12.19.06

Technique Tuesday–Tailspinning

Posted in Tutorial Tuesday, spinning at 2:09 am by wendy

How to turn this:

  into this:

  I’ve wanted to do a tailspun yarn for a long time.

I have so many little packets of mohair locks, a whole bunch of yearling Lincoln locks, in so many pretty colors, just waiting to be tailspun yarn (or a a light airy and soft bouclé) but I was intimidated, and now of course, I can’t think why.

  Tailspun yarn is a yarn that has whole locks of wool hanging off a core, like a big ol’ eyelash yarn.

A lock of wool has a butt end and a tip, the butt being the cut end or skin side of the lock, and the tip being the sproingy curly tapered bit.

You can do tailspinning using just the locks themselves, by just drafting them a bit, then catching the next butt end up and letting the twist run up to it, then another butt end, always keeping the twist one butt end behind and leaving the locks hanging out…but I used the corespinning method.

Corespinning is just using one yarn as a core and wrapping another yarn around it.

By holding the second yarn at an angle (angle depends on desired effect) to wrap around the core yarn you can get a beehive/coil yarn look, and by holding a fiber at an angle (roughly 90 degrees) and using the grabbing action of the core yarn being spun as resistance to draft back on, you get a really fluffy soft looking yarn with a strong solid core.

Tailspinning creates a really unique looking yarn, maybe not terribly practical for knitting (you can keep the curls to the front of the work by purling on the right side) but I really dig it, and it looks really cool in weaving too.

It is pretty labor intensive though–you have to flick open the lock ends and treadle rather slowly. In the 25 minutes I was messing around with it and trying to film a tutorial, I only ended up with 6 yards (1.5 oz).

For a similar effect with less work for knitting, look at the cuffs Brooke made at SOAR.
You can use an overspun single or a plied yarn, the important thing is to execute the tailspinning by spinning the wheel/spindle in the opposite direction of the last direction that the core yarn was last spun (so if you are using a plied yarn, odds are you’ll tailspin clockwise, if you’re using an overspun single, odds are you’ll be spinning counterclockwise).

So, you hold the core yarn right out in front of you, as you might with any other drafting or plying, but in another hand you lay the butt end of the lock on top of the core as you treadle and the twist travels along the core and grabs the lock (use a flicker, or slicker brush from a pet store, or a regular hair/tick/flea comb to open the butt end of the lock into a fanning of fiber and it makes it grab incredibly easily) and you move onto the next lock. You can slide the locks up together along the core to pack them densely or you can space them loosely, with separations of wrapped soft fluff.

The more tension, the tighter you tug or wrap the locks, the less soft the resulting yarn will be.

I don’t have pictures in progress of the spinning because I made video, but it is taking forever to upload. I will embed them and you’ll have a choice between Pomona-packed and Pomona free Quicktime video that you can download to your video ipod (Hi Mary-Kay!) if you want to see it in action.

Tailspinning quicktime video:
I’ve removed it from being embedded, I guess it’s so huge it just doesn’t want to load.

Over a year later, I found a way to upload it to youtube (it was too big before) sou you can now find the not so great tutorial video right here.
If I can do it, you can do it. ;p

The hardest thing might be letting go of expectations of exactly how it should look and just enjoy the serendipity of the way the locks wrap the yarn.

Diane Varney (does anyone know if this is the same Diane Varney?) describes this as Curly Locks in her Spinning Designer Yarns. She says that an advantage is that you can use a perfectly hideous commercial yarn, as you’ll be covering it up, but I don’t have any hideous yarn in my stash anymore.

I don’t think.

I did have a beautiully dyed yarn from Siri, with colors that seemed meant to be mated with the locks I’d dyed way back when. Just in case the core peeked through after all, and plus I like having all parts be pretty, even if they aren’t to be seen.   Kind of like wearing pretty panties.

This is my view when I started writing this post:

  Everyone on the couch!Pomona/Angelina was in a silly mood earlier; she kept stealing wads of locks and I kept having to go retrieve them before they were too thoroughly killed and subdued. But could I be mad?Not with the silly girl with such a face, no.

   Wait, are you sure you’re not mad at me?

  A quick note about the locks–they’re from a yearling Lincoln fleece I bought from Lorraine Powell of Powell Sheep Co (PO Box 183 - Ramona, CA 92065 760/789-1758, she’s also an Ashford Dealer). in Ramona.

It’s a great fleece, well skirted and relatively clean, with great luster and actually quite soft.

Updated: I meant to say something about spinning this on a wheel.

My orifice for my Victoria was way to small for this, and my s17 has hooks which would snag it.

I used the Jumbo head on my Lendrum and still had to feed the yarn manually onto the bobbin.

If you have a Country Spinner, this type of yarn would probably be no problem for doing a big ol’ skein on a wheel…but otherwise, this might actually be most easily done on a spindle…

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