Now I'm one of those people who have a very limited range of thickness when spinning. And (unfortunately for this purpose) it is rather on the fine side. So I ended up with two very different-sized balls of yarn; I wound them off today and weighed them with my letter scales.
The "Thick Yarn" weighs in at about 8 g for one hour's spinning time. It is pretty uneven, in spite of my trying oh-so-hard to spin a decently smooth and even yarn. Thick stuff is just not for me. Here you see the sorry results of my thick-spinning:
Beside the huge (haha), bulky and uneven ball of thick yarn, you can see what I spun as my normal thin yarn. The weight? Somewhere between one and two grammes. Both yarns spun with the same wool on the same spindle (which was about double the weight of the reference whorl for the experiment, and fitted with a rather heavy wooden spindle stick). When wound onto a ruler, the thick wool gives about 20 threads per inch, the thin one about 12 threads per quarter-inch.
So now I've outed myself as a thin-spinning freak, can any spinners of thick yarn out there give me a rough estimate of how much fiber in grammes they hand-spindle away in one hour? Just to check against my calculations? I'd be very grateful...
2 comments:
Thanks for news about spinning experiment, I will surely follow the result.
Your thick yarn looks very fine.
Do you spin often or rather occasionally?
I don't get to spin very often, unfortunately. And I must admit that while I like spinning, it just takes so long with my usual thicknesses to see a nice bulky ball of yarn on the spindle that I gladly turn away to other techniques that will let me see a result slightly faster.
Yes, my "thick" yarn still is still fine. In the background, you can see a ruler with centimetre scale, if that helps you more than the threads per inch measurement.
I seem to have a severe limitation in yarn thickness range when spinning, and I am just too lazy to try and work against that. I've tried a few times to stretch my range into thicker yarns, but it always gets me uneven yarn, and I don't want to struggle with that when I can spin even yarn in a lighter weight. Also, I'm thinking that I can always buy or barter handspun thicker yarn should I need it...
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