Tag: spinning

Work for Kolfinna Valravn’s Golden Dolphin, 2022

Photograph by Nicolo Santorio

Kolfinna Valravn is one of my favorite people, period. In addition to being an amazing artist, Kolfinna is unfailingly kind, thoughtful, and giving; she thinks of others, and then does something tangible with it. She is always working to make others’ lives better, even when “on a break”. Of course I had to help with her Golden Dolphin (GoA service award).

Ollamh Lanea gathered a dream team for this scroll: Bran Mydwynter was our designer, Aurri le Borgne was the “illuminator” (which, in this case, handled substrates, engraving, and assembly), Lanea wrote the beautiful words (of course!), and I was in charge of calligraphy… and spinning and weaving.

Yes. I got to spin and weave for a scroll. Even better: I got to spin and weave for a scroll for Kolfinna!

You see, Kolfinna loves the Bronze Age, especially the Egtved Girl. Bran knew this, and designed a scroll that incorporated the Egtved Girl’s spiky belt plaque, corded skirt, and a runic plaque (the research behind the runic translation ALONE is incredibly impressive, let alone the piece as a whole, so please go read about that now).

But first, let’s talk about the calligraphy.

Runic Calligraphy

Runic practice and color decisions

The plaque for the calligraphy was made by Aurri out of a piece of pergamenata attached to thin wood and then spraypainted, giving it an excellent metallic sheen. I had never done calligraphy for a scroll without tracing, so I was incredibly nervous (I hadn’t traced the calligraphy for the Apprentice’s Manuscript, but if I messed up with that I could scrape it or start a new folio if needed). I spot-tested to see if an eraser hurt the base paint, and it didn’t seem to, but I was worried enough about reducing the sheen that I decided to minimize erasing as much as possible. I really didn’t want to freehand this, though, as I was terrified I would mess up the spacing.

Bran’s runic layout

Thankfully, Bran had made a layout with the runes that was almost the exact size of the plaque. After discussing with Aurri, I resized it slightly in Procreate to increase the margins so she had more flexibility with attachments when assembling, and then I went old-school carbon-copy-transfer tech: I rubbed the entire back with a pencil, placed it carefully onto the plaque, and then traced over it with a mechanical pencil to transfer the design to the surface.

Since the original runes had fairly regular line weight, being incised, I tried several different tools to paint the runes, including about a dozen different paintbrushes and a tool only known as the dottifier. After some trial and error, I settled on using a crow quill with acrylic paint.

Finished plaque

This was incredibly satisfying to do, and I am quite smug about how well it turned out. I also don’t think I can call myself a baby calligrapher anymore.

The Skirt

Combed wool roving (blended grey) and black locks

I did the initial research and spinning for an Egtved skirt in 2020 (in fact, I kept bugging Kolfinna with info about it as I was researching and spinning for it), but I’ve been stalled on the actual creation process. However, because of this, I was immediately ready to make a small sampler for the scroll! Because I plan to weave a full skirt soon(ish), I’m not going to go particularly in depth in this section.

While I’ve spun a lot of wool in the last two years, I wanted to spin specially for this project, because I knew exactly the wool to use. Pre-pandemic, Kolfinna joined me at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival for her first ever visit, and she fell madly in love with Jacob sheep (and their two-to-six horns on both sexes). I had purchased a Jacob fleece in 2021, and while the fleece was predominately white (to my disappointment), I thought there may be enough to make the cords of the skirt black. Because I wasn’t quite sure how much yardage I would need, I decided to make the woven base out of white wool; it would be hidden anyway, and extend the amount of wool I had.

Aiming for an 8″-wide sample, I estimated the amount of yarn I needed. I then processed an appropriate amount of wool using wool combs borrowed from Lanea (having washed the fleece last year), then spun up the yarn at ~10 WPI on my wheel. While I was worried about yarn chicken, I actually only used about half the yarn I spun for the skirt sample:

Estimate Total Spun Used
White (warp) 8 yards + 1 yard plied 32 yards (7.1 grams) 16 yards
Black (weft & cords) 101 yards 114 yards (127 grams) 62 yards
Grey (twining) 2 yards 14 yards (1.42 grams) <1 yard
The weaving: observe the three loops of black weft (six threads total) per pass of the warp.
The rigged inkle set-up

Time for weaving! The Egtved skirt has an interesting construction, where three loops of weft are pulled through and placed on a peg per pass of the warp; as the weaving progresses, two loops are twisted tightly and then plied together into cords. The amazing fiber artist who reconstructed the skirt originally used pegs clamped to a table instead of a loom (which you can see here), but I don’t have a table where I can set up for a long time. Thus, I rigged a semi-portable set-up. I put the warp on my inkle loom, turned my rigid heddle loom upside-down and clamped a peg to its crossbar, and then sat on the floor with my leg between the inkle and the rigid heddle loom. I kept a ruler nearby to make sure that the peg was always 15″ from the warp (especially important to check after taking a break!). As I progressed in the weaving, I plied the cords together using a hand-cranked plying tool to speed the process. As with the original, I tied the ends of each cord in a half-square knot before carrying on.

