Guest blog by Jodi Meadows
An epic adventure of socks and spindles and fanciness
Part one: THE YARNING
by Jodi Meadows, aged twenty-six and three and a half months
For years, I have loved yarn. It’s so soft, and it does these crazy things when you stab it with needles, or hang it with crochet hooks. Yarn violence has been a big part of my life since I was fourteen and my mom gave me my first crochet hook. (Okay, there was a pause for things like school, work, getting married, but eventually I did rediscover my love for yarn.) I made blanket after blanket with my crochet hooks, foisted my hobby on various friends, and a few years ago, one friend and I made a pact to learn how to knit.
We bought the same how-to book, which came with the same needles and notions*, and even the same kind of yarn to practice on. She dropped out early (slacker!), but I immediately learned the most difficult ways to do things, became frustrated and yelled at things, and then learned the easier and more efficient ways. I didn’t understand basic things like why stockinette stitch curls**, but I knew I liked knitting. And you know what else I like?
Socks.
You know what knitting was made for?
Socks.
Okay, so it was probably made for a lot of other things, and I hear you can knit things like sweaters and shawls and whatever, but….socks. Right?
It was at this point I discovered real yarn stores that sold actual wool yarn. Not the scratchy stuff you can find in mmmphthfff big chain stores, or acrylic (plastic!) yarn. Real wool. Nice wool. From sheep! There was silk, wool and silk put together to make a SUPER YARN, cotton, llama, alpaca, cashmere, angora, and blends of all manner of wonderful soft fibers.
And then I saw it. A light shone down from Heaven, angels sang the Hallelujah Chorus, and my husband clutched his wallet and gave a manly whimper.
Shelf after shelf of glorious, cheerful-colored sock yarn. Yarn made specifically for socks. Because there are more people like me who think knitting is made for socks. Sisters. Brothers. (But usually sisters.) I have found you at last.
Fast forward a year and dozens of socks later. I joined a web community called Ravelry (www.ravelry.com), widely known as a bastion of enablement, and this is where I learned that some people make their own yarn. With spinning wheels. And spindles. Some of them (gasp!) even have sheep and make wool yarn from their sheep’s hair. So I said to anyone who would listen that I wanted to learn how to spin, and lo, my mother listened and sent me a kit for my twenty-fifth birthday. (At which point my bank account, sensing its demise, shuddered and tried to think of happier days when my hobbies were less expensive and/or non-existent.)
This is where things get complicated, and not just because of my obsessions with fiber and pretty tools and so on, but because my original version of this post was miles shorter, but Robin (hi, Robin!) wanted more. Lots more. She had many questions, and, knowing how I feel about yarn, probably realized I would be happy with complicated. (She totally planned this. Again, she proves why she is the BRIGHT PINK HELLGODDESS.*)
Ahem. So. As you can see above, I had a spindle. And some wool. And by golly, I was going to learn to spin.
For the next part of our adventure, there are a few things you’ll need to know about the construction of yarn. Here’s a brief tour:
1. Yarn is simply fibers twisted together. You can make it out of most anything fibrous — hair, wool, cat fur, dryer lint — though, as with most things, your final product depends a lot on what you start with. Dryer lint yarn won’t be very nice. *g*
2. Wool (and other protein fibers, but we’ll talk about wool for now) has scales that lock together nicely when you twist them. They grab each other and stick, so when you twist the wool into yarn, then try to pull it apart, it’s much more difficult than if the fibers weren’t twisted. You can try it with your hair. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
3. When you spin yarn, either on a spindle or wheel, you spin something called a single. It’s just one strand of twisted fiber.
4. You can knit/crochet/weave singles if you like, and there are good reasons to do it, but because because you’ve twisted the fiber all in one direction, whatever you make from your single will tilt in that direction.
5. To balance your yarn so it doesn’t tilt when you use it, you’ll take another single (or several other singles, depending on what you want), and ply them.
6. Plying is simply two or more singles put together. And remember how much stronger twisted fibers are than loose fibers? Same thing for plied yarn. The singles are spun together, and just like the first time spinning, the scales lock together, and the whole thing becomes much stronger.
Visual aids:
This isn’t as easy to see as I’d like, but here you can see the twisted fibers. See how they’re all turned one direction? That’s a single.
And in this photo, you can see two singles twisted around each other, sort of like a rope. (Though I assure you that ropes are entirely different things. I’m not sure exactly how, but I promise they are.)
To sum up: First you spin the singles, then you ply them together. Plying doesn’t take as much time as the spinning, but for many, it’s not nearly as exciting. Some might even call it dull. (Then you photograph the finished project and keep it as a pet.)
Generally, the more plies you have, the stronger your yarn will be. And the rounder. Two-ply yarn (two singles stuck together) is flat-ish, but three is rounder, and four is even rounder than that. Flat yarn is good for things like lace, and round yarn is good for things that might take a lot of abuse, such as, ahem, socks.
I should also mention that, like things in English don’t necessarily mean the same thing in other versions of English, saying things like “four-ply” and “two-ply” don’t mean the same thing in all worlds. When I use the terms, I mean the number of singles stuck together in the final yarn. Other people may be more familiar with them describing the thickness of the final yarn, regardless of the actual number of singles involved.***
TO BE CONTINUED……….
* * *
*I have no idea why they call these things notions, but all that means is knitting stuff. Stitch counters, stitch markers, little doodads to stick on the end of your needles so stitches don’t fall off. Stuff, as I said. You don’t need all of it, but sometimes it’s pretty. Too pretty to resist.
**Stockinette is the basic knit stitch you think of, row after row of vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv. The front (right side) is made of knit stitches. The back (wrong side — but it feel so right, it can’t be wrong!) is made of purls, which look like ridges. Here’s the trick I didn’t get at first: they’re the same stitch, just backward. A knit is only a knit on the side you’re looking at. On the other side, it’s totally a purl. If you knit on one side, come to the end of a row and turn the work over (as you do), then start your purls, you’re making knits on the other side. The other side is going to look like this:
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
And the back side will look like this:
==================
==================
==================
The Vs are called stockinette stitch, and stockinette curls because the knits and the purls — in spite of being the same thing, just the opposite sides — are different widths. So it curls because that’s what uneven widthy things do.
It took me forever to figure that out.
***A long, long time ago, or so I hear, giant spinning mills usually just spun one size single. Little. To make thicker yarns, they’d add more singles during the plying process. So, for sock yarn, they might use four plies. For thicker yarn, they’d use eight. For ridiculously thick yarn, ten, or twelve. In those days, the number of plies was used to describe the thickness of the yarn.
Now, though, mills can spin singles all different sizes, so “four-ply” sock yarn might only have three plies. Or it might have six.
* I have added the bright pinkness. I have no idea why Jodi failed to add the bright pinkness. Some terrible oversight evidently. –Ed/hellgoddess
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