Friday, June 04, 2021

Using the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter to Sample Yarn Gauges and Ply the Yarn Weight I Want



Last year, Maurice Ribble asked me to beta test a prototype of the Dreaming Robots EEW Yarn Counter - a little gadget that measures yarn.*

*Full Disclosure - I'm a Dreaming Robots Affiliate.  If you click through and make a purchase, I will receive a small percentage of the purchase price at no additional cost to you.  All profits from my blog go a small way towards funding future blog posts.


Aside from just measuring finished yarn, my mind has been buzzing with other uses for the yarn counter.  I think one of the most valuable tasks it can undertake is to help with dividing yarn up into however many plies you need.

I think every experienced spinner eventually works out that there are a few neat tricks that you can do to use one bobbin full of yarn to make a plied yarn more efficiently.  Whether it is chain plying, Andean plying, or winding a centre pull ball and plying from either end of that.  All of these methods, (in their simplest forms), take a little skill and practice, and result in either a two or three-ply yarn.  I started to wonder if I could use the EEW Yarn Counter to measure off small samples of singles, ply them, wash and then swatch them to work out how many plies of a certain single are required to spin specific gauges of yarn.


I spun a bobbin full of hand-blended merino on my Nano.  I was attempting to see the maximum amount I could get on my hand made resin bobbins, but at the same time, spinning singles for a long-term mitred blanket project I’ve been working on.   I should say that this is my default spinning weight on the Nano.  It’s the gauge of singles that I spin when I’m not concentrating on thickness, and the type of yarn I find most relaxing to spin.  If I were to chain-ply it, I know from experience that it would make a good sock weight yarn, but, for example, I’m not sure what I would get if I were to make a 6 or 7 ply yarn.  I was intrigued to find out…

Sampling for swatching


I knew that I wanted to turn the singles into a double knit yarn, but I wasn’t completely sure how many plies I needed.  My guess was 5, but you can rarely be completely sure how your yarn is going to turn out until you’ve plied and washed it.  (Spoiler alert - I was wrong.)


This is where the yarn counter is just invaluable.  In the past, if I’ve wanted to do a sample ply of more than 3 singles, I had to spin a set number of grams onto a few bobbins and ply those.  It was impossible to get exactly the same length onto each bobbin, I always ended up using a lot more than I needed and there was always wastage at the end.


With the yarn counter, I was able to measure off exactly 12 metres onto each bobbin.  I have 7 of these storage bobbins and so out of curiosity, I made sample yarns in 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 plies.


Here are all of my various plied yarns, all knotted together for washing…


I would always recommend knitting a full swatch to definitively determine the gauge of your yarn.


However, I designed my mitred blanket to allow me to use any gauge of yarn I want and I’ve knitted so many mitred squares, that I’m able to tell very quickly whether or not I’ve estimated the yarn gauge and needles required correctly.  


After comparing my plied yarns with the yarns on my yarn gauge reference tool and knitting the beginnings of a mitred square, I’m able to conclude that 4 plies of my singles make a double knit yarn.


I’ve now added my plying samples to my yarn gauge reference tool to give me a starting point in the future when I’m looking to ply to a particular yarn gauge.


I made a short YouTube video of my process for measuring off singles to make a 4 ply double knit yarn here

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If you’d like to learn a little more, read on…

I tried three different methods for winding my singles onto bobbins that worked for me. I do not recommend trying to wind them onto centre pull balls. I tried that, it got very messy during plying, especially as I was dealing with 5 of them. If none of these methods is available to you, you could just wind your singles onto ping-pong balls, while pulling them through the yarn counter.   I’m sure that would work just as well, it would just take much longer.


The first method I used was to attach the storage bobbins that I got with my Electric Eel Wheel 5 to a power drill, running the singles through my Yarn Counter until I reached the desired length.  This worked very well, but I have chronic pain and the drill is very heavy.  It needed to be held at an angle with the button compressed.  This would not be a problem for most people, but it was for me.


The second tool I used was an electric screwdriver.  This was significantly lighter and easier on my shoulder, but it was slow!

I did manage to do all of the sampling with the electric screwdriver though and, as I was only winding off 12m at a time, the slow pace was a bit of an advantage as it made it easier to keep an eye on the rising measurement.


Well, necessity is the mother of invention, and if I hadn’t found using the drill so painful, and the screwdriver so painfully slow, I wouldn’t have felt the need to look for another device to wind my bobbins with.  I didn’t have to look far, as I had the original Nano 1.0 from the Kickstarter.  I found that if I unscrewed the flyer arms and wrapped a couple of layers of washi tape around the flyer rod to stop the bobbin from rotating, I had myself a bobbin winder.  It’s so much better than using a drill, or an electric screwdriver as it doesn’t need to be held in position, it goes faster than I could ever need and you don’t need to keep the button pressed down to get it to work.  It’s almost like it was made for winding bobbins!


This section of the video shows how I added washi tape to the flyer to stop the bobbin from rotating.


You can see how my setup looks in this section of the video.  It’s a very basic arrangement with my Nano, Yarn Counter and Lazy Kate all in a straight line.  I chose to use the Lazy Kate on my Ashford Traveller as it’s raised up slightly and stays firmly in place.

Once I had the Lazy Kate to yarn counter to Nano bobbin winder in position and working well, I could turn the speed right up and I only needed to guide the yarn onto the bobbin with my hand to load it evenly.


This photo gives an idea of just how fast I was able to run the singles through the Yarn Counter and onto the bobbin as I stepped away for just a few moments to film the yarn being pulled off the bobbin by my makeshift Nano bobbin winder.


After filling the bobbin, the yarn counter gave me a singles measurement of 464m.  Dividing that by 4, I need to wind off 3 bobbins measuring 116m (the remaining 116m will be on the original bobbin).


Well, it didn’t take long to measure off and ply 4 singles together, and here is the DK yarn after it’s been for a soak.  


Interestingly, the 4 x 116m singles have now become 103m of plied double knit yarn.  This is the first time I’ve been able to measure both the plied yarn and the original singles that made it and it’s quite helpful to see how much singles can shrink by when the twist is added and the yarn is washed.

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The Kickstarter for the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter launched on May 20th, 2021, and after watching the video, I saw yet another use for the Yarn Counter that I hadn't considered.


Maurice's wife, Emily, demonstrated how the yarn counter can be placed between your yarn and knitting to measure how much yarn a particular project takes.  I tried it with one of my stuffed mitred squares and it worked a treat!

I'm sure there must be many more uses for this clever little device that spinners, weavers, dyers and knitters will all discover eventually - I can't wait to see the ideas that this innovative group of makers come up with!

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At this point, I normally suggest similar related blog posts, however, my list of spinning-related content is becoming a little unmanageable...  If you'd like to read more blog posts about spinning and fibre preparation, please take a look at this page here where you will find links to all of my spinning and fibre articles.  

Thank you for reading, and happy spinning! 


Testing the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter
Prototype to Spin a 5 ply yarn

Spinning a Complex Fractal 3 Ply Yarn

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1 comment:

Norma said...

Oh my gosh! So much goodness here! Now, I REALLY can't wait to get my yarn counter. Thanks so much for everything you do.

6/07/2021 6:17 pm

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