I thought I’d share my latest spinning and plying attempts.
I’ve tried plying straight from two spindles. That worked ok. I tried winding off two spindles onto one spindle then spinning that together. That didn’t work so well because when one of the singles broke and I wanted to fix it by overlapping it… well, the lengths got uneven.
So I thought I’d try winding off onto two balls and spinning from those. I wound around some spare whorls I don’t use as they’re too large. They worked well as I didn’t have that much wool to wind off.
Then I spun these together. I used a drop spindle because I’m told drop spinning is faster. Well, nope. I even was getting a real fast sin off my thy but I still had to hang around waiting for stuff to spin. Maybe it was no slower than using a hand spindle but there was more waiting around for sure.
Then I went to take the plied thread from my drop spindle to my niddy noddy. Well, didn’t work to well. Normally I just slip the whorl off and it’s all good but because it was a modern drop spindle I couldn’t take the whorl off and the HUGE whorl was just getting in the way. So I slipped the cop off the spindle and onto one of my hand spindles (with no whorl on).
Well, my spindle was narrower than the drop spindle and I was worried things would get tangled so I wound this all off AGAIN onto a whorl then wound it on my niddy noddy.
When it came off it had less energy than my first wool attempt but more than my second.
I washed it and hung it up to dry without weighting it. The excess twist settled in the wash (unlike with my first attempt) and overall I’m quite pleased with it.
(most recent attempt on right, first on far left)
What I have to work on now is deciding how thick I want my thread and spinning at that thickness. I’ve just been spinning as easy as I can and as the cop gets heavier switching to a lighter whorl or no whorl at all. This means that there’s a fair bit of unevenness in the thread. If I set a thicnkess (and make a sample to refer to while spinning) then I think this will help me spin more evenly.
15thcenturyspinning 