Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Durability testing

I am sure that many of my readers, and perhaps the great majority of my readers have tested yarns with nylon content for durability, e.g., compared yarns with nylon to yarns without nylon.

A better experimental design is to compare yarns with nylon to yarns without nylon at different gauges.  Do that, and you discover that knitting tighter brings more improvement than adding nylon, and that with the medium long wools, the tightly knit, properly blocked, all wool yarns are the most durable.

Then the questions are how to knit tighter, how to knit ergonomically, and how to avoid stiff fabrics. A knitting sheath will let you knit tighter, without ruining your wrist.  Thinner yarns of more plies will allow softer drape even with the tighter knitting.

Thinner yarns of more plies, knit tightly result in light, durable, warm fabrics with a delicacy that we do not often see today. They seem to be almost magical.

With a good DRS spinning system, even fine yarns of  many plies can be produced much faster than they can be knit.The cost of production is dominated by the labor to knit the object.  A couple of days of spinning will produce the yarn for a couple of weeks of knitting.

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