Overflowing Fiber Riches

So for the first 4-and-a-bit years that I spun (until a few weeks ago), I had a very consistent set of spinning tools. There’s my Ashford Joy, and about 3 spindles that I handle with any regularity.

There are a lot of things I like about the Joy. It was really the ideal wheel for me when I bought it–an intermediate beginner with a love of fine yarns, no spinners in my social circle, a moderate budget, and almost zero space. It was easy to set up and learn. It folded down to a very small size. There’s tons of information and parts lists for Ashfords available out in the world. It is happy to spin very fine yarns. It looks amazingly cool.

But for the last year or so, I’ve been keeping an eye out for something different. I’ve got more space and money than I did as a grad student in our tiny Madison apartment, though I still have a fairly “compact” sensibility. I’ve become a much faster spinner since I bought the Joy, and spent a lot of time bored on the highest ratio (the highest ratio was also noticeably harder to treadle than the lower ones). I’m a bit more willing to deal with complexity–something that can be tuned a bit.

At the end of last summer, I decided to deal with this by getting on the waiting list for a Bosworth book charkha. A ratio of 70:1 makes my inner speed demon drool, and so does the craftsmanship and adorably teensy size, which I can easily toss in my backpack before I ride my bike to a guild meeting. I’ve done a little playing with cotton on a support spindle, and I think that this will be a really fun way to continue working on that. The charkha should be coming within the next week or two, and I’m wicked excited. Pictures and more details once it arrives.

The charkha is a pretty specialized tool, though. While I’ve been waiting for it I’ve still been spinning like crazy on the Joy, and spending most of that time close to the limits of our mutual mechanical abilities. I wasn’t in a rush for a new wheel, but I was keeping an eye out for something interesting.

And that something interesting popped up locally just a few weeks ago, in the form of a Schacht Matchless.

This particular wheel is 21 years old, although the Matchless is still in current production, so parts are easy to come by. I like the nice clean lines and castle wheel construction. The fact that it’s an older wheel gives it a bit of quirk (I’ll need to do some work on the bobbins before I can use the wheel in Scotch tension, frex), but it’s in excellent shape and when I have things arranged correctly it’s amazingly quiet. I’ll be buying some some new high-speed bobbins and whorls for higher ratios soon, but the current top speed I have is slightly faster than the Joy and not nearly as tiring.

Never rains but it pours, I suppose.

And what of the Joy? Well, within about a week of buying the Matchless I realized that I’m probably a one-spinning-wheel person. The Joy is already loaned out to a friend that’s a newer spinner–spreading those riches around, I suppose. If I don’t miss it and she likes it, it may stay there. It does mean a loss of portability–the Matchless isn’t too cumbersome, but in a portability contest the Joy wins that hands down. But I do have spindles, and soon I’ll have a charkha. I don’t think that will be too much of a loss.

*kaboom*

Did you hear an explosion last week? That would have been this yarn the moment it touched water:

I got this fiber–Ashland Bay Merino in the Mojave colorway–as part of the Fondle This! Fiber Club. I’m doing this club in part because one of my patterns is being included in the club, and I decided that this would be a nice opportunity to try different spinning techniques. First up: spinning from the fold.

I’ve spun from the fold for tiny samples before, but I hadn’t ever kept it up for a long period of time, or tried to do it while maintaining a particular thickness. Maintaining it for 4 ounces seemed like a worthy plan, and an expansion of my spinning toolbox. My ability to do this new technique followed my standard learning curve.

Day 1: Pure frustration. Nothing works. Constant breakages, things slipping through my fingers that looked fine. A big pile of snarly fiber both on and off the bobbin after 30 minutes, as long as I can stand it. Clearly I suck.
Day 2: I still suck, but at least I’m not frustrated anymore. No unpredictable breaks, but thick and thin like whoa. A lot of intentionally breaking the yarn to remove an ugly bit, a lot of stopping to deal with a slub.
Day 3: As far as I can tell I am doing exactly the same thing as Day 1, but suddenly things are holding together, more or less evenly, and I can actually control what’s going on. It’s not as good as my comfort zone, but now it’s just a matter of refinement. Magic.

I knew that this yarn would not be the most even in the world, and I was fine with that. I had aimed for a sportweight 2-ply, and I figured it would be close to that with occasional forays to DK. Plied and skeined directly after spinning, I had 15-16 wpi with a few thicker slubs, looking very similar to some commercially spun sportweight yarn in my knitting bag. Sweet.

