Remember your first spinning lesson and the very first yarn you made? If your first lesson went anything like mine, that first yarn looked and felt a lot like a piece of thick bumpy rope. Besides working to master the coordination spinning takes the main goal was to make a nice, smooth thin yarn. And we did. We got our yarns thinner and thinner. But then, surprise! We wanted to spin a thicker yarn for a project and found that we could not do it, at least not easily so we had to relearn how to spin thick yarns.

One of the reasons we spin is so we can make the yarn we want when we want it. To be able to do this, a spinner must be able to comfortably spin yarns in a wide range of grists. The grist of a yarn is its thickness or diameter. Of course one way to increase the grist is to use multiple plies to make the final yarn but that does not always give us the yarn we want and can require spinning many bobbins of thin singles which takes more time. So why not learn to spin for the correct grist?

Here is an exercise for learning to control the grist of the yarn you spin.

You need:
A spinning wheel or spindle and some fiber to spin.
A piece of sturdy cardboard, such as the back of a tablet.
A scissors.
Some tape.
A WPI gauge or a ruler
A pen.

First, spin your comfort zone yarn and count the wraps per inch. To count wraps per inch, pull the yarn back through the orifice while winding it onto the wpi tool or ruler. Rather than winding the yarn around the tool, turn the tool so the yarn winds onto it. This prevents twist from being added or subtracted from your yarn.

Then mark your cardboard along the long edge as follows: 5 wpi,10 wpi, 15 wpi, 20 wpi, 25 wpi , 30 wpi , 35 wpi , 40 wpi. Leave some space between each number. Cut little slits at the top and bottom of the carboard. Then determine where your yarn fits. Say you have 20 wpi – mount a strand of that yarn in the 20wpi spot. If your yarn is, say 22 wpi, write in a 22 wpi category and mount the yarn there. To mount the yarn, insert and end in the top and bottom slits and tape the ends down on the back. Make a note on the cardboard that indicates that this is your comfort zone yarn.

Now it gets more interesting. If your comfort yarn was 22 wpi, try to get it a bit thicker and hit 20 wpi. When you get it, mount a sample. Then work towards the thicker end of the scale and hit the 15, 10 and 5 wpi marks. Don’t make new spaces for 8 wpi or 10 wpi – the object here is to work towards being able to spin a specific number of wraps per inch for your singles yarn.

After hitting the wpi goals for the thicker yarns, go the other direction and work towards the thinner yarns with more wraps per inch.

Once you’re done with this exercise, you will have a ready reference card with a control sample of 8 or 9 different grists of yarn to refer back to for project planning.