Watching Achim's excellent video, I thought it was interesting the bobbins are wound anticlockwise (as most of the world seems to do) but then they were also shown wound clockwise '"for cotton".
Surely if you are going to sometimes use one direction and at other times the other, it would be more logical that the direction should be chosen to match the direction of twist, Z or S, rather than the fibre the thread is made from. I know a lot of linen threads are S twist, and a lot of cotton ones are Z, but there are still a lot in both categories that are the other way round. Does anyone actually wind one way for one twist and the other for the other? Does it actually make that much difference? And which way round is it? I thought it was anti-clockwise for Z twist, ie lots of cottons, but that's the other way round to Achim's video. Or perhaps so long as the important rules of "wind off the side not the top of the spool" and "wind the bobbin onto the thread, not the thread onto the bobbin" are observed, it doesn't much matter which way the thread is held on the bobbin. Does it help to prevent the problem that some people have, particularly with the Madeira cottons, of the thread untwisting and just falling apart. Or is this partly to do with the type of cotton fibre that Madeira is made from? I know we have had the start of this discussion in the past, but don't remember if it has ever been resolved, so I would be interested to hear from people who have done proper trials. Finally, I noticed that the thread winding was started at the bottom of the neck. I can see that this made it clearer to show the knot, but I saw bobbins wound this way in Spain and wondered how many of you do it like this. I was always taught (by several UK tutors), and have always taught my students, to start winding at the top of the neck, for two reasons. The first is that this way the thread stays on the bobbin longer when you are nearing the end. Secondly when you are using a bobbin without a head to hitch onto (like Honiton and Continental bobbins) the hitch is always on top of thread so it slips less and only needs a single wrap into the hitch. Jacquie in Lincolnshire - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
