It is a mystery

Flax splicing research article here and a less scientific article here

Essentially you can make super super fine fibers by splicing instead of drafting and I wanted to see if I could do it. I've been doing a bunch of reading up on it and various techniques in various places. 

Initial thoughts on my experimenting, I did a little bit of it, maybe 10 minutes of splicing per “ply”. I did a two strand yarn:

Splicing: My technique after I fiddled with it a bit was to have the splicing end in my left hand and the already spliced fiber working through my right hand. My right hand was the wetting hand. I held the fibers between my pointer and thumb fingers with my palms up. I overlapped the fiber by 2-3 inches and pinched the end of the already spliced with my left hand and rolled the fiber between my left fingers while moving my right hand along the two spliced fibers to wet them and let the twist move along them. I twisted them in the S direction and let the extra twist run out the end of the unspliced fiber. I really want to try this with unhackled fiber because the split ends of the fibers really were difficult to smooth together. I just let the fiber pool into my lap although I will need to figure out a way to wind as I go I think.

At this point, I can probably say that the balls were stored dry because by the time I got around to wrapping the fibers into a ball, they had dried already. The joins were strong enough to hold up to gentle tugging as I wrapped it up.

Splicing was a success! Twisting, not so much

I made some mistakes with the ply balls, originally planning to put them on a dowel but it caught on the dowel and didn’t turn. The other issue is that the fiber soaked up the water extremely quickly and became very difficult to work with and I lost the ends more than once. I did many things wrong with this but I was able to do four arms length of twisting. My lightest spindle is also slightly too heavy I think, but I didn’t break the fiber during twisting so maybe not. I still haven’t figured out how much twist to put in but I think that will be something to figure out when I have more strands to work with. My “bowl” was just a shallow plate with a dowel secured across so the threads could run under it, would probably work better with larger balls.

I did make some yarn, but I’ve got some more figuring to do. Current problems to solve: figure out how to wind as I go, figure out actual ball winding and figure out appropriate amount of water to use in the bowl for how much fiber I’m using.

So I've got more to do and it was fun!