Fibre processing: plying

(For transparency: This blog post was written on 19/12/2024 as an extended version of an LinkedIn post dated 15/10/2024. It has been backdated to the date of that LinkedIn post so that it appears in the correct order in the blog summary.)

Welcome to the fibre-processing corner of my website.

“Fibre processing? What’s that got to do with translation?” I hear you ask.

Well, I could give a long and complicated answer about how it ties (no pun intended) into all of my specialist areas. For example, understanding the steps of manufacturing textiles is a key part of working on texts about making those processes more circular. Or take the food systems angle: There is huge scope for adding value to some of the by-products of the food system (like sheep’s fleece), or introducing fibre plants such as flax into rotations as a valuable cover-crop. Or I could even make the case for ‘the big picture’ – a good translator needs to be curious about the texts they work on and about how things work. For me, that is expressed in a genuine love of understanding how the things we interact with on a daily basis (like our clothes) are made.

But the honest truth is, I just really enjoy thinking about it, and I strongly suspect there are a few of you out there who feel the same. And if that’s you, you can find a list of all the previous posts on this topic here.

Today’s topic is: plying

When I wrote the original LinkedIn post, I said that the retting gods had gone into hibernation and I was still waiting for the retting to take effect – not realising that they had probably already finished their work, and that my flax was probably ready to be dried again. Hindsight is perfect, of course, but so it goes.

But it is still true I picked up some interesting vocabulary that week at a Chelmsford French Circle conférence on the history of textile production in the Nord region, so I thought I’d skip ahead in the process and tell you about ‘retordage’ or ‘plying’.

The French term is so unusually literal – ‘tordre’ is ‘to twist’, so ‘retordre’ is logically ‘to retwist’. I know, I know, French uses ‘re-’ for all sorts of words that don’t actually mean redoing or repeating anything. In this case, however, it’s quite literal because ‘plying’ is when you take two or more individual strands of spun (i..e twisted) yarn (called ‘singles’) and (re-)twist them together to create a stable yarn. The trick is that the singles are twisted in one direction, but a pair (or more) of them are twisted together in the opposite direction. This means that once you take them off the bobbin and the fibres relax, the singles try to untwist in one direction, whereas the yarn as a whole tries to untwist in the opposite direction. So if you’ve put the same amount of tension into the spinning as into the plying, they should balance out and hold together in a ‘balanced’ yarn.

Incidentally, I learned how this is tested at a demonstration when a member of the public unceremoniously grabbed one of my skeins, undid it and held it up in a loop (see picture) to see if it twisted one way or another at the bottom of the loop. Apparently I passed the test, and the yarn was pronounced “nicely balanced” (is it paranoid to have heard a note of surprise in this pronouncement?). This isn’t just a question of pride – balanced yarns are less likely to warp and shrink when washed. This skein is a bit kinked at the moment because I haven’t yet washed it to ‘set the twist’:

I also tried to take some pictures to show the plying in progress – it’s a two-handed, two-footed process, so not easy to take a picture of, but hopefully you get the idea.:

What I’m spinning here is obviously quite fine, but here’s a zoomed-in picture:

The blue lines in the next photo are meant to illustrate the direction of the twist. It’s not easy to see, but hopefully you can get a sense for why the two directions are called ‘S-twist’ (anticlockwise) (and inversely, ‘Z-twist’ (clockwise)):

It’s interesting that English uses ‘plying’ for this process, presumably cognate with French ‘plier’/‘to fold’. Knitters will know the term ‘ply’ from, e.g. ‘4-ply [yarn]’ (4 singles plied together) and DIY-ers from ‘plywood’ (layers of wood). But ‘ply’ as a verb also has more metaphorical meanings, e.g. ‘to ply a trade’, ‘to ply X with Y’, and apparently even to ‘ap-ply oneself to X’). They all have to do being deliberate and meticulous, which I enjoy for obvious reasons.

Not that French spinners are any less meticulous in their plying, of course. It’s just interesting that it’s conceptualised differently in the terminology. There’s something to be said here about Aitchison’s “Words in the Mind” point about how languages cluster conceptually-linked words together, and about the translation challenges of navigating between different languages’ non-overlapping conceptual clusters. But it’s been too long since I read it for me to do justice to the argument, and anyway, I have actual work to ap-ply myself to.