Spinner's Alphabet: What Begins with F?

By Amelia © April 20, 2026

Me, spindling in the Olympics

F

is for Fiber Artist. When people call me a fiber artist, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. I don’t instinctively feel like an artist. I tend to think of myself as an artisan. I’m drawn to the craft itself — the methods, the repeatability, the satisfaction of using tools and technique to reliably achieve a specific result.

I suppose this goes back to my background as an engineer, where the goal is to design a process and then execute it well. We use our tools to get results, and there’s something deeply satisfying about refining that process until it behaves the way we want it to.

Over the years, I’ve seen that fiber artists come in many stripes and colors, and that the label can apply to me too. There are fiber artists who focus primarily on the art of what they do. They create unique pieces, rarely the same item twice, because they’re working to embody an idea or concept.

My own path has been different. As an artisan, my focus for many years was sock yarn. That was a ten-year journey. I embraced the idea that I could refine my process until I could reliably produce the sock yarn I wanted, while still exploring different variations within that framework.

Another aspect of my skills is analytical. I’ll encounter a commercial yarn, love its feel, and then work to copy it. Often I end up improving on it, because I can choose the breed of wool, the fiber content, and the structure. I can make deliberate decisions that shape the final result. I don’t see that as plagiarism or copying. I see it as using my skills to reach an intended target. It’s part of the craft — understanding something deeply enough to recreate it, and then making it my own through the choices I make along the way. This harkens back to my background as an engineer, where what we are doing is working to get results, and we use our tools to get those results.

I embrace the art and craft of spinning and am happy to be recognized as an artisan, teacher, writer, and yes, even artist in this space. I'm excited to see where the next decade takes my spinning — cotton, perhaps, as my looms call to me for new projects.

A table of spindles from my Spindle Tricks presentation

I had originally considered having F stand for fiber, since that is the heart of what I do as a fiber artist, and then building you a beautiful taxonomy of everything fiber, the animal, plant, and manmade fibers, and all the subcategories below them. There's just so many!

I would love to hear about your fiber artist journey and about the fibers that you love to spin.

What's your spinner's F?

~~~~
© April 20, 2026 by Ask The Bellwether, posted at http://askthebellwether.com/

How do you measure twist angle?

By Amelia © April 13, 2026

I much prefer to measure twist angle in my yarn instead of twists per inch.

Part of this stems from my unwillingness to count treadles when using a wheel, perhaps because neither my spindles or my espinners have a treadle. The other part is that twist angle has the same impact on yarn whether I spin thick or thin, while twists per inch (TPI) change as wraps per inch change, to get the same feel.

I am a huge fan of Mabel Ross - to the point of having two copies of her book Essentials of Yarn Design for Handspinners, and one of each of her others, Encyclopedia of Hand Spinning, Essentials of Hand Spinning, and Hand Spinners' Workbook: Fancy Yarns. (All links are affiliate links - I may benefit from you using them to make your next purchase.) She has lovely tables in her books of WPI, treadle counts, TPI, and twist angle. I distilled it down for myself, filtered through my experience, to:

• 15° → very soft fluffy yarn - usable but easy to split when knitting
• 25° → medium knitting yarn - great for hats and scarves
• 35° → durable yarn - lowest twist I like for socks
• 45° → crepe yarn - high twist weaving yarn that will crinkle the fabric woven to a balanced sett

You can buy specialty tools for measuring twist angle, or simply use a protractor. I've done both. In fact, Mabel Ross's book has a twist angle tool printed on cardstock in the back. The tools are handy because they contain the typical twist range, so you aren't going to measure in a way that mis-reports twist angle as 75°.

Protractors, however, are much easier to find in your local school supply aisle or online, like the one I found here. I can display it on my phone when I want to measure twist angle. With the protractor, I line my yarn up on the 0 line at the flat bottom, and keep it parallel to the 0 line as I slide it across toward the 90° on the other side.

The angle lines on the protractor tell you what twist they measure - those slanted like the middle of the S measure S-twist (counter-clockwise twist) and the other half, slanted like the middle of the Z measure Z-twist (clockwise twist). What about the 90° mark? I like to jest that it is for measuring corespun, as that has the fiber wrapping a core, perpendicular to the length of the yarn.

In the series of pictures that follows, you see me moving the yarn across to measure the ply twist, which here is S-twist. I am looking for the angle line that matches the angle of the strands twisting around each other.

If you agree with me, you will say this twine (it's what I had to hand for these images...) has a twist angle between 25° and 30°

I would use the other half of the protractor for Z twist.

I recently posted on twist in singles vs. twist in yarn plied from them. I usually use a ply-back to see the ply twist and help me decide on the appropriate amount of singles twist, rather than trying to directly measure twist angle in singles. I invite you to check out your current spin against a protractor and free yourself up from counting treadles.

