What do I want my sweater to feel like? Sturdy and windproof, or soft and snuggly? Or somewhere in-between?
It shouldn't be too soft. I once bought a lambswool sweater, and wore it out at the elbows in six weeks. When I took it back to complain, the manageress told me that 30 wears was pretty much the expected life of a lambswool sweater. I want at least 200 wears, so I think I need to make it from fibre that's at least 24 microns thick, processed and spun in a way to keep the fibres fairly parallel.
This would mean using a fairly soft fleece of at least average staple length. If you remember my prismatic fleece grading system (PFGS) this corresponds to indigo. I dug through my buckets and pulled out several bags colour-coded indigo. I pulled out several handfuls of each fleece and put them all together in a big box. Now to find out if they can all be prepped and spun up together to form the kind of sweater yarn I want.
After some research on the internet I concluded that the best equipment for combing fine fleece, of about 4 inch staple length, would be fine hand combs like the Valkyrie extra-fine wool combs, and if I owned a pair, these are what I would be using. Sadly, these are beyond my budget. What have I got that will do a good enough job?
I have carders, a flick carder, some Afro combs and a selection of dog combs.
The carders don't pull out the vegetable matter or the short fibres, and however I used them I couldn't get the fibres parallel enough for my liking. However I spun carder prep, the result was fluffy and in a jumper I feared it would result in pilling.
The dog combs are a good choice for short or very fine fibres which are difficult to process with my other tools. However, it is easy to grip them too hard and end up with aching hands. After a few tries I put them to one side, reminding myself to try them on a fine Shetland fleece I have in the loft.
The flick carder works well on staples that are at least 4 inches long, and produces a very fluffy pile of fibres that are very easy to disarrange. Once your pile of fibre is disarranged you end up with a "cloud" of fibre, that you can't spin shortdraw. Again, the result is fluffy yarn that I don't think will be very hard-wearing.
The Afro combs do a good job on well-defined locks about 3 to 5 inches long. The resulting sliver (or maybe it's called roving) is not as well-organised as properly combed and dizzed top, but you get rid of some of the shorter fibres and most of the vegetable matter, and the resulting sliver / roving can be pulled out and coiled round to make neat little nests. Best of all, I can comb comfortably sitting at a table watching a horror movie on my laptop. I therefore decided to prepare my kilogramme or so of fibre using Afro combs, and I returned to the loft all fleeces that refused to submit to Afro combing.
So now I had a big box of Afro combed "nests". The big box was important because I was mixing up several different fleeces, and wanted to mix them evenly. The box contains about 200g of nests, which is about 120 nests or about 3 films' worth of combing. As long as I stirred the nests around every day or so, that's quite a good randomiser. I planned to add in more mixing up at the plying stage (see next post).
How to spin these nests? They weren't prepared well enough for a true worsted short forward draw. There were patches of short fibres which drafted and spun unevenly. There were even some neps and noils left that I had to stop to pick out. A short backward draw seemed to work the best, with just a little twist entering the drafting zone, and a little smoothing of the fibres with the forward hand. This produced a yarn with just a little fuzz. I used a whorl with a ratio of 18:1 and aimed for the lower end of my default singles diameter, which is about 30 WPI. I planned to 3 ply this later, which should help even out the thick and thin bits in the singles, even if it gave me a worsted weight rather than double knitting yarn.
As I spun I applied the ankle test to the yarn. You have already heard of the bra test, and the boxer shorts test (since discontinued) for unspun fibre? Well, the ankle test works as follows. Take a length of singles off the bobbin, ply it the way you plan to ply for the project, and tie it around your ankle. If, when you next have a bath or shower, you discover it round your ankle and wonder what it is doing there, then it passes the test - it is soft and not itchy. It is advisable to perform this test as well as the bra test, because the way you spin your fibre can affect the feel of the finished yarn.
If my yarn had failed the sock test I would have tried combing it more carefully, spinning it with a short forward draw, or more probably started all over again with softer fleece. I could have bought commercially combed top. I might even have had to buy the minicombs. Sadly...er, I mean happily, it passed the test first time. The Afro combs worked well enough for this yarn.
Next post: storing the singles and plying.
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