Yarn

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''This article is about yarn fiber. A yarn is also a type of long and involved story, such as a shaggy dog story or a campfire yarn.

Yarn is a long continuous length of interlocked fibers, suitable for use in the production of textiles, sewing, crocheting, knitting, weaving and ropemaking. Yarn is any fiber used to construct a fabric. Thread is any fiber used to sew two pieces of fabric together.

Materials

Yarn can be made from any number of natural or synthetic fibers.

The most common natural fiber is wool, followed by alpaca, angora, and cashmere. More rarely, yarn may be spun from camel, yak, possum, cat, dog, wolf, rabbit, or buffalo hair, and even turkey or ostrich feathers.

Other natural fibers that can be used for yarn include silk, linen, and cotton. These tend to be much less elastic, and retain less warmth than the animal-hair yarns, though they can be stronger in some cases. The finished product will also look rather different from the woolen yarns. Other plant fibers which can be spun include bamboo, hemp, and soy fiber.

A number of synthetic materials are also commonly made into yarn, chiefly acrylic. All-acrylic yarns are available, as are wool-acrylic blends in various proportions. Some other synthetics are available as well; yarn designed for use in socks frequently contains a small percentage of nylon, and numerous specialty yarns exist.

Construction

Yarns are made up of any number of plies, each ply being a single spun yarn. These single plys of yarn are twisted in the opposite direction (plied) together to make a thicker yarn.

In some cases, thread may be monofilament, in which case it is a single fiber. The only natural fiber that is counted as monofilament is silk.

A relatively recent trend is the novelty yarn. Typically these involve at least one or two strands of regular yarn twisted together with something else to make an interesting texture. The extra element can be a metallic thread, artificial fur, a much-thicker or much-narrower strand of yarn, yarn that varies between thick and thin (also called bouclé yarn), or yarn that has short bits of plastic sticking out at ninety degrees from the main strand. Novelty yarns are frequently made from nylon.

Some novelty yarns are "ladder yarns," which means that they are constructed like ladders. These are most commonly synthetic.

Measurement

Yarn quantities are usually measured by weight. In the United States, balls of yarn for handcrafts are usually sold in three-ounce, four-ounce, six-ounce, and eight-ounce skeins. In Europe, yarn is often sold in increments of 25 grams, with 25g, 50g, and 100g being common quantities. These measurements are taken at a standard temperature and humidity, because yarn can absorb moisture from the air.

There are several thicknesses of yarn, also referred to as weight. There is an industry-standard system for measuring this, numbering the weights from 1 (finest) to 5 (heaviest), but it is not precise and tends to be subjective. There are also names for the various weights of yarn, but they are also subjective. From finest to thickest, they are called lace, fingering, sock, sport, double-knit, worsted, aran, bulky, and super-bulky. This is also not precise; fiber artists disagree about where on the continuum each lies, and the precise relationships between the sizes.

A more precise measurement of yarn weight, often used by weavers, is wraps per inch (wpi). The yarn is wrapped snugly around a ruler and the number of wraps that fit in an inch are counted.

Labels on yarn for handcrafts often include information on gauge (knitting), known in the UK as tension, which is a measurement of how many stitches and rows are produced per inch or per centimeter on a specified size of knitting needle or crochet hook.

In Europe textile engineers often use the unit tex, which is the weight in grams of a kilometer of yarn. Decitex (dtex) is the weight in grams of 10 kilometers of yarn. Many other units have been used over time by different industries.

Color

Yarn may be used undyed, or may be colored with natural or artificial dyes. Most yarns have a single uniform hue, but there is also a wide selection of variegated yarns:

heathered or tweed: yarn with flecks of different colored fiber
ombre: variegated yarn with light and dark shades of a single hue
colorway: variegated yarn with two or more distinct hues (a "parrot colorway" might have green, yellow and red)
self-striping: yarn dyed with lengths of color that will automatically create stripes in a knitted or crocheted object
marled: yarn made from strands of different-colored yarn twisted together, sometimes in closely-related hues

Uses

Knitters often use worsted-weight yarn spun from the wool of a sheep, though mohair, angora, and alpaca are also well-known. Natural fibres such as these have the advantage of being slightly elastic and very breathable, while trapping a great deal of air, making for a fairly warm fabric.

Manufacture

Yarn is manufactured by either a spinning or air texturizing (commonly referred to as taslanizing) process. Yarn manufacturing was one of the very first processes that was industrialized.

Yarn used for fabric manufacture is made by spinning short lengths of various types of fibers. Synthetic fibers which have high strength, artificial lusture, and fire retardant qualities are blended with natural fibers which have good water absorbance and skin comforting qualities, in different proportions to manufacture yarn for fabric. The most widely used blends are cotton-polyester and wool-acrylic fiber blends.

External links

Craft Yarn Council of America
How to buy enough yarn: Wraps per inch method
Standards & Guidelines for yarn, needle and hook labeling

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