Cold! and Spinning Geekiness

[altivo]

I think perhaps the coldest it has been here in a year. Fortunately, it isn't supposed to last. We should get a slight warming trend and a little more snow as soon as this afternoon. The indoor humidity is down to 29% so we are going to have to do something about that ASAP.

An interesting breakthrough last night, probably meaningless to most but I record it in case I ever wonder myself just when it happened. Hand spindles are commonly made in two basic designs: bottom whorl and top whorl (there are some other variants, but these account for 99% or more.) That is, the weight that drives the inertial rotation is either located at the bottom of the shaft or at the top. In the last ten to fifteen years, handspinners in the US have begun to show overwhelming favor to the top weighted design, which is more common in Eastern Europe and Asia, rather than the bottom weight which is the common style of Western Europe and the Americas, at least historically.

I've never been a great fan of either type, and found I could spin so much more efficiently on a spinning wheel that as soon as I got a wheel, I never looked back. However, as part of the study group I'm in now, proficient use of a hand spindle should be expected. Consequently I purchased one of each design last fall and then hid them so I wouldn't have to think about it. This week I pulled them out and began playing with them, using wool from our own flock of sheep here.

I started with the bottom whorl design, a Turkish spindle (Jenkins) with some heft to it, since I've always found the bottom whorl to be more stable and reliable. This is a primitive design in some respects, lacking even a hook, though the cleverness of the Turkish spindle is such that the finished yarn comes off already wound into a center pull ball. To my surprise, I got it working pretty quickly. Over the last couple of days, mostly on my lunch time at work, I have amassed a respectable little ball of fine yarn, fingering weight or so, and it looks quite usable.

Last night, with the same wool, I pulled out the top whorl (a 50 gram Kundert.) These have always seemed inherently wrong to me, prone to wobble and out of balance because of the design. By some accident, though, I got it to work this time. The issue for me, apparently, was speed. I have a general preference for slower twist, even on the spinning wheel. It seems that you must start these at a high rotation, and then they develop a gyroscopic stability. Soon I was whizzing along at high speed, cranking out yards of woolen thread. High speed + light weight spindle ==> thin yarn. I suspect this breakthrough was possible because of a sequence of accidents, starting with leaving the high speed whorl on my spinning wheel when spinning wool on Saturday (I had been using it for hemp and cotton, and would normally have reduced the ratio before switching to wool) and finding that I could in fact work at that rate with this particular fleece.

So now I can spin on either top or bottom whorl spindle, though I still can't say I feel a preference for the top whorl. It has obvious advantages in the production of finer yarns, and some edge in the speed with which completed yarn can be "wound on" but still must yield to the bottom whorl in terms of practicality for heavier yarns and probably plying.

Comments

[dongstyle-ltd.livejournal.com]

It is commonly said that the greatest discoveries in human history were done by accident :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

True. The odd thing is, I've watched dozens of people spin with these, always at a high velocity, and never made the connection. Moreover, many people have watched me try and fail to get them to work well, and no one said "I think you have to rotate it faster than that."

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

Dude, I comiserate about the c-c-cold.

As for the spindle yarning it does
make a kind of sense to me, from an intuitive
viewpoint, that the top spindle would work
faster, even if it was wobbly. Things that
spin tend to (in my experience) want to
throw off things at the top easier than
at the bottom. I dunno, but I'm glad it
works for you.

Now I have to find "You Spin Me Right Round".

DOH!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually the question of faster production (more yards per hour) is separate from the question of rotational velocity. The faster RPMs stabilize the spindle, which wants to flop around otherwise because it is top-heavy and not very aerodynamic in most cases. The higher production rate, though, has to do with how you handle the yarn you produce. The setup of the top whorl spindle makes it easier to stop, wind up the finished yarn, and start again. Doing so with a bottom whorl is, of necessity, more cumbersome. That could probably be addressed, but no one has done so as far as I can tell.

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

Its why industry became our norm.

*goes out in the snow and tends to the
animals and lets you worry about the
spindles*

^_^

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

*eyes the spun yarn with glittering eyes and a twitching tail*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*tosses a ball of wool fluff for you to play with instead*

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

*attacks the wool fluff in a frenzy, wool bits go everywhere*