Then it hit the water. Remember? kaboom.

Now first of all, this is non-superwash merino, which loves to bloom like a blooming thing. Secondly, I was intentionally spinning with a woolen technique, quite different than my usual semiworsted drafting style. These two things added up to the yarn blooming rather spectacularly after washing and drying, from 15-16 wpi to 13-14, suddenly DK bordering on worsted.

A good lesson in sampling, and a good lesson on spinning to spec with a new technique. I really like the resulting yarn, squishy and bouncy and warm. But it’s not at all the yarn I intended, and it’s not the yarn for the project I was thinking of (a retread of Suppliers of Angst).

I did really want to do a quickie project with this yarn, and in looking through my favorites on Ravelry I found a cool project from the book Knitting Nature, involving a variety of hexagons put together in interesting ways. I’m not very far on this one yet, but it seems to be getting my knitting mojo back after almost exclusively spinning since late October. (I’m knitting on 8’s, incidentally, and the fabric is not at all dense, but the yarn is completely filling up the spaces. Magic.

Bookmarks

There’s been some stuff going on in my life lately that led me to say no handmade Christmas gifts this year, everything for me. Except somehow in mid-December suddenly I wanted to use my little inkle loom, and making bookmarks for some folks seemed like a moderately useful, fun little project.

Long ago and far away, I spun some dyed silk top, some of which I used to make a scarf. Sometime later, I spun some undyed tussah silk, and had the vaguest idea of mixing the two yarns–same fiber, similar weights, very pretty. There was an article in Spin-Off this past summer about making silk ribbons with an inkle loom, and that appealed to me a lot. Pretty handspun handwoven ribbons! How could I resist? So I made a weaving project, just a plain woven ribbon. Sometimes I make these things forgetting that I’m me, though, the ungirliest of female people. What is the point of this ribbon? Its current job is to tie the cap of a hot water bottle to the body so they don’t get separated. It’s nice to look at when I’m crampy, but that’s hardly showing it off to its fullest potential. Bookmarks, though, those are nice to have around and look at.

I decided to use the same yarns for the bookmarks, but I wanted to try some pickup patterns (which in weaving lead to patterns of longer threads that appear to sit on top of the woven fabric). One problem I’d had with the yarns when weaving the ribbon was that they were a little too loosely spun and were sticking to their neighbors frequently. So I cabled them–added a ton of twist, held two strands of the same color together, and cabled with a ton of twist. This did help a lot, so it’s useful to know if I’m ever spinning up a fiber with the intention of weaving it.

I was played around with different pick up patterns, just to get an idea of how they worked. I set up the patterns so that they would be reversible. Initially I started with my copy of Inkle in front of me, but after a few rows of that I got the idea of how things worked and was just able to play. For all of the ribbons, I did a few rows of plain weaving, then set up a pattern, trying to arrange it so that it would be symmetrical and 6-8 inches long, and then I left an inch or two of unwoven warp between each bookmark, so that there could be a fringe on either end. I was able to do a bunch of bookmarks on one warp (basically I just had to set up to weave once for all of these bookmarks), which was great. The whole process didn’t take very long, maybe 30-45 minutes per plain bookmark, a little longer for the fancier ones, and an hour or two for warping, washing, and finishing.

The ribbons had a tiny bit of a helical curl when they came off the loom. I don’t know if this is because the yarns were intentionally overtwisted a bit in the cabling, if it had to do with some error in the warping, or with the weaving itself. I’m still very much in the goofing-around-newbie phase of this all. After washing, they seem to lay flat, and being stuck in a book for most of their lives should help too.

The bottom bookmark was kind of a screwup, but a symmetrical screwup! Second from the bottom was woven plain without getting fancy–the warping was set up to do that striping, because I liked the color patterns that could be made with that warp setup.

For the bookmark in the third from the bottom, I was thinking that it would look like a little floral pattern–if you just look at the longer pieces of white (the pickup pattern), it kind of looks like a flower, and I was mostly paying attention to the pickup. It was only after taking it off the loom that I saw it for what it clearly really is: a TIE fighter. Once my brain saw it that way, it could not be unseen. JJ claimed that one.

