Wool Obsession

In my earlier post on spinning hemp, I showed you my initial progress on spinning singles using a wet spinning method. Now I’ve finished making the yarn and wanted to show you the results.

As you can see, I didn’t do anything fancy here - I just made a standard a two-ply fingering weight yarn, which I’m planning to use for one of the scarf projects in Lisa Lloyd’s new book, A Fine Fleece (click here for a review). However, I’m probably going to end up modifying the pattern slightly to make a thinner scarf, because I don’t have as much yardage as the pattern calls for.

The plying went really fast. Because I only had about a bobbin and a half worth of singles, I took the full bobbin and the partial bobbin, put them on my lazy kate, and plied them from there. Once the partial bobbin was out of yarn, I made a skein out of the resulting two-ply yarn.

Next I took the bobbin that had some yarn remaining and made a center-pull yarn with my nostepinne. Sometimes when I get to this point I’ll just ply directly, grabbing one end from the center and one from the outside, but because I think I overspun the singles slightly, I thought that I might end up with a tangled mess if I did it that way. So instead, I used a method I think I first heard about from this thread on Ravelry (login reqired) - I took both ends together and re-rolled the yarn into a standard, outside-pull ball, which gave me a double-stranded length of yarn that was ready to ply.

After plying that, I took both skeins and boiled them for half an hour on my stove to set the twist. After the skeins cooled, I rolled them in a towel to take out as much water as I could, then I hung them to dry with a hanger hanging from the bottom to weight them slightly.

Although this is a far from perfect yarn, overall I’m pretty pleased considering that it was my first attempt to spin hemp. If anyone has any additional tips about spinning hemp or other bast fibers, I’d love to hear them!

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When choosing a raw wool fleece or other type of animal fiber, one of the things you’ll want to know before you purchase is how soft the fleece is. As anyone who has ever worn a scratchy wool sweater knows, the softness or fineness of a fiber should probably be the #1 consideration if you’re planning to use the yarn you spin for a next to the skin project.

If you are buying your fiber online or by phone, you are at somewhat of a disadvantage when making your choice, since you don’t have the opportunity to put your hands on it and see what it feels like! Fortunately for us, there are some fairly objective measures of a fiber’s fineness. The two you’ll see most frequently are Bradford count (also known as English spinning count) and micron count.

Bradford count is the less objective of these two types of measurement systems. The Bradford system measures the fineness of a fiber by determining the maximum number of 560 yard skeins that can be spun from one pound of combed fiber. So under the Bradford count system, a higher count translates into a finer fleece.

Micron count is a bit more scientific of a measurement. One micron is equal to 1/1000 of a millimeter. This means that if the micron count is being used as the system of measurement, a lower number means a finer fleece. So you can see that it’s important to know if someone is referring to the micron count or the Bradford count when they are describing a fleece.

It’s all well and good to know the definitions of Bradford count and micron count - but you may still be wondering how this translates into how a fleece actually feels to the touch. This might give you some idea:

• Merino wool, which is among the softest breeds of sheep’s wool, generally has a Bradford count of approximately 60-70, and a micron count of about 24-18.
• Blue-faced Leicester, another breed of sheep whose wool is prized by spinners, has a Bradford count of about 56-60, and a micron count of 28-24.
• Navajo-Churro wool is generally on the opposite side of the scale from Merino, with the Bradford count of its outer coat of around 38 and a micron count of approximately 36.
• Alpaca wool, which is well-known for its softness, has a micron count of 27-19.

Now, if you absorbed what I’ve said above, you may have noticed that the micron count of alpaca fiber is comparable to that of merino wool. However, if you’ve felt both fibers yourself, you probably noticed that alpaca feels much softer to the touch, and might be wondering why.

This is where things get slightly more complicated. Although the micron count of alpaca fiber is similar to that of merino, it will generally feel softer because the height of the scales on alpaca fiber is about half that of wool.

If you’d like to learn more about the characteristics of sheep’s wool, I would recommend that you visit Oklahoma State’s web site on sheep breeds, or that you pick up Nola Fournier’s wonderful book on the subject, In Sheep’s Clothing: A Handspinner’s Guide to Wool.

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