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No, that still isn't enough yarn colors

Posted on: Friday, 2023-11-17

Category: Textile

Tags: yarn-spinningandean

If you're one of the not-that-many people out there who still make their own yarn by hand, you might be familiar with Abby Franquemont, of "Respect the Spindle" fame. In February 2022, she tackled a long-standing, difficult project of teaching Andean backstrap weaving over the internet: I was lucky to join the early cohort. This is not an easy subject to teach, let alone remotely, because it is rooted in a particular cultural context and uses materials we literally cannot buy in the global North. I'm not going to go into more detail about the weaving itself here and now, but if you want to see more about those traditional textiles, CTTC (Center of Traditional Textiles of Cusco) has plenty of information and a webshop.

A narrow woven band wound around the hand of a white person. The pattern is symmetrical swirls forming diagonals, in green and orange.
Practice band with the jakaku sisan pattern

The focus today is on the special materials mentioned. Yarn suitable for Andean backstrap weaving is known as khaitu (Quechua word). It's made of sheep or alpaca wool, 2-ply, spindle-spun, and has very, VERY high ply twist. No, more than that. No, even more than that. It was actually difficult to understand how much ply twist it actually needed until I had some in my hands - the class mandated Peru-made kits for this very reason. And that amount of twist is not something machines are especially good at managing, let alone something that anyone bothers making industrially. Meaning: in order to learn this kind of weaving, you'd better know a handspinner, or be one yourself! At the very least, you need to be equipped to add ply twist to commercial yarn so it can be somewhat adequate to practice with, because otherwise the friction it needs to endure during weaving will break it.

A gorgeous chunk of fiber in rich orange-red-brown colors. Under it, part of a wooden handspindle is visible, with some freshly spun yarn forming a small cone on its shaft.
Technically this is not ideal fiber because it's not all wool, but it's very pretty

The traditional workflow is - roughly - to spin undyed singles on two spindles (typically a type called pushka), wind them off together directly into a plying ball, skein that to dye it, then ply the dyed yarn (on a larger spindle called canti). As always the details matter too: how is the fiber prepared, how is it drafted, what kind of skein are we winding, how do you even dye yarn at such high altitudes, sorry how did that plying spindle start going this fast? But rather than badly repeat what Abby teaches for a living, I'll direct you to Franquemont University if you're curious. My version is that I cannot be arsed to do either prep from raw fleece nor dyeing, so I work from commercially combed dyed fiber. The "problem" then becomes that I'm a color nerd, and "need" to have many colors on hand.

A lot of small yarn balls in various colors, arranged on a wooden surface in a roughly chromatic disk
The stash a month ago

Enter Hilltop Cloud, one of my favorite fiber dyers. HTC is special to me, because I bought my first "learn to spin yarn" kit from her Etsy shop nearly a decade ago. It came with a note saying that you do not need to be afraid of wasting material while learning: "the sheep are always growing more wool". Much of my fiber stash built over the years has since come from her shop. Notably, she carries Cambrian wool, a local-to-her variety that she dies in packs of 5x20g of coordinated colors... which is perfect to build a large palette without getting bored spinning large amounts of the same shade.

Spindles and yarn in various stages of making on a wooden surface. From left to right: two thinner spindles with red fiber being spun, a skein of yarn looking like a sea sponge, five neatly wound balls of yarn, and a much larger spindle filled with tightly plyed blue-pink yarn.
Various stages of The Process

And so this has turned into a fidget of sorts. Grab a new color, split it into two 10g chunks, attach them to the two pushkas. Have that in my hands while watching something, or listening to a meeting. A few hours later, in fits and starts, the spindle then its twin is full. Wind them off together, making a plying ball that gets set aside until I have a few of them. Make skeins, give them a bath, make plying balls again, eventually ply those in turn on the canti. It is hardly meditative, but it keeps my hands busy and I get yarn at the end. Maybe I'll even use it to weave with.

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