A while ago, I wrote a teaser post about a plying technique that I wanted to write about - and then I almost forgot I promised you a follow-up post.

While most of the ladies on medieval images have a long distaff that clearly holds fibres, like this:

Psalter of Fecamp. Ca. 1180. From Petzold, Andreas. Romanische Kunst, art in context. Köln: Dumont, 1995, p. 97.

and some fewer ones have a short distaff that also clearly holds fibres, like this:

Detail from Giotto: Annunciation to St. Anna. Scrovegni-Chapel, Padua. 1300-1320. From Flores d'Arcais, Francesca. Giotto. New York: Abbeville, 1995, p. 150.

something about this picture has always sort of tickled the back of my brain.

Young woman, Pseudo-Apuleius, 13th century. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 93. From Kotzur, Hans-Jürgen. Hildegard von Bingen 1098-1179. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998, p. 336.

It's not the usual what she's holding; it's clearly a shorter distaff than usual, and the form of the stuff on the distaff is very clearly defined, very spindle-shaped and not fibery-looking at all.

Let's jump to another topic: the problem of plying. I don't know how well you manage to spin the same amount of length on two spindles or spools - I don't manage so very well; there's always some of the yarn left on one side when the other side has already run out. There's a theoretically very easy way to avoid this, though: To fold the yarn spun in half (from one single spindle, spool, or cop) and ply it with itself. When there isn't a foulup, you end up with a neat two-ply with no singles left.

There are different instructions on the 'Net on how to ply from a center-pull ball, and there's also the Andean Plying Bracelet which both are means to achieve the desired end-result: a skein of single folded in half and plied up. Both involve re-winding the spun yarn from the bobbin of a spinning wheel (where it's an absolute necessity) or from a spindle.

Me, I'm lazy. I like to be lazy. I promote winding spindles in a special way so that I can, after spinning, just slide that cop of yarn off the spindle onto a slim bit or stick of wood or so for storage. (Chopsticks, by the way, work fine.) And the way that I wind my yarn results in a stable, spindle-shaped cop of yarn that is essentially something not too unlike a center-pull ball. So I tested plying directly from the  cop (transferred to a slim stick) onto the spindle... and it works, and very very well too.

There's me doing it...

... and a close-up with a slightly different hand position that occurs quite frequently during the process.


So... here's a method that is efficient, easy to use, will result in no waste of yarn singles, and does not require extra tools (you can use a spindle stick to ply from). And I'm hooked on this new technique.

There's this half-joking rule for IT guys and programmers that goes:

If you have a job to do and need to find out how long it will take, do the following.
Estimate the length of time you will need to do the job. Now take that number and increase it to the next number of magnitude - minutes into hours, hours into days, days into weeks and so on.
Now you add three. That's how long it will take.

Maybe I should start to use this rule as a hard-and-steady rule for my work stuff - like getting the webpage overhauled (well, yes, that did go on hiatus for quite a while), the online shop running (I didn't realise how much Holy Saint Bureaucracius would need to be revered) or the Spinning Experiment all wrapped up.

Ah, the Spinning Experiment. Yes, the results have been found and the paper is in the processing; but I have one thing left to do with the data, and that is cleaning it up a little, translating some of the extra info into English and then packing it up nicely for everyone to download from the Forum webpage. And for that, I need to sort through the yarn cop photos.

I took at least three photos from each sample, and I will just upload one, the best one regarding light and contrast. So I need to pick out those that should be uploaded, resize them a bit and then pack them into a .zip file. And that's still left to do. Sometimes I'm really, really amazed at how much time that Experiment gobbled up... though I'd do it again, it has been totally worth it.

And sometime soon, you will get a note on this blog that the data is up...

Somehow, the time this year flies like crazy - I just realised that it is almost Ascension Day. There was a bunch of things that I had planned to finish before the long weekend that this induces... but I will probably not manage all of them.

That greenish blackboard is looking a bit less green and more black today, thanks to a bunch of things to do finished since Friday (and thus vanished from the board). On the list for today is packing a bunch of files and sending them off: the article about the spinning experiment results is finished, and I'll give it a last once-over before getting it to its destination.

Associated with this, I am planning to put all the experiment data online so that everybody interested can download the results and do additional research, develop theories, or - in case of the spinners  - see how their spinning looks on a survey card. I have to go over the database for this and make sure that everything is in there that should be in and that nothing is in there that shouldn't, and that will probably need another few days. You will hear about it on this blog, of course.

Spinning experiment work, here I come again!

I'm being very lazy today, and I'll just point you to a very interesting article over on the Abby's Yarns blog about the debate whether the hand spindle or the spinning wheel is the better tool for spinning.

