I've been spinning a yellow cotton for a while now. It's some of the ginned cotton that my dad got that I dyed yellow. I've drum carded it, picked out the seed bits and other unwanted waste, hand carded it into punis and spun it into yarn. Whew! The end results are a small woven piece for my collection of COE-handspinning work and a skein of fine (~40 wraps per inch) cotton.
The cotton was spun on my Matchless spinning wheel. The woven piece was technically woven on my Might Wolf, but I was just using the loom as a tensioning device to hold the warp. The threads went through the reed (to set the spacing of the warp), but weren't threaded through the heddles. I tied continuous string heddles (there's a great tutorial here at Laverne Waddington's site) over a knitting needle to make one of the sheds and used a wood shuttle to create the opposite one.
2 comments:
It's so fun to see projects all the way from raw materials to FO. You'll have to make something special with your square when it comes back from the COE. 40 WPI is pretty fine! I've never spun cotton, but it's something I've always wanted to try. I love long draw, so I have a feeling I'd like it.
I am extremely interested in the settings, preparation, etc. that you used to be able to spin cotton on a wheel. I have tried and had little success. I think my prep may have been insufficient -- didn't make punis, for example -- but I am interested in how you got sufficient twist in the yarn, too. Could you write a post on that?
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