Third from the top was where I really started to figure out how to set the weaving book aside and make up whatever pattern I wanted. Second from the top is just cool, though the strong color contrast between the two colors makes it harder to see in person. I think this would look really nice as a pattern on a single color.

The one on the very top is my personal favorite, and it was one of the easier ones to work. A lot of graphic bang for the weaving buck. I’ll definitely use that pattern again, maybe without the plain weave at the beginning and end.

The recipients liked them. I brought them to the family’s house with me and just told everyone to pick one, as they were more of a stocking stuffer. They’re easy enough that I’d definitely be willing to do them again.

Yarn swap!

I’m not very good at out-of-the-blue inviting people over to my place without a purpose. I always need to find some kind of excuse for a get together. I like having people over, though, so once I think of an excuse, things happen quickly.

A while back my local group on Ravelry was having a spate of “Anyone want to trade X for Y?” types of messages, and it seemed like the kind of thing that would work better in person. The vast majority of fiber people have stash that someone would love, but which isn’t doing it for them–maybe they already used some of the yarn on another project, or they’re just tired of looking at it. So why not have a yarn swap? I’m including some notes on what worked and didn’t here, both for future reference and for ideas in case you’d like to try it.

The way I arranged it was to set up my dining room table on one side of a room with as many leaves as would fit, then have chairs in a circle next to it. One piece of the table was taped off as “for free”, for things that people didn’t want to take home with them (we collected unwanted orphans at the end and donated them). The rest of the table was for sale or trade. This was a late afternoon to early evening get-together, so I made two quiches, thinking that other people would be more likely to bring chips or desserts (which was right on the ball, it worked out perfectly.)

About 10 people were able to make it. This was a really good number. If there were many fewer people there might not have been enough stuff to get a free-flowing trading setup going, while if there were many more, it would have required more organization to sort out whose yarn was whose. It was a good mix of huge and tiny stashes, larger and smaller pocketbooks, more and less experienced knitters. Everyone knew at least one person, and everyone didn’t know at least one person (even me!), so it seemed like a decent social mix as well.

I seriously underestimated the amount of yarn that would show up. Some people made multiple trips up my stairs to carry it all. The table was pretty much instantly full, then there were bags under the table and around people’s feet. I did like having it all together rather than next to the owners, which could have made it feel too much like people were protecting their yarn. If I did it again I would kick the cat out and pile the yarn up in the middle of the room on the floor, maybe on a sheet so it was kept mildly organized.

Straight-out sales (as with a gorgeous Hanne Falkenberg kit) seemed to settle at about 50% of retail. One thing I worried about beforehand was whether people would be trying too hard for a 1-to-1 trade, but after the first person said “Eh, you can keep it,” the whole room really opened up. I think everyone passed along whatever generosity came their way: I gave something to S without a trade, who gave something to R, who gave something to M, who gave something to me. It all worked pretty well. This is something I’ve found at Share Tompkins; the presence of generosity makes everyone feel good and generous.

Having a computer handy was useful; my desktop is in the room we met in and there were occasional checks on Ravelry or yarn sellers to find out the fiber content of something, or the retail price, or to remind someone what weight yarn they needed for that gorgeous scarf they saw the previous week.

Overall, I think it went really well. A few people talked about making it a once-a-month thing, but I feel like a less frequent meeting is more likely to work out so we don’t all see the same unloved yarns all the time. I might do another one when the weather warms up, as a spring cleaning.

Yes, yes, all very nice. What about the LOOT?

At the end of the night I had a fabulous pile of Dale Baby Ull, to replenish my colorwork stash, a skein of kettle-dyed bright green sock yarn for socks for JJ, and some chunky wool yarn in a colorway that matched chunky wool yarn I already had a small amount of. The chunky yarn was so that I could make a cat bed for the wool-obsessed cat. Once I had enough yarn to make the bed, it came together really quickly.

Prefelting:

Postfelting:

See? Wool obsessed. I put it on the floor and she pretty much instantly claimed it.

Doodling with Fiber

A 3-ply, worsted-ish weight yarn. 120 yards, 65g, which puts it somewhere in the Cascade 220 classic worsted weight range. I have a little bit more which is all spun up and just needs to be plied. Superwash Blue-Faced Leicester, dyed by Susan’s Spinning Bunny. What for? Who knows!

A relatively clear pic

And an arty pic, because the light was lovely and because I just figured out a focus-related setting on my camera. Viewed ginormously, you can see the individual fibers are in focus. So sweet.

