About that black wool
After the finish of my technical wool fabric project I have lot of jet black undercoat wool left. Most of the overcoat wool was used up for the project so I can’t use the wool for more samples within that project, and I didn’t really have any plans until a friend of mine mentioned that she prefers machine spun wool over handspun, because handspun is so chunky.
Well, thought I, challenge accepted!
The samples and my preferred spindle, made the same way my grandfather used to make them: With a cut head instead of a metal hook at the top.
These two samples are woven out of the handspun undercoat wool I had laying around. I want to make a bigger piece of cloth but before embarking on a spinning project that will likely take years I wanted to make sure that the yarn was good enough to weave with first! I made one sample with 12 treads/ cm (left) and one sample with 24 threads/cm (right). The binding is a broken diamond twill pattern modeled after textile finds from Birka, Sweden, dated to around 8-900 AD. I am not trying to make an exact reconstruction of any of the finds however. Instead my main goal is to see what I can make, how thin I can go and just to reach the satisfaction of having a handspun and handwoven fabric. Maybe I’ll make a cool t-shirt or something when I’m done?
Have a closeup!
Because I am a nerd for history I tried two different spin directions on the big sample; The warp is all z spun but underneath the white stripe I have woven with a s spun weft. (Does the terminology confuse you? Here, I googled it for you. ) Above the white stripe the weft is also a Z twist. I was expecting there to be a visible difference in the structures of the samples but to my surprise I can’t really tell any difference between them, apart from that the S/Z sample tends to strive towards curling up and the Z/Z does not. If anyone has tried weaving with S/Z single ply yarn and has experiences of a visual effect from that I would love to hear about it!
And here’s the 24 tr/cm sample, with a sewing thread for scale. Even though this is woven out of a soft type of wool the sample is rather tough and dense, as the threads are so thin and tightly packed together. I would love to try weaving another sample with the same thread thickness, but with maybe 16 och 12 threads/ cm. I wonder if I could get a thin and soft fabric that way? But spinning the thin yarn for this sample took a bit too long for me just to make another sample right away, so we’ll see. The yarn for the 12 tr/cm sample is about double thickness, and a bit more reasonable to spin a big batch of, so I will settle for that. My plan now is to handspin all the black undercoat wool I have left to a Z spin single ply yarn, and then weave a cloth from it. It’s going to take a really long time to spin but I’m going to enjoy every minute of it!