Filling a spindle

A little while back at Susan’s*, I picked up a new spindle of Jim’s and some superwash BFL dyed in cheerful gender-neutral colors–I think the colorway is Autumn Sunset, but it’s a considerably more orange dyelot than usual. Just what I wanted. I started spinning it up right away, and have continued working on it off and on for the last month or so. I was planning to make a 3-ply yarn, and was initially thinking that I might need to split the fiber into 6 balls of singles if I wanted to end up with a easy-to-work-with spindle-full. But then, I spun up nearly a third of the fiber without even noticing. How easy!

Then I got thinking a bit about plying. I had plenty of space left on the spindle even after spinning up a third of the fiber–it was only the weight that was starting to annoy me while drafting. How much yarn could I *actually* pack onto this same spindle if I wasn’t worrying so much about drafting?

The answer: at least 3 times the weight of the spindle itself. Then I ran out of singles and was starting to lose patience anyhow, but I’m sure I could have fit more on there if I’d been inclined to.

There are regular conversations on Ravelry about how to fit more yarn onto a spindle, or how much yarn can fit on a spindle, that sort of thing. So I thought I’d show my method by taking a picture every 30ish yards, so you could see how the yarn builds up. (I actually took these pictures in the reverse order while winding off, so the cops are a little sloppier than they were while being built up.)

First off, the spindle. This is a 1.1 ounce spindle, with a 2.75 inch diameter whorl, and 9.5 of shaft below the whorl. I’d call the physics of the spindle a nice middle ground–neither a fast center-weighted spinner that stops quickly or a slow spinner that goes for hours. I actually have another spindle of Jim’s with a wider whorl that I usually use for plying, but this time I found it an entertainment to spin and ply a yarn all from one spindle.

About 20 yards in. I tend to work from the top and build my way down, but I thought I’d try working a bit farther down the shaft than usual this time around. To start with, I usually have a cone-shaped cop, or something that runs parallel down from the whorl before tapering down to a V. Also, since I knew that I would be packing a lot of yarn on, I was more careful to very tightly wind this first section, so that if/when I dropped the spindle, the whole cop wouldn’t slide down. I’d love to wind the whole thing on really tightly, but that starts to bother my wrist. Everything’s a deviation from the spherical cow, in the end.

You can also see a bit of crosswinding here, which I mostly prefer to do until the cop gets really unwieldy.

At 50 yards, it’s still mostly a parallel-then-tapered cop, but the center is just starting to bulge out. I don’t really calculate this, but I think I generally start building the center up when the diameter of the cop is about 1/2 the diameter of the whorl. This allows for some spindle tricks later, and still gives me plenty of space up there if things get sloppy and need a few courses of fresh yarn to hold the whole thing together.

(You can also see my extra plying twist in that loose little bit of plied yarn. Two of the three singles composing this yarn were sitting around for a while, and I was aiming for a slightly overplied yarn to give it some more elasticity. The combination leads to kinky yarn right off the spindle, but it should calm down with washing.)

80, then 110, then 140 yards, and the center is distinctly bulging, with the cop starting to be built out much more than down. (It’s also a nice series of pictures that show the variations in the colorway!) At this stage, I pretty much only wind down to the bottom if there are a few strands getting loose and misbehaving. As I go, I really use the yarn from the building cop as a structural net to hold the underlying layers in place. This is much different than winding a loose ball for knitting, where I’m more likely to wind it any old way. But the knitting ball isn’t going to be getting spun at a few thousand rpm for a few hours, and I’m not going to need it to be cohesive enough for more than minimal handling. Not so for the spindle–by the end, I’ll need to have my hand partly on the cop to add twist and wind on. It helps to have something stable to grab onto! This is also why I like spindles with long shafts. I can’t stand trying to spin or wind on from some teensy bit of wood at the bottom.

A little before this point, the “belly” of the cop was getting near to equalling the diameter of the whorl. So by this point, at 170 yards, yarn management tricks and planning start to become more useful.

Why? Well because at this point if I had some yarn going straight up from the bottom of the spindle to the notch, to the hook, the yarn would probably slide out of the notch and the spindle’d go whirling off across the floor. It’s part of the physics of all that torque–the yarn isn’t especially inclined to stay where it is. But if the yarn comes up from underneath the whorl, THEN over the notch, then it’s much more inclined to hold together, because there’s a bit of tension being kept on the yarn, in the direction almost exactly opposite to the force trying to pull the yarn off the spindle.

