Fibre processing: woollen vs worsted spinning
(For transparency: This blog post was written on 13/11/2024 as an extended version of an LinkedIn post dated 1/11/2024. 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: woollen vs. worsted spinning
Believe it or not, there are actually quite a few different ways of spinning fibre into usable yarn, depending on what exactly you are trying to achieve. It all comes down to how you prepare the yarn and how you feed the twist into it. In the broadest terms, there are two main ways of doing this - woollen spinning and worsted spinning.
The yarn on the left is worsted and the right woollen, with their respective rolags. In the worsted, the fibres are carded and then rolled up so that they run parallel to the direction of the rolag:
In the woollen meanwhile, the fibres are perpendicular to it. So when you draft (draw out) a section of the woollen rolag to spin, you don’t get a neat bundle of aligned fibre, you get a bunch of fibres running in all sorts of directions.
This may sound messy, but the idea is to try and trap pockets of air into the yarn, ideally around a hollow core, thereby producing a softer, chunkier, ‘bouncier’ yarn, and also one with better insulating properties. This is why I’m doing it at the moment despite the fact that I prefer spinning worsted. I promised I would make an outdoorsy friend a woolly hat, and these air pockets produce a yarn than is both better insulated and also more breathable – useful qualities for a hat I’m sure you’ll agree. The added softness is also a factor, since this is an adult Romney fleece, and therefore ever so slightly scratchier than the shearling/lambswool I’ve been working on up to now.
This also means, incidentally, that it’s quite difficult to make side-by-side comparisons. Even though both of these skeins are from the same fleece, prepared into the same way up to this point, they have come out quite differently. As you can probably see, the worsted (first image) is finer and glossier, even though the the woollen rolag (second image) probably looks neater. This is partly because it’s more tightly packed, which makes it harder to draft, which in turn means the final yarn isn’t as fine. But this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ‘worse’, it’s just been processed differently. But I also find it harder to spin finely from a woollen rolag, so is the fineness an artefact of the preparation or of the skill of the spinner? Impossible to answer really.
So why do I prefer spinning worsted? For one thing, I find it easier to achieve a nice even thickness. Woollen spinning can drag an entire strand of horizontal fibre into the twist all at once, unlike worsted where the individual strands are fed in more gradually. This means it’s much harder to even or pick out the clumps that come from uneven patches in the rolag when spinning woollen. These sorts of imperfections come primarily from something called ‘second shear’, which is basically clusters of shorter strands of hair. It’s called ‘second shear’ because it’s normally from where the shearer didn’t quite catch the entire lock of hair the first time round and had to go back to ‘tidy up’. And even shear is important for the sheep’s comfort (imagine if your hairdresser left random patches of hair behind), but it isn’t ideal for spinning. In fact, the art of shearing for spinning is a special skill, and one that is dying out as sheep’s fleece itself is undervalued, and shearing speed is more important to farmers than shearing quality. But I digress.
Anyway, these clumps stop the twist moving down the bundle evenly, so it’s much harder to achieve a balanced yarn. I also just find it a more frustrating experience to spin, primarily because I am quite fussy about these things. I keep trying to remind myself that it’s just a hobby, and I shouldn’t get so annoyed over imperfectiosn, but I am who I am.
Woolen spinning is supposed to be better for long-draw, but that hasn’t been my experience. All that happens is that the twist pulls primarily from the centre of the rolag, drawing it out into a worsted alignment anyway. What’s long-draw you ask? Well, that will have to be its own post, because there are just as many spinning techniques as there are carding techniques. Suffice it to say, long-draw is supposed to be a quicker way of spinning, and one that is kinder on the finger joints. However, because it is quicker, it does require that your fleece be much better prepared because imperfections in the fleece move into the twist much more quickly, so are much harder to catch before they get spun or pick out afterwards. As I say, a question for another day.
This is probably all a question of experience and skill, but preference will always play a strong role, and I find spinning worsted much more satisfying. But as ever, you have to pick the technique that suits what you’re trying to achieve, so I must persevere.