I didn’t spin the fiber in any particular way, as far as preserving or wrecking the color organization of the fiber. I tend to be less organized with spindle-spun projects, because they are more likely to be picked up in spare odd bits of time–just grab whatever fiber is handy and get started. Some of the top got split into narrower pieces, which will lead to shorter stripes, but some of it was spun straight from the top, and I paid no attention to lining up particular colors. I spindle-spun most of the singles for this yarn, and plied on the wheel. There were some extra bits of fluff about when I first stated spinning the singles, so I added them into that particular batch, just putting them into the drafting triangle as I spun, or holding them together with the top and letting the fiber catch hold whenever it wanted to. I did this for one of the plies, and did not do it for the other two, in the hopes that when the fabric was knitted up, each odd color stuck out and sang on its own, without ending up plied next to something that clashed. Should give the relatively monochrome fabric a bit of interest. I’ve been trying to play around a bit more with yarn, be creative, try new things, and this seemed like an amusing experiment. One odd spinning habit I have is that when a few stray fibers from somewhere else get stuck into the fiber I’m working on, I don’t remove them, I just let them in. There’s a teeny line of blue somewhere on the biscotti socks for this reason, and for me it’s part of the delight of working with a handspun yarn. This is the first time I’ve done it in a more organized, but still relatively random way.

I’m trying to come up with something that would make sense with this yarn because I’m really curious how it looks knit up, with those occasional stripes of other colors thrown in willy-nilly. I may need to swatch it, just to find out. This is often the case with me and handspun yarn, incidentally; I have a really difficult time just stashing it, because I can’t wait to see how it knits up. This doesn’t help with the rather ridiculous number of WIPs and swatches cluttering up the craft area right now, but I’ll enjoy it until the disorder bothers me, and then go on WIP-hunting.

Batt Man

I’ve been a spinning fool the past few weeks. I’ve knit about 5 inches of a hat, which is nothing. But for spinning, I’ve:

-plied 1400 yards of 2-ply laceweight and spun a few more hundred yards of singles,
-spun and swatched a little sample for a sweater for J,
-spun and plied 100-odd yards of worsted weight 3-ply,
-plied up 70-80 yards 3-ply sportweight alpaca I had sitting around,
- started spinning on some 3-ply sock yarn–I’m about 2 ounces into 8 ounces for kneesocks,
- started some 3-ply DK weight for a sweater for me.

I’ll talk about all of these eventually, but right now the one I’m most excited about is the very last one, yarn for a sweater for me.

A few weekends ago I was planning to go to the New York Sheep and Wool festival but wasn’t able to due to some health-related messiness. I’d been thinking of buying batts at the festival to spin up, so I took the money I’d planned to spend and went wandering over to Etsy instead. I’d seen some recommendations for Corgi Hill Farm from folks on one of the Ravelry spinning forums, and ended up with four wool/silk batts (about 7.5 ounces total) in a colorway of browns and blues.

I am in love, man.

The sweater that has caught my eye is Tink’s Racing Stripes Pullover (Ravelry link, pattern link), a raglan-sleeved sweater with variegated striping along the sleeves and sides. I may borrow the idea without using this specific sweater, as it’s a little heavier than what I’m spinning, and it’s not clear from the pattern notes of other users whether the shaping would need a lot of mods or not. Also, I think I can handle a striped raglan.

I was starting to spin this batt up at a recent knitting group, and someone mentioned that they had batts in their stash but didn’t feel very sure about how to process them. Honestly, *I* don’t feel very sure of how to process them; this is only the third batt I’ve spun up. But I thought I’d document my methodology in case anyone was curious.

If you lay out this little jelly roll, you find that it’s a single large sheet of mostly-aligned fibers.

When you look at it like this, it’s also pretty clear that there are multiple layers of fibers, sandwiched together. If I’m reasonably gentle I can separate some of them from the others:

So the first question is, do I actually *want* to separate those different color layers? This would make a nice tweedy yarn with occasional flecks of brown, blue, and white. But the sweater I have in mind originally used Noro, to give you an idea of the color separation. I wanted to have at least several-yard lengths of different colors, while still having a reasonably manageable fiber format to work with. So I separated a piece of the topmost layer of batt and removed a strip of that layer.