Abby comes from the Andes, and she learned how to use a low-whorl hand spindle for production spinning. Do read her article - it's  a really, really good one.

For some people, spinning from a wide bit of top - like those bands that you can usually buy, at least here in Germany - can be irksome. The spinning seems to have a tendency to wander from the very tip of the top, where you started, backwards along a thin sliver of the roving. After a while, you realise that while you are still spinning smoothly, you are somewhere along the band of roving, a good bit from where it started.

When spinning on a wheel, with your roving on your lap, this can be irritating. However, you can just take off your wandering yarn with a bit of fluffy roving attached to it, place the fluff over the start of your band, and spin (and maybe wander) on.

The situation is not as nice when you are spinning with hand-spindle and distaff. Here, spinning is much easier and smoother when you really stay at the tip of your top - because otherwise, you would need to unwind the roving from the distaff, and the free tip will then hang in the way and become mangled over time. Which leads to two questions: Why does the wandering draft happen, and what to do to avoid it?

Wandering draft can happen easily on the wide band of roving because it's just that - roving, with all the fibres aligned in one direction. The drafting zone you have when spinning, especially when spinning finer yarn, is a not very wide triangle - the upper part of the "fibre triangle" that is often praised as the effect that shows your ratio between twist and draft is good. Let's say your drafting triangle has an upper edge about 4 cm wide. Your industrially prepared top is much wider than that; when I spread out mine to a thin, draft-triangle thickness, it is about 25 cm wide.

Wandering draft usually happens when you spin on the fibres at one edge of the band. Think of your band as a rectangle and start on a corner, and you are practically guaranteed a wandering draft.
Why? Because on that wide stretch of fibres that are all aligned perpendicular to the top tip (can you tell I'm amused by that expression?), it's beyond easy for your drafting triangle to eat itself upwards along the band of fibres. The fibres right above your drafting zone on the band flow into the triangle naturally. After feeding from the same bit for only a short while, the edge you are spinning from is already different from the main top front edge. If you spin here for a bit longer, your triangle wanders back, eating itself along the edge of your roving - further back than a staple length, which is the length in which you could still transition to fibres from the main top tip. In effect, you have separated a bit of the band from the main part and are now spinning along that much smaller sliver of roving. And once this separation has happened, you need to jump back to the main edge as described above, because you cannot just smoothly glide back to the  main edge.

So how can you keep from wandering like that?
There are two basic approaches that you can use: Change your style of drafting, or change the thickness of the roving.
If you watch out for the wandering tendency while spinning, you can make the drafting zone wander back and forth along the edge of the roving. This is easy if the difference between your roving width and the drafting triangle width is small, but gets harder with a very large difference. When you catch the backwards wandering early, you can gently pull your drafting zone back towards the top tip and proceed from there. Keeping the tip of top nicely (but not firmly) together into - more or less - a point makes this much easier, because it prevents you from spinning just at the "corner" of your band of roving. With a bit of practice, this control of your drafting area and shifting it before wandering draft zone occurs gets easier and easier.

The other possibility is the easier way out: Change the size of your sliver of roving. You can do that either by just gently splitting a piece of top into several portions lengthwise, or you can pull or diz it into a slimmer, longer band.
Dizzing is basically a pre-drafting process using a thing with a hole in it - any thing with a hole in it that's small enough to hold comfortably, like a small disc, a spindle whorl, a donut bead, whatever. You feed the very tip of your fibre top through the hole and then use the size of the hole to measure how much fibre is in the new, slimmer band - you gently push the diz into the top until it sits snugly, but not tightly, then grab the fibre just in front of the diz and gently pull. Push diz back along the now drawn-out fibre, pull again. I like to place my carded band on a table, clamp down on it with one flat hand a bit behind the diz for pulling, then use the other hand to pull. There's quite a lot of youtube videos of how to use a diz, though they usually show you how to diz a batt, diz from a drum carder or diz from wool combs. The process and the principle, however, are the same - using a hole of a certain diameter to help you measure out an even amount of fibre along your top. Here's just one example. I find using a diz much, much easier than pulling free-style with only my hands, but that's just me.
In addition, I feel that dizzing out will open the fibre a little already. If you are using industrially prepared wool that has been compressed or stored for a while, this does make a noticeable difference when spinning - the fibres have already been party unstuck from each other after dizzing.

