Woollen - what the heck is that?

I just finished off the first lot of Shetland Grey using my standard spinning style - worsted.

The wife then informs me that we need woollen spun yarn. I have never spun woollen.

Originally she told me that to felt we would need worsted wool. We looked around the country and found very little wool let alone worsted. Most of the yarns available were 90% acrylics and 10% natural fibres (not really specifying what natural fibre means). So we decided that I could spin some nice fleeces into wool and she could felt them.

She had read that she needed worsted wool to felt small fluffy objects and so that is the method I had learned. I have produced half a kilo of yarn based on the worsted spinning method. We tried to felt a couple items using worsted and it took an age to get to any stage that was satisfactory. Recently she read that you cannot felt worsted wool - which I disagree with. With tenacity and a very busy washing machine you can felt even the most disagreeable piece of knitted woollen wear.

So I have turn my thoughts to the woollen spinning style. Supposedly it is a similar style to worsted but your hands are doing different things.

My thinking when spinning is to transform this mess of tangled chaos into a cohesive order of wooly contentment. The fleecy fibres are going every direction and take these and make a yarn out them that is ordered. The division between these two states is the two fingers that hold the wool before it hits the orifice. Our one hand is untangling the mass of wool while the other two fingers are the final stage between the mass of fibre and the fine yarn being produced.

Woollen spinning seems to be based on using jumbled fibres and keeping them jumbled but twisting them into yarn. My little binary brain cannot deal with this dichotomy. A fibre cannot be unaligned and yet ordered.

I will need to figure this out.