You can pretty clearly see where I removed the top layer; it’s the area with the blue peeking through. In looking at the strip I did remove, you can also see that I didn’t do a perfect job of getting a single color; there’s a bunch of lighter and darker bits in there. That, I don’t mind at all. While I’m encouraging the batt to work in a particular way, the batt is at its heart a fairly random fiber prep, and I’m trying to let it do that to as much of an extent as my desire for control can allow. I do want it to show a bit of its history as a mixed-up fiber, that’s a big part of what will give this yarn a character that is distinct from a dyed top. Really, it’s the whole point of buying a batt, along with being so open and airy that it spins beautifully.

Time to strip out the next layer.

Again, this isn’t too perfect, again I don’t care, again you can see a new layer of fluff under the previous one. Note that instead of removing the next layer from that strip, I could just remove one whole layer at a time. Personally I find that a bit hard to work with, unless I’m going to strip this whole batt down and spin it all in one go. Usually I remove a bunch of layers from one strip, spin that up, then move to the next piece. The whole chunk of batt is much more stable and transportable than these little wispy things, so I only do this processing with an amount I know I can use at a sitting.

I keep removing layers from that same strip until I get all the way to the bottom, and twirl them around a bit so I can carry them down the hall without them falling to bits:

Different amounts of fiber, and different mixtures of color. I don’t care too much about exact lengths of color here–I couldn’t begin to match this with other plies, I’m going to chain-ply to preserve what color order I can.

Spinning it up, you can see that there’s definitely color variation, and on a reasonably long scale. This means that the individual stripes should be a few rows a piece if I have my act together.

I started working on this project last week, and finished spinning up one batt. I started to chain-ply on the wheel but that was a thorough failure–looked like garbage, totally uneven, really frustrating, incredibly slow. A few yards in I threw the whole thing into a corner and sulked. The remainder of the skein went much more smoothly on a spindle, but I thought I’d use the ugly bit on the wheel just to see how the colors and general thickness worked as a knitted fabric–didn’t even wash the yarn, just knit it off of the bobbin. It’s a pretty wide swatch, about half the width of the sleeve at the top of the arm, and so for success the stripes would need to be at least 4-5 rows long, hopefully with some intermediate coloring in between.

Success! The yarn goes from brown to blue to light gray to dark gray at a decent rate. The errant flecks of other colors make it interesting, but don’t dominate. It’s a bit hard to tell with the crummy plying job but I think the remainder of the yarn will be a fair DK weight, this is 5.5-6 stitches per in on US 6’s, slightly mushy, may move down to 5’s. Batt #2 is half done now, so I expect that another week or two should finish this guy, as long as I can keep the wool-loving cat away from the lovely sheet of wool that she eyes every time I lay it out to tear into strips.

New sweater

I have too many projects right now, and they are all thoroughly failing to capture my imagination. (For me, this is usually the problem with having too many WIPs; too many options leads to dissatisfaction with all of them.) Clearly, it’s new project time.

At the recent Finger Lakes Fiber Arts Festival, I bought about two pounds of some very nice Ashland Bay BFL top from Winderwood Farm, mostly natural white with some streaks of medium brown.

biffle

Super soft stuff, very creamy to the touch, and with some nice lanoliny smell to it. The excuse I made to buy it was that I haven’t knit J anything in a while, and maybe he’d like a handspun sweater. (If he didn’t, I did!)

He liked the fiber and has had a general sweater-type in mind for a while, so I spun up a sample and trolled Ravelry for interesting-looking fitted men’s sweater patterns.

I’m always disappointed when looking for men’s sweaters.  Limited gauges, baggy sloppy fit, none of the types of details that make so many women’s patterns must-knits. What J wants is a sweater that can be worn indoors without sweating to death, and for him that means DK weight or lighter. He looks good in fitted stuff, he likes sweaters with full- or half-length zippers.  He likes the idea of a cable or two.

He liked the Expedition Pullover, but still wanted a lighter yarn than the Cascade Eco Wool recommended. Brooklyn Tweed’s modification of the Urban Aran Pullover for a man and a cardigan looks great too, but it’s also a fairly bulky yarn. I may have to give it some more thought–I could adjust the gauge, but it’s always a slippery slope from adjusting gauge to just writing my own darn sweater pattern, and right now I’m just in the mood to follow instructions.

