For the past couple of years I’ve been thinking about writing a book. About spinning. Because I have so many questions and I want to take readers on a trip with me to find the answers. Writing a book feels very daunting so I’ve decided to take it in pieces, starting with blog posts, and starting with this one today, which is why it is titled with the number “1”. There will be many more of these spinning experiment posts, put into a separate category on the blog called “Experimental Spinning” so as not to confuse it with just every day normal spinning. 🙂
I’ve already got many topics outlined and summarized like chapters in a book and I hope that they will fit nicely into blog posts. Otherwise I’ll chop them up to fit.
The format for each topic will be the same: Subject, Hypothesis, Methods, Testing, Results, Conclusion. For anyone who has taken science classes in school this should look familiar. It’s a way to structure this work and make it easy for someone else to follow the steps and see if they get the same results, or to modify the experiments to test a similar hypothesis. I hope this will make sense as we go down this road together, my readers and I.
OK, now that I’ve set the scene…
Experiment 1 – Effects of multiple numbers of plies on color and texture
Hypothesis – 3-ply yarn is the best for knitting/crochet. It is round and bouncy. Colors play well together in 3’s. 2-ply is less round, 4-ply is ropey and 5-ply even worse. More than 3-plies in multiple colors is just not pleasing to the eye. Therefore, 3-ply is the best yarn to make when planning to make garments from spun yarn.
Methods – As you can see from the photo above, I have 5 similar colors of fiber. This is Corriedale that I bought from World of Wool (WoW) in the UK. The colors range from dark to light, blue-ish to red-ish and a basic purple. All of the colors are listed in the “purple” category by WoW.
Create 4 yarns, from 5-ply to 2-ply.
1. Create 5-ply yarn: Spin 5 x 10g bobbins, 1 of each color, as lace weight, and ply them together. Wash and set the yarn. Look at the yarn created and choose the 1 color that stands out and remove it from the next round of spinning.
2. Create 4-ply yarn: Spin 4 x 10g bobbins of the 4 remaining colors and ply them together. (I chose to remove the lightest color from this round, using purple, red-ish, blue-ish and darkest colors.) Repeat the washing, setting, reviewing and deciding which stand out color to remove for the next round.
3. Create 3-ply yarn: Repeat step 2 for the 3-ply spin. Spin a little thicker single to try to keep the total grist the same. (I chose to remove the blue-ish color from this round, using purple, red-ish and darkest colors.)
4. Create 2-ply yarn: Repeat step 3 for the 2-ply spin. (I chose to remove the darkest color from this round, leaving the purple and red-ish colors.)
At the end of these steps there should be 4 skeins of yarn, a 5-ply, 4-ply, 3-ply, 2-ply, all different combinations of colors, as close to the same grist as possible.
Testing – The best way to test the results of the method is to knit swatches of each yarn. The photo below shows the swatches from 2-ply on above, to 5-ply at the bottom of the photo. I used size US4/3.5mm needles for all the swatches. Each one measures about 6″ x 5.5″ (15 x 14cm). They were all knit: CO 32 sts; knit 4 rows; (seed st 4 sts, stockinette for 24 sts, seed st 4 sts) for 4″/10cm; knit 4 rows; bind off. Weave in ends and steam block.
You can see that from the 5-ply I removed the lightest color. From the 4-ply I removed the blue-ish color. From the 3-ply I removed the darkest color. What remained in the 2-ply was the purple and red-ish colors.
While I knit the swatches I developed a ranking/testing method that will hopefully show the “winner” of this test and whether or not the winner is the 3-ply that I hypothesized it would be. There are 8 categories and each one will be ranked from 1-5, 5 being best.
| Test | 5-ply | 4-ply | 3-ply | 2-ply |
| ease of spinning | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| enjoyment of spinning | 2 | 3 | 5 | 5 |
| efficiency of spinning | 1 | 2 | 4 | 5 |
| pleasing color result | 3 | 4 | 5 | 4 |
| enjoyment of knitting | 3 | 4 | 5 | 3 |
| ease of knitting | 3 | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| hand of fabric | 3 | 5 | 5 | 3 |
| visually pleasing fabric | 2 | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| TOTAL | 19 | 31 | 38 | 33 |
Below are close up photos of the swatches, from 5-ply to 2-ply.
Conclusion – Obviously this is not empirical testing and the results are subjective. These are my opinions about my own spinning and knitting and color choices. According to the ratings, the hypothesis holds and 3-ply is the best yarn for knitted fabric and mixed colors (of similar hue).
What surprised me? I was surprised by how nice the 4-ply yarn is. I think that apart from the extra time to spin an extra bobbin (as compared to 3-ply), it would have rated right up there with 3-ply yarn. It is NOT ropey, but still soft and bouncy and the chosen colors look nice together. It is not too busy in my opinion.
An observation about the 5-ply yarn – I found that it felt ropey in my hands and the yarn was kind of splitty, meaning that it was easy to split it with your needle while trying to knit. If you have ever knit with Wolmeise sock yarn, you know what I mean. That yarn is 6 plies of wool, however it is so ropey that it feels almost like cotton. Based on that yarn knitting experience, and this spinning experiment, I am coming to the conclusion that anything more than 4 plies is probably not going to be bouncy and lofty.
An observation about 2-ply yarn – The 2-ply yarn is rated so highly in the testing mainly because it is very efficient and easy to make. If I were to give a weighting factor to the table, I would weight the resulting fabric higher than efficiency (I’m spinning for myself after all, not for money) and maybe the 4-ply would have come out with a higher ranking than the 2-ply. The 2-ply fabric is nice, but not as bouncy and kind of boring in the depth of color. I also made a 2-ply using the darkest and lightest colors together to see what that would look like (bonus testing) and it’s really your typical marled effect.
In summary, if you are looking for fabric with nice depth of color and nice round crisp stitches, go for 3-ply. If you are just a little more adventurous, try a 4-ply.
Want to play along with my spinning experiments? Please do! I hope to share an experiment per month or two. I’m starting with the most simple and moving on to more and more complex. Next up – Experimental Spinning 2 – Plying the Color Wheel.
Here are some more photos of Experiment 1 results. Enjoy and til next time!
Under Dutch Skies 