Transcript for
Episode 73: Is your knitting style changing your ply twist?
You’re listening to The Sheepspot Podcast, a show for handspinners about making yarn we love.
Hello there, my darling Sheepspotters! Welcome to episode 73 of The Sheepspot Podcast.
I’m Sasha, from sheepspot.com, where we are laser-focused on helping you make yarns you love, with beautiful fibers and top-notch instruction.
Today I’m going to be talking about knitting style and twist when you are knitting with your handspun.
But first, a few announcements:
1. You should all check out The Crafting With Compassion podcast. This is a video podcast with the fabulous Sara Boan. Sara has been a customer of mine for a while, and I met her at the last PlyAway. She is a complete delight and if you like this podcast I think you’ll like hers as well.
2. In the last episode I mentioned a rigid heddle weaving workshop with Esther Rodgers; I said that I hadn’t seen the workshop yet but that I had seen other video classes with her that I’ve really liked. Well, I have now started watching that workshop, “Expressive Weaving on a Rigid Heddle Loom,” and I can now recommend it. Enthusiastically. Seriously. The first lesson, on different ways of warping and using supplemental warp, completely blew my mind. I cannot wait to watch the rest of it and start warping my own loom.
3. Don’t forget: The #groomyourstash challenge starts next week, on Monday, March 30th. It’s a five day challenge that will help you get your stash organized and stored safely. I’m also going to be talking about combining colorways and fibers (so you can combine single braids and odds and ends in projects) and about how to use fiber prep tools to deal with fiber that’s gotten compacted in your stash. Sign up for the daily emails at sheepspot.com/stash-challenge.
4. I am going live on Instagram Mondays-Fridays at 1 to spin, share spinning tips, and fight the dreaded social isolation! If you follow me (@sheepspot) you’ll get a notification when I go live.
OK. Announcements over. On to today’s topic, which is knitting style and twist.
First, a little story. I have been forcing myself to knit with my left hand holding the yarn, because I have some arthritis in my right thumb that seems to be exacerbated by knitting. I usually combination knit, which means that I hold the yarn in my left hand and wrap the yarn clockwise around the needle for both knit and for purl stitches. This makes purling easier, but it twists the stitch, so if I’m knitting stockinette I just knit through the back loop on the next row to untwist it.
Because of the way I tension the yarn in my left hand, my gauge is noticeably looser than when I hold my yarn in my right. So I’m trying not to combine the two methods in the same project. Except . . .
I recently picked up an old WIP that I’m making with handspun, the Stitch Sampler Shawl, by On This Day Designs. I’ll link to the pattern, which I’m really enjoying and which is free and a great choice with handspun knit from multicolored braids. The shawl is knit at a fairly loose gauge, so I thought I would try a few rows continental and see if the gauge difference was noticeable. Since I was experimenting anyway, I tried a bunch of different combinations of picking and throwing to see if I could get comfortable and still produce a fabric I liked. And weird things began to happen to my twist, depending on how I was knitting.
I’ve understood for a while that different knitting styles affect twist, but I’ve never actually been able to see this in my yarn in real time before. And this sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole of research, which was confusing, because it turns out that I wrap the yarn around my needles in an unusual way, so what I was reading was not lining up with what I was actually seeing in my yarn. I’ll link to what I was reading in the show notes.
But, after figuring out how I was wrapping my yarn around my needles in knit and purl stitches using different knitting styles, I’ve got a rule of thumb for you about how your knitting style is changing the ply twist in your yarn.
First, let’s review S twist and Z twist.
Z twist: your wheel (or your flyer, if you're using an e-spinner) goes clockwise.
S twist: your wheel or flyer goes counterclockwise.
Most of us are taught to spin Z and ply S.
When knitting English style, with the yarn in my right hand, I make both my knit and purl stitches by wrapping the yarn counter-clockwise. So using that method I add a bit of ply twist.
When I combination knit, I wrap the yarn counter-clockwise (increasing the ply twist) when I knit, but I wrap it clockwise when I purl. Because I was working with a plied yarn spun from a multicolored braid, I was able to see very clearly, in my purl stitches, that I was taking out the ply twist. As I looked at the just-made purl stitches on my needle, the individual plies were actually lying parallel to each other.
In my case, I think that the adding and subtracting of ply twist likely balances out in the fiber as a whole, except perhaps in very tightly knit fabric where the fiber and the twist just don’t have any room to move.
So, to sum up:
Wrapping your yarn counter-clockwise adds some ply twist in yarns plied S or counter-clockwise. Wrapping yarn clockwise removes some ply twist in yarns plied S. In order to figure out what’s happening to your handspun yarn, you should analyze your knitting style. If your style tends to add ply twist, you may want to add a bit less when you ply. If your style tends to take away ply twist, you may want to add a bit more.
Well, that’s it for me this week, Sheepspotters. Thank you so much for listening, my friend. I’ll see you next time, unless of course you choose to join me in the #groomyourstash challenge (sheepspot.com/stash-challenge) or live on Instagram (@sheepspot)! In the meantime, go spin something!