At the same time, I decided to sample the fiber a bit. I wasn’t sure if it would be advantageous to make the color variation stick out more or not, and I wanted to see what the fabric felt like knit up. I spun up a small amount of two 3-ply yarns. The first one was spun semiworsted, with a shortish backward draw, keeping the fibers aligned but allowing some air to get into the drafting triangle. The second was spun from the fold, trying to get my non-wooleny self to spin as fluffily woolen as possible. Spinning from the fold was also a way to maximize the color variation–the color variations go in the direction of the fiber here, so spinning perpendicular to that minimized the amount of color mixing which could occur. For the purposes of sampling, I chain-plied the singles I spun, and knit a teeny swatch, not even big enough to trust gauge, but enough to give me an idea of which direction to go.

biffle sample

More-worsted yarn on the bottom, more woolen yarn on the top. It’s a bit difficult to see the color variations in the woolen yarn, but they’re quite apparent in person. Spinning from the fold certainly made a difference in the character of the yarn–it’s a bit bumpier, and looked better on a larger needle in spite of nearly-identical wpi on the singles.  I was worried that the more worsted yarn would feel harsher and less comfortable, but I found that the feel of the fabric was still light and soft, while maintaining beautifully crisp even stitches and just enough subtle heathering to make it compelling.  It makes a great light fabric on US5’s, 5.5 stitches to the inch.

I’m thinking that it might be an interesting exercise to see how fast I could spin and knit a whole sweater. A little challenge for myself, just the thing to kickstart the creativity. I just need to decide on a pattern.

New Spinning Toy

A new spinning toy! One that doesn’t actually do any spinning, assist in holding singles or plying, or even help to make my yarn look prettier.

What is? Just a gram scale, that I got during a clearing out of some less sensitive equpiment at work. But wowwie, it is giving me some useful info.

Take this yarn,

2 ply laceweight

I’ve been working on spinning the singles off and on for ages now–I had a half-filled bobbin that had been set aside at least two years ago, possibly three.  Finally, FINALLY, last week, I actually get around to finishing off the second bobbin of singles and plying everything up. I knew I had about 10 ounces of fiber, and that Ashford claims that their standard bobbins hold about 4 ounces of fiber each. The two larger skeins, 720 and 700 yards respectively, each filled the bobbin pretty thoroughly, but at the same time they weren’t completely maxed out. The pile of fiber that was left sure looked like a lot, but how much did I actually have left, and how much yarn might I have at the end?

2 ply laceweight wpi

Now that I have a gram scale, I know all that, and I also know how similar the two skeins are. I’d been spinning to match a small sample I had, but this was spun up over such a long time that I had little confidence in its consistency.

First skein: 105g. Second skein: 97.5g. Third tiny skein: 6.2g.

So, it looks like with really well-packed, worsted spun, fine yarn, the practical limit for an Ashford bobbin for me is about 3.7 ounces. If I had a Woolie Winder and cranked down on the tension I’m sure I could get it up to 4 ounces, but 3.7 is good “best usual case” info for me. The grist was reasonably consistent between the first and second skein. Considering the many life changes that have happened in the intervening time, I’m pretty pleased with that.

I also weighed the remaining fiber: 93g. So I’ve got one more skein, slightly smaller than the first two, left. That’ll give me about 2100 yards of this 28-30wpi 2-ply wool-silk blend, which means that I can start looking up useful patterns even as I spin up the remainder. The yardage is actually less than I’d guessed–somewhere in the 3000 yards-per-pound range, when I’d been thinking vaguely of Jaggerspun Zephyr which is in the 5000 ypp range. But over 2000 yards is plenty for a nice-sized shawl, probably knit on US2’s or 3’s.

I’m finding it to be a useful thing to have around. In the couple of weeks I’ve had it, I also used it to weigh all my spindles. I have six which is not too many for a happy spindler. They all look totally different from the others, but  three of them are 14-15 grams, and three are 37-38 grams. Apparently I had preferences I wasn’t even aware of. I’m also clearing off all my spinning bobbins, so I can weigh them. I’ll make a small note of their weight on the bobbin itself, so I can try to have the same weight of singles on each bobbin for a multiply yarn. I have a few different styles of Ashford bobbins, so this will be considerably more accurate than my current “scratch my chin for a minute and then guesstimate” method, which is entirely dependent upon my inconsistent spatial awareness.

So yeah, a convenient tool, one I should have gotten a long time ago.