The emballage has been woven, and has come back to me, and it is wonderful. A thick, heavy cloth from thick, heavy two-ply yarns, it does feel like something trustworthy enough to pack valuable goods and protect them on long journeys.

Here's a picture of the cloth, raw off the loom:


The cloth is looking even better now after a nice wash to finish it, and it's currently hanging out to dry... and once it is dry, I can get the comparison photo for after the wash, and then set out to cut it into the required parts and secure the edges of the individual pieces.

If you're a spinner, you will probably know what "setting the twist" means. For those of you who don't know what that is about, let me explain.

When you spin yarn, you twist fibres together, pressing their surfaces onto each other. Friction between these surfaces gives the thread its stability - hence a thread with more twist is usually a stronger thread. Yarn thickness, fibre length and fibre surface all influence how much twist is needed for a certain amount of yarn strength.

Twisting these fibres together means inserting energy into a system - that is what you do when you flick the spindle or treadle the wheel. This energy (and may the proper natural scientists please forgive any odd wording) is stored in the fibres. Now when you let go of the piece of twisted yarn, the fibres want to return to their relaxed state (and there's probably something that could be said about the laws of thermodynamics here, or something equally smart). So... they will untwist as far as possible.

"Setting the twist" means  counteracting this, by getting the individual fibres settled into their new shape. This can be done by time (just letting the yarn sit will eventually deform the fibres) or be sped up by the application of heat and moisture. So dunking the skein in hot water, then hanging it up (possibly a little bit weighted, so the yarns remain stretched out) will help nicely. For those of us with less time, or less patience, or wanting to take before and after pictures, a steam cleaner will also deliver heat and moisture, conveniently at the push of a button.

So. I always thought that setting the twist would do just that - set the twist in the yarn, sort of freeze it in its current state. However, there seems to be something more happening here:

[caption id="attachment_2867" align="alignnone" width="640"] Yarn before and after steam treatment - you can see how the knot of the marking yarn moves. There is definitely a difference in the yarn after steaming!


Here's a closeup of the part with the marked yarn:


I haven't measured yet if the twist angle changes noticeably, but the yarns definitely move and shift and something happens to them when they get treated. Some of that movement could be explained by the steam shifting the threads, but not all of it - I tried not to get too close with the nozzle and be gentle enough to avoid shifting the yarn with the steam stream, and still things happened.

Well. Who would have guessed that...

Guess what is happening here?

Right. More yarn:

One batch still on the skeiner...


and one batch already off it and waiting for its colleague.


Both are waiting for a third one, and then I'll have done enough for the weft of the next batch. After that, it's straight on to the warp - which will have a little more twist than the weft, and will be spun in the other direction, and will be from a different kind of wool, and a little thinner. (This weft, by the way, is fairly thick with about 1.5-2 mm.)

With the last batch of this weft, I'm planning to do a little photo documentation of the setting effects - it does look like things happen to the yarn and the yarn twist angle between spinning, setting the twist and weaving, so the yarn in the woven fabric is a little different from the yarn right after spinning. It might be subtle, though, but I am definitely looking into that a bit. So: next skein - photo op before setting the twist (which I'm doing by steaming the yarn enthusiastically) and after.

This, my dear readers, is eighthundredandseventy metres of Coburg Fuchsschaf two-ply:


weighing in at 1630 grams. It is a honking big chunk of yarn, and it will travel off now to be woven into a fabric of the kind once used for packing up stuff.

Yay.

There are days, sometimes, when things are just... not as usual. Today turned out to be one of them, partly due to my parents stopping by, and me trying to cram the usual amount of work into the day despite having coffee and a chat with them. The severe lateness of this blog post is thus due to my routine being thrown off plus the computer doing some shenanigans in the late afternoon, when I actually fired it up and would have had the chance to see, on my virtual to-do list, that blogging has not happened yet.

But, on the plus side, I did manage to get things done. So... the spinning of the next batch of yarn is finished, and I'm sitting on a heap (a true heap!) of really thick two-ply yarns. Tomorrow will see the yarn sent off after taking a few photos of the skeins, and the yarn, for documentation purposes.

Because, you see... I recently found out that there can be a quite remarkable difference between how yarn looks in the skein and how it looks in the fabric. Which is... interesting. In the Firefly oh-god-oh-god-interesting way, kind of:
Well... it looks like I will have to take care not to add too much twist (I cannot believe I'm really writing this), or the cloth will not look as it's supposed to look. I'm also developing a few more thoughts and hypotheses about twist angle and its reliability, all of which are interesting but not helpful at the moment - though they should be good, juicy stuff to talk about at NESAT in May...

Really, really full. As in "no more yarn shall wind onto it" full:


And it took a fraction of the time to fill a bobbin with the thicker yarn (of course). Soon I'll find out how many metres of yarn we are looking at here - and then I will have a rough estimate of how much more of that rope I need to spin for the fabric sample!

Happy New Year to all of you - may it bring joy and wonderful adventures and many successful, happy projects!

I'm back home from a wonderful time off. There was time spent with family, and time spent with friends; there was roast goose and cookies and cake, gingerbread and chocolate; coffee and tea were consumed in no little quantity, and we had walks in the snow and the now-traditional mousse au chocolat to toast the new year at midnight on the 31st.

Now it's back to work - the usual gazillion of emails to sort out, and of course the spinning. The first batch of yarns for the first piece of fabric was done just before the holidays, and now I will spin up about 2 km of really thick yarn from Coburg Fox wool for the reproduction of a packaging fabric.

The workplace is already all set up, and I've started off:


The thread for this fabric is a two-ply (it is one of the quite rare medieval fabrics where plied yarn was used for weaving), and it's about 3-5 mm thick - so I'm spinning singles that feel really, really chunky to me. This is quite a challenge, as I'm very used to spinning fine and very fine yarns, but not yarns this size (or, as I usually call them, ropes).

Because the thread is so thick, I have mounted an "aim for this"-sample card on the left side of the spinner. On the plus side for spinning bulky yarns: Checking the twist angle does not require a magnifying glass for this thread. Also, the spool fills up much, much faster with this kind of yarn!