Pinning the rings out to equal length in preparation for twining

Once the eight inches were woven, it was time for finishing the bottom of the cords. In the Egtved skirt, the end of each cord has the ends overlapped into a ring, then wrapped with some lightly-felted wool. Instead of combing, I flicked a bunch of white locks, and then threaded the loose locks onto a yarn needle. Using the needle, I threaded the lock through the ends of the loops (to bind them together) before wrapping them around the cords. Instead of wet-felting or friction-felting the ends, I used a modern needle-felting needle (stabby stabby stabby!). Once this was completed, I twined the cords right above these rings with the grey yarn.

Then, I blocked the whole piece. Instead of soaking the piece, I pinned it to the correct length and sprayed it with a squirt bottle, sopping up the extra water with towels. Once it was dry, I wove in all the ends except one, which I left so Aurri could tell the front from the back (as much as there was one).

Finally, I wove in all the ends, and passed it off to Aurri with the calligraphed plaque for assembly.

All the pieces laid out and waiting for assembly (photo courtesy of Aurri)

It truly was a fantastic experience to work on this collaboration with Lanea, Bran, and Aurri; it truly was greater than the sum of its parts. The only thing better was Kolfinna’s reaction when she saw it!

Total 2021 Spinning Yardage

Uh oh.

You know how, in 2020, I spun 5,179 yards, equivalent to nearly 3 miles (or over 6 miles when you account for the plying)?

This year I spun 6,688 total yards, or 11,312 when plying is included. This equals 3.8 miles of yarn and 6.42 miles of actual spinning/plying. And I barely spun between August and December.

The picture contains:

Top row: Corriedale gradient and half the Romney fleece
Bottom left: Brown wool (experiment with spin direction) and a wool/seacell blend
Bottom right: “eco” blend, silk, wool/seacell blend
Far right: wool from spinning speed experiment
Not pictured: the Romney that was dyed with indigo, several skeins that were gifted, a red-gold blend that I immediately threw on a loom and wove trim out of, and a couple skeins that I’m re-setting the twist on.

Wool breeds include Corriedale, merino, and an entire Romney fleece (yes, THAT fleece!). I also dyed slightly more than half of the Romney yarn in indigo. Blends include wool/seacell and a man-made biodegradable “eco” fiber (which was a weird spin). I also spun some silk!

I’m not going to try and surpass this goal for 2022, but I would like to spin up at least two of the fleeces I have in storage, so… we’ll see.

 

 

A Plaid

Singles with penny to show width
(Some of the) skeined yarns

In 2019, I decided I wanted to weave a plaid for the first time, using handspun. I had spun the yarn earlier that year, using some gifted roving in dark brown and cream as well as light brown and green that I purchased from the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. I spun it very finely and ended up with quite a large amount of yarn!

I decided to warp up a twill on my tapestry loom, using it like a two-beam loom.

Read more

Spinning Speed Experiment

Recently, under a context that I don’t remember, I decided I wanted to time myself on my different spindles and wheel. Basically, I knew that I could get roughly the same yarn on all my spindles and wheel, thereby allowing myself to a cut a corner in experimental archaeology by using my wheel instead of a spindle. However, I didn’t have proof.

Here’s the proof.

Wool & Equipment

For this experiment, I used commercially prepared Corriedale top. I chose this so that my fiber’s preparation wouldn’t create an additional variable, as a hand-prepared fleece might. I decided to spin 1 ounce (~28 grams) of Corriedale on each piece of equipment.

The equipment I used was:

  • a top whorl spindle (a one-piece Picasso mini from Bosworth Spindles),
  • a bottom whorl spindle (a “Viking”-style spindle from Feed the Ravens with a separate whorl and shaft),
  • a Turkish spindle (mini from Subterranean Woodworks, no longer producing),
  • a single-drive foot-driven wheel (an Ashford Traditional).

The top and bottom whorl spindles are both the same weight, 24 grams. The Turkish spindle is 19 grams.

Top whorl (left), bottom whorl (middle), Turkish (top right), bobbin from wheel (bottom right)

Time Report

Total time to spin 1 oz. on each equipment was:

  • Top whorl spindle: 64.8 minutes (1 hour, 4.8 minutes)
  • Bottom whorl spindle: 108.67 minutes (1 hour, 48.67 minutes)
  • Turkish spindle: 135.82 minutes ( 2 hours, 15.82 minutes)
  • Wheel: 26.76 minutes

From this, we can see that the wheel is drastically faster than all spindles. At the slowest, the wheel is more than twice as fast as the top whorl spindle (140% faster). The wheel is 277% faster than the bottom whorl spindle, and a whopping 309% faster than the Turkish spindle! All in all, spinning with the wheel is a major time-saver for me, while still providing myself with handspun yarn.

