Spinner's Alphabet: What Begins With H?

By Amelia © May 18, 2026

H

is for Hawser yarn construction. This is a fascinating 4-strand yarn structure used in rope, and made popular by Sarah Anderson's The Spinner's Book of Yarn Designs: Techniques for Creating 80 Yarns (Storey Publishing, LLC, 2013) (affiliate link, thanks!).

To make a Hawser yarn, you spin singles Z, ply Z (crazy I know), then finish by plying S the 2 Z-plied 2-plies. It looks like a 2-ply yarn in the result from a distance, but up close it looks a bit like a sloppy 4-ply (ok, mine did!). Fun/chaotic to spin and a great way to get out of my "ply S" rut!

From a whole-skein view, it looks like a 2-ply; but that close-up above shows some "messy 4-ply" vibes!

To help myself understand the steps involved, I like to draw a flow chart for the structure. All the letters are spinning direction, and if lines lead into a letter, it's plying those lines in the direction stated. Here's my Hawser chart:

The main thing to understand is that the goal is balance, but along the way it can get very unbalanced - plying Z-spun singles Z for example - that's crazy yarn! But the final S twist here is to bring everything back into balance. The Hawser 2-ply look is best served by that Z-ply step making the yarn look plied when under tension - but when you relax it, it curls on itself like crazy trying to find balance. So you want a good plying setup with a sturdy kate, and if you can let those Z-plied bobbins rest a while it will help.

It can be fun to break the "rules" on spinning - try spinning an S single. It definitely feels different! You'd think you can't ply S and Z spun singles together. As a 2-ply, it's really elastic, but as a 3- or 4-ply it makes a very durable yarn to have one single spun opposite to the others. That's in Sarah's book too!

Here's a peek at the deck from The Spinner’s Book of Yarn Design by Sarah Anderson (Storey Publishing, LLC, 2013). I travel with the deck so whenever I want to try something new, I can shuffle it and draw a random one to challenge myself.

I had no other H's ... What's your spinner's H? What explorations have you made in yarn constructions?

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© May 18, 2026 by Ask The Bellwether, posted at http://askthebellwether.com/