You quoted this information,

  To show where you were standing:

"Peter Collingwood in The Techniques of Rug Weaving p. 61 and p. 93, "the yarn should be worsted-spun, with medium twist, from fairly coarse fibers." and "The spinning should be of the worsted, not woolen, type, both for strength and for resistence to fluffing out in use... The long staple lustre fleeces are the best..." "

And I will have to confess that I don't know this weaver, or his book...so do not know if he is combing or carding his wool.

  I do note to finding it more than passing curious that you will find most all source material tells you that wool must be combed to align the fibers, in order to spin them in a worsted way. While at the same time you almost never see a Dine or Hopi weaver who uses anything but hand cards, and yet almost always spin in a worsted or simi-worsted fashion. One exception to this is the 'fuzzy' blanket that does crop up now and then.

  Because I use both cards and combs and flicks,- poorly but continually, I will mention method for all, as pertains to my own shoddy way of going about it.
  Then I will tackle the problems facing a weaver who is facing many colored fleece with no more than a few sharpened sticks with odd bath tub stoppers, chair legs, and other curious things with holes in their middles, as weights on spindles, in order to spin cords needed for making simple coverings.

But first comes getting it ready to spin.

  If you have the top part of the fleece of a mature animal, so long tog or gard hairs are present, it is a time to spin your warp cords. Here is a good place to comb your wool so you end up with these mostly long fibers piled before you with most all the ends going the same direction. What is left in your combs from the first combings should be set aside for later carding.
Flicking these long locks will also give these results.

  For now, what you are interested in doing is to hold a lock of these long ends in your hand and comb the end on the cut side. Once the combed end is untangled and the shorter wool is in the comb, reverse your grasp onto the other cut end and comb the tip end you were holding before.

  When this lock has both ends combed, place it in a pile at your side, with the tips always pointing toward behind you. NEVER point these tips in the same direction you are facing. The reason for this will be explained.
  As you proceed to comb these long locks, you will end up with mostly longswool and tog. Properly spun, this is your very best warp. Keep placing these locks so they make a long pile, where the tip ends are always overlapping the cut ends, and don't let the thickness of this pile become larger than you can contain in your drafting hand.
  Once you have piled as much as you can place without having to move from your seat, it is time to start another pile, or spin what you have into a roving.

  Spinning this roving into a fingerling and then on down to a finer third spin, will give you a very strong and tightly spun cord with the cut ends inside and the tips on the outside.
The purpose of this will be explained. First, let me back up to tell the reason you NEVER point the tips the direction you are looking.

It is because if you NEVER do it, you will never get confused which direction you have been pointing them, and so switch in the middle of combing and piling them into the other direction, in one of these long rows of fibers to be spun.
It is also because this way you will know to always start spinning from the end of the pile furthermost away from you, or away from the end you started from. This causes you to be always be drafting from the cut ends toward the tip ends. Something that is also important to do when making baby blankets and especially worsted 'undies'- By the By. ;)

  If it is a strong 'navajo' warp you are needing, this method of combing and triple drafting down to a very fine and tightly spun cord, that is then triple plied into one continuos cord of no splices or knots, will give you the best to be found.
  I don't suggest using a 'navajo' ply for this, however, as the chain effect of the ply will be weaker where the plies chain together. It may not seem important until a large piece has been stretched tightly enough to play a tune on, over a period of more than a year, to have warps start giving away, just as you are finishing the last inches of the weave.
(If you have forgotten to disconnect your sheep from this fleece at this point, do not expect much wool production from it for a year or more.)

  What you will notice about this method, is that you are processing a lot of wool, but slowly and with little resulting spinable fiber and a lot set aside. It is an exacting way of removing the best for the purpose of a well made warp.
Faster ways are to be used when spinning your weft or woof cords. Here it is better to combine the long and short wool together. And just as soon as I say that, I must follow it with a caution. Those little nappy pills and extremely short fibers left in your combs or cards must not be used in spinning your wool. They will cause lumps and pills and differing thicknesses in your spinning.
This is a problem with some comercially carded fiber bats and rovings.

  You may wish to continue to only comb all your wool, but here is where I like to flick-card or card mine. The main differences is how it is removed from the cards and how it is spun, in the case of the Hopi and Dine using worsted and simi-worsted wools.

  You can attempt to remove it from the card in its flat form and then roll your rolag so the fibers run the same direction. (The side to side method.)   Or you can do as I do and remove it on the diagonal, so the fibers coil around the rolag, while still going in the same direction of its length.   The main advantage I find in this is that i can elongate the rolag to about three times the long width of the card. As well as being able to also roll one rolag onto the end of the last. So that a long rope of wool is had, similar to a roving.

Now it must be understood that drafting wool under a slight twist will also align the fibers. So the use of the triple spin in navajo weaving, accounts for a lot of why carded rolags can be spun into worsted and simi-worsted wool.
  This is easily done with the navajo spindle, once the method is understood.




  Listen to the Star-music.

It is always playing.

  Chu'a



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