Trenchwork

The entire purpose for this spin was to master the mechanics of chain plying. Note the word choice here. This is a case of figuring out how things function rather than polishing technique. The only way I’ll get particularly good at this will be to practice, but at least I understand how it’s supposed to work. I’ve also realized I’m simply not coordinated enough to do this on a drop spindle. At least, not yet. Chain plying on a wheel which responds to start-stop foot commands is an entirely different world of spinning.

The Stats:

Fiber: Black-white wool roving from The Sheep Shed Studio.
Finished Weight: just a hair over a pound.
Yardage: ca 268 yards, thick-thin, chain plied.
WPI: 6-8 chunky.
Spun on: Rose.

The Lessons.

It took time for me to re-acclimate to a “sticky” fiber (as opposed to slippery alpaca or merino silk and tencel blends). Likewise, the black wanted to hold together a bit more than did the white. Once drafted, however, the roving has a very nice feel to it. I realized fairly quickly that it preferred to be a loftier and thicker yarn than I’ve been spinning, and that it feels a bit hard when it’s spun thin. Since I was less concerned with the spinning than with the plying, I opted to NOT focus on consistency for a change and just span the singles in general fingering weight, working more toward softness. However, in my attempts to keep it fairly soft, I find I’ve underspun a few places; I actually had a single separate when I was pulling on it to ply, and that hasn’t happened since my first test spin. Likewise, those sections bloomed more in the plying and setting processes than they should have, but the three-strand ply holds everything together.

Since the goal for this entire spin was to ply, I spent my energies there rather than in the earlier stages. Getting started was actually the toughest part of chain plying for me. Specifically, once you tie that first knot and have your loop, what do you do next? It took me a little while before I figured out that the key here is to turn the loop so that the knot is next to the leader, closest to the wheel, rather than near me—where it is immediately after I’ve tied the knot. I’d been sacrificing that first tiny bit of yarn and actually starting the plying process in a second loop. There’s no need for that: Just turn the first loop so that the knot (and therefore the loose end leading away to your ball of singles) is closest to the wheel.

Sometimes learning really IS a collection of Simpson’s moments.

I switched the Rose back to the normal (slower) whorl for this exercise in order to force myself to slow down, and going slow really IS the key here. Holding the loop and leading single so that I had the three strands side by side before I let the twist in—that little bit I’d figured out last time—really did prove true. As long as I controlled those three strands, then I controlled the rest of the ply. However, this is also where my shortsightedness about those singles came into play. If I’d underspun the single, then getting that tiny segment balanced properly was much tougher. The other two strands did attempt to balance and compensate, but the yarn would have been markedly better had I taken time to spin a consistent and even single instead of being so focused on what I wanted to do with it. The moral of the story here is that buggery old cliche: What you get out of something depends on what you put into it.

That little personal *headdesk* moment aside, it was easy to get into a rhythm with the chaining process, and once I figured out how much spin needed to go into each section, I focused on the connecting knots. Here again, I’ve sabotaged myself by not working for a consistent single, but I’ve realized that chain plying probably won’t work very well with a true thick-thin yarn. It’s too easy to end up with a thick spot at the point where the loops join, and how one could hide that join in the plied yarn escapes me at the moment. My sense is that you would instead stagger the joins so that you were joining in a thin rather than thick space. However, if the single is a consistent thickness, then the join “fits” into the surrounding plied yarn. I worked with that in the more even spaces and am still not entirely certain about the best way to handle it. I pinched back the twist before the bottom join, then when I’d built up enough spin, blocked the twist away from the top of the loop (the next join) and released the spin into the interval. If I let the twist travel up with my hand rather than just releasing into the section, I could “smooth out” the join a bit as I went. If I released the twist into the section sort of all at once by slowly releasing the pinch until I was no longer blocking it, there was an occasional “wrapping” around, but no noticeable difference otherwise. Either way, I found I could roll the join a tiny bit between my fingers and further smooth it into the surrounding yarn while it was gathering twist.

What really interests me is that aside from the places where I had a thick single in a join or an underspun single, I have trouble finding those joins now that the twist has been set. If I run a length through my fingers, I can find some of those places, but the rest seem to melt into the surrounding bumpy landscape of the plying twists. How very, very cool is that?? It’s certainly not because I’ve done a stellar job of spinning and plying here, so it must be part of the normal function of this particular ply method.

Final thoughts. I liked this method of plying. Interestingly, I think I prefer the texture of the three-strand ply a bit better, but I know I’m comparing apples and oranges since the yarns themselves are radically different. I will, however, do this again, and probably sooner rather than later. As for this particular yarn . . . well, it’s not even, and not prettily spun. It’s incredibly well balanced despite itself. Working with a two-color fiber really helped me figure out how the twist and ply worked, and the resulting yarn is surprisingly soft. But since it’s not soft enough for *me* to wear (a spinner who’s sensitive to wools, isn’t that clever?) and there’s not enough for a piece of outer clothing, it’s going to get felted into a nifty bag of some sort. With that salt-and-pepper color, I should get a very cool heathered fabric. Now, what bag . . . ?