Resources

One thing about being as old as I am, doing this craft for as long as I have done it, is that I have resources.  Lots of resources.  A wall full of resources.

Nothing like getting hooked by an 'obscure' technique in a craft with so many variables!

I took the spinning workshop on Sunday because I wanted to be a better weaver.  If I don't understand the nature of my materials, if I don't understand the subtleties of how they are made and consequently how they behave, I won't understand the nuances of my cloth.

Crepe is a cloth that isn't very popular or top of mind for most people.  I've been aware of it for a long time, but everything I read about it said that 'true' crepe cloth had to be made with yarn spun with special aspects to it.  Since I had little time to spin, I kind of ignored that whole category although I did use some of the drafts in Olesner and other books that had sections on crepe weave because of the textures.

During the class we looked at compound plying structures, crepe being one of them.  Taking the time to understand how the yarns were put together has renewed my interest in crepe *weaves*.  But there is very little information that looks at the details of making crepe yarns.  Most of the things I've found have been pretty general.

But here's the thing.  I have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances who are more knowledgeable than me about things like spinning.  It didn't take long after contacting a few to start getting more resources.  And I haven't even exhausted my own - yet.

As usual there is the typical 'it depends' when it comes to nearly everything about weaving (and spinning).  There is a spectrum of advice on what needs to be done.  But one thing pretty much all of the resources I've read so far state the yarn needs to have twist energy built into it.  That twist energy causes the plane of the cloth to contract and develop more 3 dimensional texture.  Some refer to crepe as 'fragile' while others refer to how strong it is, due to the high twist.  One warns that the higher the twist, the closer the yarn comes to reaching its tensile strength and therefore becomes more prone to break due to the tension in the yarn.  I've seen this in action in my own spinning.  A little bit of twist makes a soft yarn, a moderate amount of twist can make a nice pliable co-operative yarn, high twist can make an unruly yarn that requires careful tension control, too much twist overcomes the integrity of the yarn and it snaps.

So, me being me, I am going to look at that spectrum of things and maybe do some experimentation.  I am even contemplating using some commercially spun yarn to pair with handspun.  I do this with my own yarns all the time - spin a singles then ply with a commercially spun yarn.  I think I might give this a try.

Learning how to control how much twist I apply to the singles and then the ply is going to be the hard part.

Will I do anything but make a few samples?  Probably not.

But the point is this - it will add to my foundation of knowledge and help me understand cloth better.  Taking things to the extreme lets me know where the boundary of functional and not functional lives.  

And besides, it's interesting - to me.  I don't have to earn an income from my weaving anymore (although I'll never say no to something in my ko-fi tip jar!  Because there are things that need buying to feed my 'addiction' to yarns/fibres!  And things like ink cartridges, boxes of paper, not to mention yarn...)

There may come a day when I will find I can't weave anymore, but I should be able to spin and knit.  So I'm not going to be too hard on myself if I don't dig my teeth into crepe yarns/cloth right away.  Sounds like maybe a winter project.

In the meantime, it's information gathering time.  The more I discover, the more information I feed into my thinking, the better able I will be to make choices when I get to the point of actually doing something with it.

My story, sticking to it...