Whipcord from Scratch
I've been spinning yarn for about a year now, and I've gotten to the point where I'm at least competent enough to produce useful yarn.
Since Pennsic, I've been using a pretty close replica of a Viking era spindle and whorl:
Most of my spinning has essentially been for practice, but the yarn is starting to pile up and it's good enough to use.
I spun (what I think is...) tan swaledale (period-ish), and some white rambouillet (not period! Very soft, though...) wool into some very fine two-ply yarn so that I could practice plying. I'm not totally happy with the results, but it works. Below is more or less what I've spun in the past year. The rambouillet is the leftmost, and the swaledale is second-from-the-left:
I'd bought some madder at Pennsic, and I wanted to try it out. I mordanted the swaledale and a few little baby white skeins (seen hiding in the grey icelandic ball above) in alum, and the next day heated up some madder in water until just under a simmer and soaked the skeins.
I love the color.
But what to do with it? It's too fine to knit or nalbind without going mad, and not really enough to weave broadcloth. I don't want to do tablet weaving until another project completes.
Happily, Alienor Salton taught a really neat class at the Whyt Whey schola on whipcording, which is a way to rapidly produce a four-stranded plait: http://arts.piglet.org/index.php/2017/11/19/medallion-whipcording/. I'm not going to go into the history or how-to of the technique because Alienor has covered it completely.
My setup is slightly different than hers: I'm using kumihimo bobbins (which I got as part of a posement kit which I haven't actually done anything with...) and these nifty 1/2 ounce Japanese weaving weights that I bought in Japan. They're totally not meant for this - you're supposed to use them to weight replacement warp threads on a loom if your main warp has a thread that snaps - but they do very well. They're little ceramic donuts.
The kumihimo bobbins work great because they hold onto the yarn and don't let it slip without having to fuss with knots.
I did my braid descending from a pin on a door lintel, with a slip knot to hold it at the right height. Once I was going, I could braid at up to about two passes per second, as demonstrated in this video where I totally don't get going that fast:
So producing 5 yards of cord (from about 6 yards of each thread) took a few hours.
Here's the final result. I'm not totally sure what I'll do with all of it, but I'm sure I'll use it as a drawstring for some pouches or for pants.
The mathematics of the cord are interesting to me. I was using two threads of each color, and I put the threads adjacent to one-another in order to produce a candy-cane stripe, as it is Christmas. The technique regardless of pattern is that you swap the diagonal cords (making sure to swap one pair clockwise and one pair counter-clockwise, consistently) so you go from
So if you have two colors X and O, you have a cycle like:
But of course, I made mistakes by occasionally losing my place and swapping the same yarns twice, or not at all. Interestingly, doing that reverses the twist of the pattern even if you resume the correct motions immediately:
I wasn't interested in making a particularly complicated cord, but you could make a very cool wavy pattern by swapping the direction regularly.
Since Pennsic, I've been using a pretty close replica of a Viking era spindle and whorl:
 |
| 16g whorl. Note that I'm using two hitches because there's no notch. |
I spun (what I think is...) tan swaledale (period-ish), and some white rambouillet (not period! Very soft, though...) wool into some very fine two-ply yarn so that I could practice plying. I'm not totally happy with the results, but it works. Below is more or less what I've spun in the past year. The rambouillet is the leftmost, and the swaledale is second-from-the-left:
 |
 |
| still slightly wet rightmost mini-skein is unmordanted |
But what to do with it? It's too fine to knit or nalbind without going mad, and not really enough to weave broadcloth. I don't want to do tablet weaving until another project completes.
Happily, Alienor Salton taught a really neat class at the Whyt Whey schola on whipcording, which is a way to rapidly produce a four-stranded plait: http://arts.piglet.org/index.php/2017/11/19/medallion-whipcording/. I'm not going to go into the history or how-to of the technique because Alienor has covered it completely.
My setup is slightly different than hers: I'm using kumihimo bobbins (which I got as part of a posement kit which I haven't actually done anything with...) and these nifty 1/2 ounce Japanese weaving weights that I bought in Japan. They're totally not meant for this - you're supposed to use them to weight replacement warp threads on a loom if your main warp has a thread that snaps - but they do very well. They're little ceramic donuts.
 |
| Can you tell this is a scadian household? |
I did my braid descending from a pin on a door lintel, with a slip knot to hold it at the right height. Once I was going, I could braid at up to about two passes per second, as demonstrated in this video where I totally don't get going that fast:
So producing 5 yards of cord (from about 6 yards of each thread) took a few hours.
Here's the final result. I'm not totally sure what I'll do with all of it, but I'm sure I'll use it as a drawstring for some pouches or for pants.
The mathematics of the cord are interesting to me. I was using two threads of each color, and I put the threads adjacent to one-another in order to produce a candy-cane stripe, as it is Christmas. The technique regardless of pattern is that you swap the diagonal cords (making sure to swap one pair clockwise and one pair counter-clockwise, consistently) so you go from
AB
CD
to
DB
CA
to
DC
BA
to
AC
BD
and finally back to
AB
CD
So if you have two colors X and O, you have a cycle like:
XO
XO
to
OO
XX
to
OX
OX
to
XX
OO
and finally back to
XO
XO
If you look at the Xes, you can see that they rotate counter-clockwise around the center, and as we're producing the cord as we rotate, this produces an S-twist (or left-handed) rotation. This is the pattern that I wanted to make.But of course, I made mistakes by occasionally losing my place and swapping the same yarns twice, or not at all. Interestingly, doing that reverses the twist of the pattern even if you resume the correct motions immediately:
XO
XO
but we accidentally don't swap.
XO
XO
Now, we thought we swapped the top-left and bottom-right, so the next swap is top-right and bottom-left.
XX
OO
carrying on...
OX
OX
to
OO
XX
and finally back to
XO
XO
Now we're rotating clockwise, all because we made one mistake earlier. Swapping twice and swapping not at all get us into the same state pattern-wise, so they both cause this effect, although of course the cord will have more or fewer twists depending on which happens.I wasn't interested in making a particularly complicated cord, but you could make a very cool wavy pattern by swapping the direction regularly.
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