additional planning and troubleshooting
This week, I decided to do a bit of sampling with the materials that I have on hand. All that this is very much experimental, but I think I've reached some valuable conclusions that will be helpful for the experiment proper.
For the record, I did most of this in one sleepless night in lieu of my hobby knitting, so don't worry about me impeding on "actual" (read: academic) work time. Also, now that I have some visual progress, additional pictures can be found on Instagram (@atortuositystudy), because these posts are pretty lengthy as is without a total inundation of photos.
errata
I forgot to say in the last post that we will need to make 5 samples of each type. Reflecting further on experimental holes, I don't really have an airtight 5-by-5 plan; I don't feel very confident about the idea of stripping into 5 plies, but that's a possible option. Probably, for a formal lab report, I would stick to just measuring the impact of different numbers of plies, and the rest of the factors I'm analyzing would just sort of be 'fun fact!' additional content. Anyways, if I do end up also making a 5-ply, I will only be making a traditional 5-ply.
pre-drafting
I have some wool (... well... 'fibre of unknown content' might be a better descriptor) from a needle felting kit in my stash, so I spun a few swatches using a makeshift drop spindle.
The first one is a 3-ply Navajo yarn, spun with slightly pre-drafted fibre. It's really fine (i.e. thin), and fairly consistent, but I ran into a lot of breakage while I was spinning. Although I wouldn't really mind this if I was spinning for clothing (tensile strength is not a top priority for that kind of stuff), since I'm measuring tensile strength in this experiment, I think that this is a variable that might mess with the results. As a result, I have now officially fully ruled out the possibility of drafting while spinning
Next, I did a 2-ply yarn with fully pre-drafted fibre. I didn't experience any breakage in this case, since the spindle was neither adding twist nor weighing down on the fibre while I was drafting. It's not perfectly consistent, but it turned out a lot better than I was honestly expecting. Based on the inconsistency, I think I need a better way to measure how much I've drafted -- this will also be helpful if I want to make a sample that is exactly 2 times thinner, for example.
With that in mind, I decided to try hand-painting the wool before spinning, so that I could draft it in equal parts. I've dyed before, but I normally work with superwash yarns, so working with a feltable fibre was definitely a different experience, since agitation was a legitimate (and huge) concern. The first method I used was hand-painting (I used food dye -- specifically, some very old Wilton's Teal, and neon purple Club House -- and white vinegar as mordant), then wrapping tightly in plastic wrap and microwaving. Since I was working with a pretty small sample, I microwaved for 1 minute to set the twist, then rinsed with lukewarm water. To my (pleasant) surprise, I didn't encounter any bleeding with the fibre. That, however, is where the pleasantness ended.
Although the dye set well, the colours bled really heavily into each other. This defeated my original intention of using the hand-painted sections to carefully manipulate the amount of drafting I did. As a result, I decided to strip the roving into two haves, and then just pre-draft a little and try to spin the sections separately. That didn't work particularly well, since once again (surprise surprise), I drafted too thin and had a lot of breakage. I think part of my tendency to draft super thin is that I am a knitter who prefers to work with lace/fingering weight yarns, so my instinct is to attempt to create them. However, especially with a drop spindle, this is simply not realistic. (I also think that the fibre I'm working with might be a little bit rougher than standard spinning fibre, which makes things more complicated.) Anyways, since that didn't work out, I just took the one half of the dyed roving that I'd already spun and Navajo plied it.
Since at this point I finally (finally!) got it through my thick skull that I was just going to have to deal with thicker yarn, I took the remaining half of the roving and stripped it into 3 equal parts. Then, I pre-drafted it just a little bit (I mean it, Future Jasmine -- just a little bit -- because otherwise the roving becomes too delicate, and breaks, because there's no twist to keep it together), to loosen up the fibres. I spun this without any additional drafting, winding the singles onto marker pens to hold them while I worked on the other plies. Finally, I lined up all the ends and plied the singles into a 3-ply yarn. This -- thankfully -- turned out pretty well. The colours didn't line up perfectly, but that's honestly okay. The thickness of the yarn seems pretty reasonable, although I think I might spring for something a little thicker for the actual experiment, since I need to strip all the way down to a 4-ply.
In an attempt to dye a slightly more effective roving, I went ahead and soaked another piece of roving in the leftover vinegar. I soaked the roving in white vinegar for longer this time, so that the dye would take faster. Using the same dyes as before, I hand-painted a little less colour onto the fibre, then wrapped it very loosely in plastic wrap. I then dropped it in a pot of boiling water for about 7 minutes, after which I removed it from the water and let it cool. As always, I rinsed in cold water before letting it dry. The colours still weren't totally clearly defined, but they were separated enough that I was able to get decent measurements off of it. To spin, I stripped it into 4 equal parts, pre-drafted to about 1.25 times the original length, then spun the same way I did the 3-ply. I know a lot of these words mean absolutely nothing to you, so a video of this process can be found here. I hope it helps.
I'm pretty happy with how this last sample turned out, so this is probably how I will work my final project (obviously stripping/drafting for the appropriate samples). Of course, there's a lot of possibility for change, since this worked well for this specific fibre, but might not work with the experiment fibre.
tensile strength
With that finally figured out, I went ahead and started experimenting with handspun polyfill (the stuff that goes in stuffed animals, etc.) yarn to see how much weight it can hold, and thus how best to experiment with my handspun. At first, I considered using commercial yarn, but after an initial test, I decided that it would not provide an accurate reflection of what I should expect out of handspun. I ended up using the polyfill yarn rather than spinning more wool since I wasn't sure how many attempts I would have to make, and there are more productive uses of my time than spinning an endless number of pieces of yarn so that I can break them (I had the polyfill on hand from a brief phase I went through a couple of years ago).
Anyways, my first attempt involved the commercial yarn (I think was CraftSmart Super Value) and a beach bucket of water. I cut a 14" piece of yarn, then tied it to the (empty) bucket and a horizontal pole. Slowly, I poured in water, until the bucket was filled. I was expecting the yarn to break at some point -- and while it did stretch, clearly undergoing a fair amount of tension, it never broke.
I did my second attempt using the handspun polyfill, since it's weaker than the commercial yarn. To my shock, the yarn still did not break. Truly, the yarn wasn't that strong -- I am able to snap it by hand, and you have already read by now about my tendencies to spin fragile yarn -- so I decided to keep messing around with this bucket first.
For my next attempt, I pulled the yarn taut, knotting it to some hooks. This was done with the intention of decreasing the amount of additional tension the yarn could take. Again, it didn't work. At this point, I was kind of exhausted, so I just let the camera roll and didn't take actual photo documentation. Hopefully, I will edit that video together sometime soon -- but I make no guarantees. (I also don't think a video is particularly necessary here, since the idea of 'hang a bucket off a metal bar' is something that is universally pretty easy to visualize.)
In the end, I decided that the ideal way to do testing was with a doubled length of yarn, knotted to the lower bar. I added water to a medium-sized bucket into 1 dL increments. I found it was important to wrap the handle bar with fabric, to make sure that the roughness of the plastic didn't cause the yarn to snap. Whether or not that will hold up to the real experiment, I'm not sure, but I'm really really hoping that it will. Given that it worked for both the commercial yarn and my extremely weak polyfill handspun, I think it should work ok.
Up next, I need to do some research regarding the uses of tensile strength in society (e.g. architecture), and then format everything into a nice post.
[Also, update: materials arrived literally just before I published this post. Still in quarantine, though.]
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