The emballage has been woven, and has come back to me, and it is wonderful. A thick, heavy cloth from thick, heavy two-ply yarns, it does feel like something trustworthy enough to pack valuable goods and protect them on long journeys.

Here's a picture of the cloth, raw off the loom:


The cloth is looking even better now after a nice wash to finish it, and it's currently hanging out to dry... and once it is dry, I can get the comparison photo for after the wash, and then set out to cut it into the required parts and secure the edges of the individual pieces.

If you're a spinner, you will probably know what "setting the twist" means. For those of you who don't know what that is about, let me explain.

When you spin yarn, you twist fibres together, pressing their surfaces onto each other. Friction between these surfaces gives the thread its stability - hence a thread with more twist is usually a stronger thread. Yarn thickness, fibre length and fibre surface all influence how much twist is needed for a certain amount of yarn strength.

Twisting these fibres together means inserting energy into a system - that is what you do when you flick the spindle or treadle the wheel. This energy (and may the proper natural scientists please forgive any odd wording) is stored in the fibres. Now when you let go of the piece of twisted yarn, the fibres want to return to their relaxed state (and there's probably something that could be said about the laws of thermodynamics here, or something equally smart). So... they will untwist as far as possible.

"Setting the twist" means  counteracting this, by getting the individual fibres settled into their new shape. This can be done by time (just letting the yarn sit will eventually deform the fibres) or be sped up by the application of heat and moisture. So dunking the skein in hot water, then hanging it up (possibly a little bit weighted, so the yarns remain stretched out) will help nicely. For those of us with less time, or less patience, or wanting to take before and after pictures, a steam cleaner will also deliver heat and moisture, conveniently at the push of a button.

So. I always thought that setting the twist would do just that - set the twist in the yarn, sort of freeze it in its current state. However, there seems to be something more happening here:

[caption id="attachment_2867" align="alignnone" width="640"] Yarn before and after steam treatment - you can see how the knot of the marking yarn moves. There is definitely a difference in the yarn after steaming!


Here's a closeup of the part with the marked yarn:


I haven't measured yet if the twist angle changes noticeably, but the yarns definitely move and shift and something happens to them when they get treated. Some of that movement could be explained by the steam shifting the threads, but not all of it - I tried not to get too close with the nozzle and be gentle enough to avoid shifting the yarn with the steam stream, and still things happened.

Well. Who would have guessed that...

Guess what is happening here?

Right. More yarn:

One batch still on the skeiner...


and one batch already off it and waiting for its colleague.


Both are waiting for a third one, and then I'll have done enough for the weft of the next batch. After that, it's straight on to the warp - which will have a little more twist than the weft, and will be spun in the other direction, and will be from a different kind of wool, and a little thinner. (This weft, by the way, is fairly thick with about 1.5-2 mm.)

With the last batch of this weft, I'm planning to do a little photo documentation of the setting effects - it does look like things happen to the yarn and the yarn twist angle between spinning, setting the twist and weaving, so the yarn in the woven fabric is a little different from the yarn right after spinning. It might be subtle, though, but I am definitely looking into that a bit. So: next skein - photo op before setting the twist (which I'm doing by steaming the yarn enthusiastically) and after.

I'm not spinning today, for a change - the yarn is still in transit, and once it has arrived (the two-ply to be woven together with some variants of the yarn for the next batch), we can discuss what I spin next, and how exactly regarding thickness and twist.

So instead, today there was finally time to sort out some paperwork, pay bills, make some space on the desk and now I will have to do the beloved (hah!) book-keeping and tax stuff. One day I will be rich enough to have somebody do that for me. (Maybe. Probably, by then, I'll have come to terms with it and have become so efficient at dealing with that stuff that I won't need somebody to do it for me anymore...)

Anyway, while I am doing stuff that is not spinning and not knitting, here's a picture of the current state of the knitting (which I'd rather be doing):

I have a Pirate Roberts on the needles, and I'm halfway through the pattern bit, so almost finished. Here it is only a few rows into the pattern part:


Also, the Vignette cardigan is almost finished. It needs blocking now - though I have discovered that one of the sleeves, due to Weird Yarn Shenanigans, looks much more pink than the rest of the pieces, so I'm considering knitting it again (from a different skein, obviously):


Aaaaand that being blogged, now I'm finally out of excuses not to get started with the bookkeeping stuff!

This, my dear readers, is eighthundredandseventy metres of Coburg Fuchsschaf two-ply:


weighing in at 1630 grams. It is a honking big chunk of yarn, and it will travel off now to be woven into a fabric of the kind once used for packing up stuff.

Yay.

There are days, sometimes, when things are just... not as usual. Today turned out to be one of them, partly due to my parents stopping by, and me trying to cram the usual amount of work into the day despite having coffee and a chat with them. The severe lateness of this blog post is thus due to my routine being thrown off plus the computer doing some shenanigans in the late afternoon, when I actually fired it up and would have had the chance to see, on my virtual to-do list, that blogging has not happened yet.

But, on the plus side, I did manage to get things done. So... the spinning of the next batch of yarn is finished, and I'm sitting on a heap (a true heap!) of really thick two-ply yarns. Tomorrow will see the yarn sent off after taking a few photos of the skeins, and the yarn, for documentation purposes.

Because, you see... I recently found out that there can be a quite remarkable difference between how yarn looks in the skein and how it looks in the fabric. Which is... interesting. In the Firefly oh-god-oh-god-interesting way, kind of:
Well... it looks like I will have to take care not to add too much twist (I cannot believe I'm really writing this), or the cloth will not look as it's supposed to look. I'm also developing a few more thoughts and hypotheses about twist angle and its reliability, all of which are interesting but not helpful at the moment - though they should be good, juicy stuff to talk about at NESAT in May...

Thank goodness it's Friday - I'm really looking forward to having a weekend and catching up on sleep. I mentioned that things are exciting a few days ago, right? Well, the downside to all that excitement, for me, is often a lack of sleep time. As in I go to bed, I fall asleep without a problem, but then I wake up way, way too early... and have a really hard time to fall asleep again. Hard time as in "normally it doesn't work at all".

So after a while of tossing and turning as little as possible (so I don't make myself even more awake and, even more important, neither the cat, who will then pester me to serve her food, nor the most patient husband of them all, who does not deserve to be woken by my sleeplessness, get disturbed), I usually give up, get up and do something more or less useful. In this morning's instance, that was some more spinning, and some more plying.

The weekend, on less than adequate sleep and the corresponding amount of coffee, though, is beckoning harder than usual now. There might be some extra spinning to get the perceived stress level of "so much still to spin" down a bit... but there will also be time to relax, and go for a climb, and do some more fun things - which is just what I need to balance out all that excitement!