Back to the Coopworth
I’ve gotten back to work on the Coopworth fleece. Remember, it’s the first fleece I ever bought. It’s the first wool I ever washed, it’s the first fiber I ever processed myself, and it also outweighs my next largest spinning project by, oh, four and a half pounds.
Here’s what I’ve been up to:
Washed fleece is thrown into plastic bags. Some bags contain better wool than others, though I didn’t sort the fleece other than “this part looks yucky, I’m not going to wash it with the nice stuff.” Since I don’t know what to do with the different parts of the fleece, I’ve been combining it …
… in the combing process. Those are two-pitch Valkyrie mini-combs. On each pass, I fill the combs about a quarter of the way with locks, shorn end to the back. Every once in a while, I throw in a yucky lock or two. Consider this: in the finished yarn, you can’t tell that that stuff’s in there, and I wasn’t left with a bag full of short, coarse, black junk.
(That piece of purple fabric in the background, by the way, is the remains of my first rigid heddle project. Since I needed the table space, and I didn’t like how the weaving was turning out, I decided to just cut it off the loom and call it a learning experience. I use it to protect my lap from VM.)
As I pull finished top off the combs, I wrap it into a little birdsnest and throw it in another plastic bag. Once I have a full bag, I move over to the wheel.
I’m spinning the singles with a short forward draft at the Lendrum’s middle ratio. They’re 22-24 wpi with a 27 degree twist angle.
Thanks to a little bit of masking tape, each bobbin is numbered and labeled with its weight. Once I have six bobbins done (enough for two rounds of three-ply), I re-weigh to see how much I ended up spinning onto each one. I then ply together the ones with the closest weights.
Since these bobbins have been sitting a while, I check for balance by looking at the slant of the fibers.
After plying, I wind off onto a niddy-noddy. It gets to be pretty full, as you can see — that Lendrum bulky bobbin can hold a ton of yarn.
To find out how many yards I have, I count wraps as I wind on the niddy — I count up to 25, make a hash mark on a handy piece of paper, and repeat.
After the skein’s off the niddy, I weigh it and label it. (If you fold a tab of masking tape over a lease tie, and write a number on it with permanent marker, you have a label that won’t come off when you’re setting the twist, and is still usable in the dye bath.)
Next, I enter the niddy wraps and the weight into an Excel spreadsheet to determine the total yardage and grist. (To find yardage, multiply the number of niddy wraps by the length of each wrap; to find grist, multiply the yardage by 16, then divide by the skein weight in ounces.)
Now would be the time to set the twist, but I’m planning to wait until all the skeins are done.
Voila!
