try ^^
i think maybe the problem is that im asking questions more in rope making direction to a spinning expert 😅
my bad, i mean i knew that i was probably a bit out of bounds here from the beginning, just wanted to try ^^
@therealkuu ahhhh far as i know rope is totally different
@therealkuu not sure tho at the end of the day!
@inherentlee
well, not that much, rope also gets spun initially ^^
i think its mostly the how many step follow after spinning that's different
@therealkuu yes sorry i mean the later stuff, that is a mystery to me
@inherentlee
mew, sorry for having crashed in sideways in your thread so much, cool yarn and spinning and uh, unrelated but also cool weaving ^^
mew, sorry for having crashed in sideways in your thread so much, cool yarn and spinning and uh, unrelated but also cool weaving ^^
@therealkuu ur all good nw!
@inherentlee
i think in rope making this can actually be circumvented by "overtwisting" the partial strands
i think in rope making this can actually be circumvented by "overtwisting" the partial strands