You can experiment to find out how thick or thin you prefer your band of fibre to be for spinning comfortably. And combining the two approaches - learning how to keep the wandering in check and adjusting top size to spinning preferences - is the best and most efficient way. Knowing how to control a thicker bit of roving and how to prevent wandering back is a good skill to have as a spinner.
And the rest is just personal preference. I like to have a sliver that is not too thin, because I get very annoyed when my sliver breaks, and I don't mind taking a little care to prevent wandering backwards of my drafting zone; others like to have a really thin sliver where most of the drafting work is already done. There's no rule, and there's no roving size police - suit yourself. And remember to wind your fibre on a distaff for historically correct hand-spinning.

I think I am now going to invent a new blogging rule. A very easy one. It goes: When in doubt what to blog about, post pictures of yarn.

So I'm doing that. I weighed the skein of yarn yesterday, and it has 65.1 grams on its 595 metres of two-ply.

That's what the skein looks like now:

(Click the pics for the larger versions.)


And then, I just wanted to know. Exactly. So this is what happens if you match a skein of yarn with a visual survey card for threads.


Now these cards are... let's just call them unforgiving. Because you have white threads on black background, and because the threads are absolutely evenly spaced out, you can see every irregularity. You can see them so well that these cards are used for visual survey of machine-spun, industrial yarns - and those have very, very little differences in thickness.

Which means that while the yarn on the card might look quite irregular... I'm actually more or less content with the yarn. There are a few thinner-than-planned-for bits in it, and a few places where the plying could have been more even, but overall, I'd say it is pretty good quality.

And I'll probably hang that skein into my market stall with a note attached to it giving the time that it took to spin it. That should get some reactions - at least from the spinners.

A while ago, I mentioned that I've done a bit of wheel spinning again for a change. After a long while (felt like forever) of spinning to more or less fill two bobbins with single, I'm now in the plying stage.

This

is what it looked like after two hours of plying work. After three and a half hours of plying, the bobbin was more than full - it had a bulge in the middle. (Of course I forgot that I wanted to take a picture. Only natural to grab the swift right away, right?) The result is 595 metres of 2-ply yarn, and it's roughly about 28 wraps per inch. Since I gave it a soak right away to relax the fresh ply, I can't weigh it yet, since it's not completely dry this morning.

However, the plying time has made me think about pricing of handspun yarn again. Six hundred metres of yarn took three and a half hours of plying. If I do a very rough calculation and suppose that spinning took one and a half times the work time of plying (I'll time a bit of spinning next time), then that means roughly fourteen hours of work total. That is one and a half workdays for sixhundred metres two-ply! And that's wheel spun with industrially prepared merino wool, so no additional prep time required plus a relatively fast and efficient spinning tool.

Fourteen hours work - now what would you pay for a skein of handspun wool like that? Probably not my normal hourly rate times fourteen, and my normal hourly rate is not very high at that. And if you look at etsy or dawanda or any other shop, stall or market, you can see handspun yarn roughly half the length offered up for less than 20 Euro. (Oh, it's hand dyed as well.) Spinning rates seem to go up to a stunning 20 cents per metre - but you can have it cheaper, too.

Now, my little wheel is not the fastest one on this earth, and I'm not trying to spin as fast as humanly possible. But let's do some maths. One hour spinning and plying time taken together will let me end up with about 42 metres of two-ply yarn. If I sell that for 20 cents per metre, I will end up with the stunning sum of 8,40 Euros for one hour of my work. Plus the material needed - and I also need the tool to work with, of course. So let's say eight of the Euros remain as "winnings".

And now there's the snag. While 8 Euro per hour might sound not too bad at the first second, what you technically are as a spinner is... a freelancer. And that means you will have to calculate so that you can pay everything yourself - your health insurance (where usually your work/your boss will pay half, if you have a fixed job), your working tools, your stockpile, your vacations; you will need to make enough money so you can cover the times you are ill or some time off that you need to recover and recharge your batteries. Oh, and maybe some day you wish to be old and pensioned? Go pay for your own pension account, then. And if you make enough money for all of that, keep in mind that you will also have to shunt off the VAT from your selling price - and that's between 15 and 21% in Europe. (In Germany, those 8,40 Euros would mean 7,05 Euros for you.)

That is much, much too little money for that work. Ask any freelancer. Go read any freelance advice column, or webpage. And too little money for work - that's not healthy, and it's not good for the economy nor society. Plus too little money for textile work also furthers the underestimation and the undervalueing of this line of work that is so widespread today.

So... provided every spinner around that sells his or her own handspun yarn (and I'd bet it's mostly female spinners here) doesn't work at least three times faster on their spinning wheels than I do... they sell their work under price. Vastly under price.

That always leaves me more than a little sad. Hand spinners, please value your work correctly!

This blog post was the starting point for a series about fair pricing in crafts. Read the start of the series here.