I want to knit myself a sweater so badly: a real, hand-spun, hand-knitted, all British wool sweater. It's one of the reasons I learned to spin, eighteen months ago, and I still haven't done it yet.
I've spun for countless hats, neckwarmers, mittens and even a number of children's jumpers. But to spin for an adult jumper has always been too hard. What makes spinning for one jumper harder than spinning for a dozen hats? Well, it turns out that it is quite hard to spin that much wool evenly and consistently. You need quality control and you need to be organised.
When I started buying fleeces I bought whatever looked pretty and fluffy on eBay. The fleeces looked big enough to make a whole sheep-cozy. I washed them all lovingly (felting a few along the way), dried them (unevenly, a few got musty and moldy in storage) and stored them in buckets up the loft.
Over the next year or so I opened the buckets periodically, threw out any fleece that smelled funny, pulled out handfuls that looked nice and spun them. The bits of fleeces that remained got pulled about and mixed up like ingredients in a great big Christmas pudding, so that if I had ever known which fleece was which to start with, after a year I didn't any more.
If you are looking to knit just a hat, you can simply open a bucket of fleece at random and pull out a few handfuls of fibre to process and spin. Hats weigh about 100g, and if you can't find at least 100g of nice fleece in a bucket, you have seriously screwed up along the way.
An adult's jumper on the other hand, a thick double-knitted, oversized, "it's a sack made out of wool with sleeves added" sort of jumper, can weigh nearly a kilogramme. Adding in a generous allowance for wastage you want about 1.5kg of fleece. And here's something I learned the hard way: the fleece must all look the same (crimp, staple length, colour) and feel the same (handle and strength) ot ir just won't spin up the same.
A year ago I thought I knew it all. I had worked out you needed to allow 1.5 kg of fleece for a jumper, so I bought raw fleeces that weighed more than 1.5kg. I realised that dirt, twigs, lanolin and sheep sweat all weighed quite a bit, so I look for fleeces that weighed at least 2.5kg. One large fleece = one large jumper, right? What could possibly go wrong?
As it turned out, many things can and did go wrong.The first problem was in the quality of the fibre itself.
Firstly, the fleeces I bought were far, far too coarse to make comfy sweaters. Leicester long wool, Herdwick (don't laugh, I was young and naive) and Oxford down, all produce lovely big fleeces and spin into nice worsted yarns but you wouldn't want them against your skin. After consulting a fleece guide I bought a Dorset downs shearling fleece and found parts of that were too rough to wear against the skin. Maybe some Dorset downs sheep produce soft wool, but this one hadn't. Perhaps it hadn't read the fleece guide.
Secondly, I hadn't realised how much the fibre quality can vary within an individual fleece. I have a Cambridge fleece, the back and hind quarters of which feel as rough as a kitchen scrubber, yet the shoulder wool is soft and fine enough for a scarf. Unfortunately, I haven't learned to tell the fleece quality until the fleece is washed, by which time I have usually mixed up my fleeces until I don't know which is which.
I needed a method for grading the softness of washed fleece, which did not depend on knowing any details about the breed or age of the sheep. I explained my trouble to my quality control superviser (aged eight and three quarters) and he thought about it.
"You need a standard of softness, Mum," he said. "How about the CN (comfiness number)? 100 CNs is so soft and snuggly that you can fall asleep snuggling it. 0 CNs is as rough as sandpaper."
For a small fee (a tongue-painter lollipop) he agreed to sort through my fleece stash and grade my fleeces. It turned out, most were only about 70 CNs, which he explained, was rough and itchy next to the skin. 80 CNs was the minimum for socks, 90 CNs for next-to-the-skin jumpers and neckwarmers.
With the CN system in place, the next step was to devise a standard system for sorting and labelling fibre. After some discussion we agreed on a colour coded system, Example breeds given are based on actual fleeces in my stash.
Red = 50 CNs or lower, fit only for carpets. e.g. Herwick and Leicester long wool
Orange = mountain and hill breeds mainly 50 - 60 CNs, fit for rugs and rough blankets. e.g. Oxford, Cambridge
Yellow = 60 - 70 CNs, fine enough to spin worsted for sturdy sweaters and shawls e.g. Romney lamb
Green = 70 - 80 CNs, can spin semi-worsted for sturdy kids' sweaters e.g. Dorset down
Blue = 80 - 90 CNs, The lower end of the next-to-the-skin soft range. Spin woollen for comfy sweaters. e.g. Shetland.
Indigo: as blue but longer staple and strong staples, can comb and spin worsted for socks. Eg the finer parts of the Romney lamb
Purple = 90 - 100 CNs, luxury yarns such as alpaca, spin woollen for snuggly shawls.
I got all my fleece buckets down from the loft and colour-coded them by tying wool around the handles. Then, one by one, I got the fleeces out. I examined them and felt them carefully.
I used the bra test to sort out the blue / indigo fleeces from the green ones. If you don't already know it, the bra test is a very useful way to test for next-to-the-skin softness in fleece: put a lock in your bra and if by the end of the day you have forgotten it was there, then it's soft enough for next to the skin wear. Since my quality controller does not wear a bra, I have to perform the tests myself. I thought of devising a boxer shorts test, but decided it would end up with wool going down the loo, causing all sorts of plumbing problems and invalidating the test results.
Having finally a means of distinguishing the softness of fleeces, I was astonished to learn how much the fibre can vary across an individual fleece. I found patches of blue and indigo fibre on otherwise orange fleeces, and vice versa. I also found that a lot of the fleeces I bought which from the breed description ought to be blue quality, in fact were green. So much for believing everything you read in books.
Having sorted the fleece out into pillowcases (of which I have a large collection, thanks to jumble sales) I had to label the pillowcases. I pinned on labels giving the breed and date of purchase (where I could remember it), the type (downs, long etc) and colour code. For good measure I tied the bags with colour-coded wool, then put the colour-coded bags into colour-coded buckets. That means that a bucket now contains, not one individual fleece (as before) but parts of two or three different fleeces. However they are parts of similar quality, and, as long as I keep the lustre wools separate from the downs wools (low crimp vs high crimp), they should spin up in a similar manner.
The next matter to address was the design, which will form the next post.
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