One ounce of yarn on each equipment.

WPI and Yardage

For each test, I also recorded the yardage and wraps per inch (WPI) to determine yarn weight. While I tried to spin roughly the same yarn across the board, I allowed some variance in the yarn because I wanted to see what was different or difficult with each method. Therefore, my final yardage varied somewhat:

  • Top whorl spindle: 104 yards
  • Bottom whorl spindle: 111 yards
  • Turkish spindle: 128 yards
  • Wheel: 103 yards

This indicates that my yarn weight varied slightly on each equipment, with my top whorl- and wheel-spun yarns being approximately the same and my Turkish spindle-spun yarn being lightest.

To determine WPI, I measured at both ends of the yarn as well as a randomly selected part in the middle:

End 1 End 2 Middle Average
Top whorl spindle 32 23 24 26.3
Bottom whorl spindle 27 22 24 24.3
Turkish spindle 27 23 25 25
Wheel 18 20 22 20

One end of the top whorl spindle ended up vastly thinner than the other, but based on the yardage, I believe that this was only at the end, skewing the average WPI. While my WPI varied across each yarn, I was able to get 22-23 WPI at some point for each; therefore, I know that I can get the same yarn with each method, even if my WPI varied across the actual skeins.

Discussion

Overall, I would say that this experiment proved what I intended to demonstrate: that with some effort, I can spin the same yarn on my spindles as my wheel.

I had some additional takeaways:

  • The bottom whorl spindle required more flicking than the other spindles, which increased the overall spin time. With a bottom whorl spindle that spins faster/longer between flicks, I may be able to reduce this spin time.
  • The Turkish spindle took longer to wind on, which increased the spin time.
  • The Turkish spindle was harder to spin heavier on because it was a lighter weight (19 grams, compared to the other two spindles’ 24 grams), resulting in a lighter and longer yarn overall.
  • The wheel wanted to spin slightly heavier, and I neglected to adjust the equipment and my style for this. However, I know that I could achieve the WPI from the other yarns (32 through 24) if I made these adjustments, as I have done so in the past, and I still achieved 22/23 WPI on each yarn during this experiment.

 

Total 2020 Yardage = 5179

In 2020, I spun 5,179 yards.

This is almost, but not quite, everything

Yup. I spun nearly 3 miles of yarn. When accounting for the fact that half the skeins are two-ply, half are singles, and one skein was chain plied, I actually spun 10655 yards, or over six miles. This includes the merino that I spun and used for the madder adventure. Almost all of the yarn is pictured above, excepting a skein that I gifted, and it took up almost half of my bed (I had to stand on a footstool for the picture).

Wool breeds include merino, Dorset horn, Shropshire, Jacob, and some unidentified breeds. Blends included merino/silk and wool/bamboo/silk. A lot of the spinning was from roving, but the entire bottom row in the picture, the madder-dyed merino, and a handful of other skeins were hand-processed from fleece (about half also washed or re-washed by me).

Oh, and this isn’t actually all of 2020 — it’s just what I counted since March.

Honestly, I’m impressed with myself.

Ugly Bands

In 2020, I started inkle weaving what I called “ugly bands.” This is a bit of a joke, as the work is actually quite attractive. However, I named them “ugly bands” because a significant amount of the warp is always yarn that was less-than-attractive in the skein form, whether it was a random color combination from a blending experiment, an uneven spin from a demo, or some chaotic combo of both. I combined these with a solid-colored narrower warp to unify the bands, and they all came out absolutely lovely. In the future, I hope to give these as gifts and largesse.

Spinning Merino

Several years ago, my friend Liz passed a washed merino fleece off to me. During summer 2020, I decided to finish processing it and spin it. The staple was quite short, so I decided to card it into rolags. Carding was a little difficult, because I didn’t have the right density of teeth in my cards, but by the end my rolags were looking pretty nice. I spun the rolags using a short forward draw, because it gave me a lot of control over the really short fibers.

The washed fleece (ignore the See’s candy in the background).

Pretty rolags and singles.

Finished singles.

1272 yards of finished, plied laceweight yarn.

Once the yarn was finished, I decided it was the perfect amount to split into smaller skeins for my madder dyeing adventure (coming soon!).

Spinning for a Vigil Shawl

In addition to sewing Mistress Ysabeau’s Laurel cloak, I spun the wool for her vigil shawl. Ysabeau has made several vigil shawls for other people, so my friend Lucy (Lucy of Wigan) and I decided that we must make Ysabeau her own. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the yarn-in-progress. The wool was off-white merino from Paradise Fibers, and it was an utter delight to spin. Once the yarn was spun up and washed, I threw together a simple triangular shawl pattern, did a tab cast-on, and passed it off to Lucy to knit. Once she was done with her beautiful knitting, we blocked it together.

In-progress picture from Lucy

Finished shawl before blocking

Ready to be presented!