So what I’m doing at this point when I wind on goes like this: wind a bit of yarn onto the lower-down part, leaving a fair amount of yarn, then wind the yarn once *right under the whorl* before bringing the yarn up to the hook. When I have another arm’s-length of yarn ready to wind on, I unwind that bit right under the whorl, and continue to wind lower-down, repeating the process.

The downside is obvious: I need to unwind a few inches of yarn every. single. make. This gets tedious, and is why I love my super-wide-whorled spindle for plying.

The upside is that I’m not actually limited by the diameter of the whorl as I normally would be. As long as I leave a bit of space right under the whorl, I can put some tension on the yarn and wind on whatever I have left. It’s the difference between wanting to wind on a bit more and being *able* to wind on a bit more–at this point, I get distinctly annoyed with that extra little step in the plying process, but what they hey, I only have a few yards left, and knowing that gets me through to the end.

And back to the beginning, about 200 yards and just over 3 ounces. When I get really very close to the end of whatever I’m working on, I end up just filling in that nice space under the whorl that I’d been taking such pains to maintain, because I’m almost done and won’t need that gap anymore, so I may as well skip the annoying extra step and just wind on wherever it’s convenient.

Like I said, if I’d had more yarn in the plying ball I could have kept going, but somewhere around the 160 yard mark, this stopped being fun. With a wider whorl it could have been fun for longer, but my arm might also have gotten tired.

Long blog post made short: You can cram a lot of damn yarn onto a spindle if you do it right.

*Full disclosure: I’m friends with Jim and Susan and have helped them out at fiber shows a few times. They’re neither paying nor asking me to shill for them.

More Frenzy!

Seems like a finishing frenzy should involve more than just a baby sweater, right?

I’d been working on these tabi socks for J for a few months. He likes wearing sandals, and hopefully these will extend the season for them a little bit.

I went patternless with these. I decided to work them toe-up, and just started with a shorter figure 8 cast-on than I would use for a plain sock, proportional to the size of what I was fitting. The big toe compartment I basically worked like a tiny sock, but I needed to work the increases non-symmetrically on the section that held 4 toes, so that it fit the feet appropriately. The one thing I found the most useful while working on the toes was to have the feet of the wearer available for frequent checks. Once that part was done, they were a pretty standard plain sock pattern, and progressed pretty smoothly. There was a good chunk of time in the middle of knitting these where my first trimester happened when I didn’t have energy for much except planning naps and figuring out ways of avoiding queasiness, but aside from that they were a quick knit. I finished them the week before last and finally wove in the ends last night. They fit great! I’m looking forward to seeing how they work in practice once we get into autumn.

The second project started with this yarn:

I talked about it in February. Two ounces of sea silk/worm silk blend from Fleece Artist. Not a whole lot, so I wanted to use it in a smallish project, but not one that felt too insignificant.

I think I picked a good one.

The pattern is Lacy Baktus, a variant on the plain garter stitch Baktus. A very simple knit, and one that did nice things with the yarn.

I had 2 ounces of this yarn, so I started to decrease when I had just over 1 ounce left, to give myself a little wiggle room. This worked fine, I had a *very* small skein left over at the end, which will probably end up going into some future inkle loom project. (This is always what I think when I see little leftover bits of sturdy lace-to-fingering-weight.)

Something about the combination of camera and time of day seems to have made this project read more purple than it actually is–the purple stripes are actually sections where a ply of dark green and a ply of pink lined up together. There are even a couple of those going right through the yarn picture I posted above, if you want to see them up close. In person, those stripes read as a brownish gray, like an apple bruise. When J first saw the colorway, he described it as “apple picking colors”, which is so perfect that I haven’t thought of it any other way since.

This yarn was also a bit of a lesson in patience when starting a project. For the first 10-20% of the scarf (most of what can be seen as the left side piece), there was a ply of dark green against a ply that shifted color from pink to yellow to orange. The ply of green kept everything looking very muddy, and I was worried that the whole scarf was going to end up being one undifferentiated blah. I was so thrilled when that dark green finally went away, because some of the brighter colors were allowed to come out and play. And in the end, I like the effect of the mixture. I don’t think I would have liked this scarf if I’d taken more care in keeping the colors separate. The bit of mud mixed in here and there help to make the bright parts brighter, but I wouldn’t have known that if I’d frogged the project early on and thrown the yarn in a corner.

So, two winners. Plus, my in-progress pile diminished so rapidly that I didn’t have another traveling project planned! Typically I’m thinking of the next project while working on a current one, and am all ready to cast on again as soon as I’ve woven in ends, but I actually need to go check out the stash for a bit before I pick something.