~~~~
© April 13, 2026 by Ask The Bellwether, posted at http://askthebellwether.com/

Spinner's Alphabet: What begins with E?

By Amelia © April 6, 2026

My HansenCrafts miniSpinner Pro, 3900

E

is for e-spinner. E-spinners have long existed, I remember when I was learning to spin in 2001, the Roberta Eortl was popular as a plying tool. In fact, the early e-spinners seemed to mostly be focused on making plying take minimal time. However, they were not all that friendly for spinning in groups as they were pretty loud. I made a hunt in the early 2000's for a quiet e-spinner and came across the Womack Butterfly. It was both gorgeous and quiet - yay! Then HansenCrafts showed up on the scene and since then e-spinners have really taken off. Theirs was whisper-quiet, light, and very portable with the addition of a small battery pack.

Learning to use an e-spinner for spinning is different from a wheel or spindle. So if you already spin but want to start on an e-spinner, don't be surprised that there is still a learning curve. The key difference is that an e-spinner twists at a constant speed, while you can vary the speed of your wheel or spindle almost without thinking of it.

There is now a rich variety of e-spinners; I'm a huge HansenCrafts fan - not only because I teach Zoom workshops through them, but also because the wood is lovely. See 3900? yeah. Amazing. (3900 is its serial number, printed on the underside.) That said, the 3-d printed or plastic molded ones have their place. The Electric Eel Wheels are affordable and you can 3-d print extra bobbins. The Daedalus line has a huge following. Ashford already had an e-spinner but redesigned theirs to fit in this new landscape; Louet now offers the Jenn-E e-spinner. And there are others out there... but please, avoid the cheap knock-offs on Amazon. If it's a no-name e-spinner likely it's not going to have good manners.

The same advice I offer wheel spinners I offer you: look for a second-hand one; the mark-down is not as significant as it can be with wheels, but you may save a little and should also be able to re-sell it if it turns out not to be your dream e-spinner. I have mine with HansenCrafts #3900 that's for sure!

Related posts:

• Why Spin on an Electric Wheel? - shows my lovely Butterfly!
• How do I choose the Speed Setting on my E-spinner? - featuring HansenCrafts #3, so early that they were not yet making the flyers!
• There are several others as well, tangentially related: see these blog articles mentioning e-spinners

I'll leave you with two questions...

1. Do you have an e-spinner? Which one and what do you think of it (be kind!)?
2. What's your spinner's E?

~~~~
© April 6, 2026 by Ask The Bellwether, posted at http://askthebellwether.com/

How much ply twist is "balanced"?

By Amelia © March 30, 2026

Typically we tell new spinners to seek balance in their plied yarn ... see How Much Twist do I Need When I Ply? for that advice. If you let singles rest, the twist in the single is still there, but dormant. Don't wake it up before plying! Instead, keep a fresh ply-back from when the singles were spun to guide plying twist and realize that the dormant twist will show up when you wet-finish your skein after plying.

However, I would really like more specific advice. Some authors talk about counting treadles - clearly not spindle spinners!

What follows is from an old Ravelry post of mine:

"Mabel Ross’s theory, in Essentials of Yarn Design, is that ply twist is 2/3 singles’ twist. So, your final yarn has 8 TPI [twists per inch] in the 2-ply and each single has 4 TPI remaining in it. But why would two, skinnier, 4 TPI singles “balance” with an 8 TPI 2-ply? I know, 4 + 4 = 8, but does that hold true here, isn’t it more like 4 and 4 in parallel, not in series, pulling against 8? Clearly I’m thinking about this too hard, muddying my ability to understand what I’ve always taken as fact in my desire to get at its underpinnings.

"Alden Amos’s theory, in The Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning, states that ply twist is 1/2 singles’ twist. I read that 10 times last night trying to figure out what he meant. Does he mean, once it’s plied, that your 2.5 TPI 2-ply has singles that each still contain 5 TPI? or that your 2.5 TPI 2-ply has singles that when not plied were 5 TPI? And do either of those things match up to Mabel Ross’s statements?

"Anne Fields (Spinning Wool: Beyond the Basics) quotes Mabel Ross, so she’s taking her numbers as a given. And Peter Teal (Wool Combing and Spinning, the original version) doesn’t really discuss balanced yarn, since he wants to be aware of what the twist is in his singles, and he wants there to be a certain amount, so he discusses plying twist in those terms."

End of quote

Well, that didn't really help. Especially the TPI of the single after plying - I want to know how much twist to put in the single and then how much twist I put in the ply.

These days, I do still use the freshly spun ply-back sample as a sample to match to when plying. And rather than TPI, I use twist angle to let me know what type of yarn I'm spinning. Medium knitting yarn wants a 25° angle of twist while durable sock yarn wants a 35-38° angle of twist. This is true no matter what my yarn diameter (WPI, wraps per inch) is.

If I don't have a sample, I can make one by folding a length in half and knotting the ends, being careful not to let any twist come out. Put it in warm water and the dormant twist wriggles the sample up to show what balance is in the 2-ply.

If I have no access to warm water, I can visually inspect the plying. When balanced, the fibers in the singles area straight, and the plied yarn is at maximum diameter. Before it's balanced, the singles are compressed and after the balance point, the plied yarn compresses.

You can find many posts on this blog about balance in plying if you'd like to dive into the topic further.

I may never get to the bottom of the singles-vs-plied twist question - but perhaps someone else will rig up an Alden Amos-style twist counter and then we'll all know. Will it be you?

