Then when you are ready you bring it back out and you frog it. For any non-knitters reading this frogging is the process of undoing your knitting by grabbing the end of the yarn and pulling. You may have heard that it is called frogging because you “rip-it rip-it”, and this is a fun explanation although unlikely the true origin. Our best guess is that the term was adopted from it’s use as a curse or disparaging term for the French which was widely used in England at the time we first see it appear in reference to fiber arts. If you want to read more on the possible origins of the word Lord Libidan has a great blog post on it. So I frogged my crooked sock, pulling and pulling all the way back to before the heel.
Why didn’t I just frog the toe? I picked now to do this because I was in need of a portable project that is so simple I barely need to look as I work. I don’t want to be thinking about where to put the heel and then actually need to do the heel, so I have decided to try an afterthought heel. For an afterthought heel you knit the whole sock as a tube then come back and open it up to add the heel. If this goes well I think it will be my new favorite way to make socks!
The speed you spin at depends on the staple length of your fiber. Fibers with long staple lengths can be spun slower/less and fibers with short staple length need to be spun faster/more to hold together. Charkhas are made to spin cotton which has a very short staple length, hence the 80:1 ratio. Many spinners used to European style wheels are often intimidate by book charkhas, because you only have one hand for fiber management while the other hand spins the wheel. However I encourage them to try it, because with such a short staple length I find one hand is plenty to draft with.
So this long winded explanation of the mechanics puts us all on the same page of wondering if the charkha is built for spinning very short fibers like cotton, what on earth am I doing spinning silk with it?
I found a big bag of roving at the creative reuse center that was tied shut and had “silk” written on the bad with sharpie, I figured I would give it a go and grabbed it. But when I tried spinning it on my drop spindle I got no where. The fibers were bourette silk, which made from the short by product fibers of silk processing. With such short and slippery fibers no matter the spindle or technique I could barely get it twisted into singles and I was not having a good time. The bag then got shoved in to storage box and forgotten about.
Then I bought my charkha and decided to give spinning the bourette silk another try, and it was a match made in heaven. The charka spins fast enough to lock the short fibers together. The horizontal draft direction minimizes the tension on the fibers before there is twist, meaning the slippery silk is less likely to slide apart and break as your spinning. And the long draw pulls beautifully from the roving after a small bit of fluffing. The two work perfectly together and it is so much fun to spin! I am currently chain plying using a drop spindle and trying to get 750 yards of finished yarn to weave with (a future post). I will keep you updated, but I still have at least 300 yards to go.
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