~~~~
© March 30, 2026 by Ask The Bellwether, posted at http://askthebellwether.com/

Spinner's Alphabet: What begins with D?

By Amelia © March 23, 2026

spindle long-draw

D

is for Drafting Style. Do you draft woolen or worsted or something in-between? Woolen draft is a long-draw draft, usually to allow maximum air in the yarn. Worsted draft is a short-draw draft, pinched continuously to minimize air in the yarn. Both can be fast; both can be fun. Most folks are somewhere in-between in their drafting style.

Worsted drafting is easier to learn and what we typically learn when we start. You pull out about 1/3 the staple length of the fiber you are drafting, then slide your fingers over that so twist follows behind them. Pull-and-slide repeats to do the drafting. Oh yeah - "staple length" is the length of the individual fibers. So much vocabulary! This explanation also simplifies the overall process a bit - there is a drafting area sometimes called a drafting triangle though not all of us see the triangle where you are already attenuating (drafting down from original diameter) the fiber supply. That final 1/3 staple length length is at the front of the drafting area, closer to your spinning tool of choice, and is as fine as you need to have it to get the yarn diameter you want once twist enters it. One key features of worsted draft: twist is never in the drafting area; to make this happen, you maintain continuous squeezing with the forward hand, even when it's not pulling fiber out of the drafting area.

Woolen drafting is also called long draw - if it's two four letter words you know it's going to be challenging. This is an amazing draft, when well done the spinner looks like a ballerina swinging their arm gracefully away from their wheel and then toward to feed on the yarn. You can do this with two hands where the forward hand gates (squeezes and releases) the twist so you can draft against the twist in the yarn but limit how fast the twist enters; or with one hand, where you have to move your hand back, drafting out the fiber at the same speed twist is entering. With woolen drafting, it is the twist in the drafting area, and the speed that twist is entering it that controls the yarn diameter. So, you draft by pulling back and letting the twist keep the fiber in place. Your hands end up wayyyyy more than a staple length apart doing this, and if you are doing it with just one hand well, that hand ends up far away from your wheel/e-spinner/support spindle.

My default drafting method leans toward woolen - that's my go-to, but if the fiber is not cooperating I may end up doing shorter draws or what I like to call leap-frog drafting, where I do a short forward draft but don't maintain the squeeze. So when my hand leaps back to the end of the new drafting, I have to give a quick twist to remove twist from the drafting area - mimicing worsted's no-twist-in-the-drafting-area policy so that I can maintain yarn diameter. Yes, even on a suspended spindle - it's supported long-draw in that case since gravity would cause drafting to be far too quick.

Two questions for you to ponder ...

1. What's your drafting style? does it vary based on what you are spinning on?
2. What other D's come to mind for our spinning dictionary?

~~~~
© March 23, 2026 by Ask The Bellwether, posted at http://askthebellwether.com/