Two skeins can come off the same breed, the same fleece, the same spindle — and behave like different materials. The difference is decided before the spinning starts: how the fiber was prepared. The spinning handbooks draw the line in two steps — carded wool becomes woolen yarn, combed wool becomes worsted — and everything the yarn does on your hands follows from one of those two preps.
Carding takes two paddles (drum carders do the work later) and opens the fleece into a jumble: fibers pointing every direction, short and long mixed, air trapped between them. Spin that jumble with a long draw — the drafting hand moving back as the fiber flows — and the yarn keeps the jumble's structure: cloudy, lofty, fuzzy at the surface, full of air pockets. Air is the insulation; a woolen sweater is warm because its yarn is mostly caught air. The fuzz also hides uneven dye absorption and forgives the occasional bad join, which is why woolen spun was the everyday workhorse of handspinning for centuries.
Combing does the opposite work. A comb (or a set of them) passes the fleece through a row of tines that remove the short fibers and leave a bundle of long ones lying parallel — the smooth, dense preparation. Spun with a short draw, the yarn comes out sleek, strong, and firm: the fibers run along the yarn, the surface sheds light cleanly (the sheen), and the twist shows as definition. Worsted yarn is the crisp one — it holds a stitch or a weave line sharp, drapes with weight, and pills less because there's less loose fiber at its surface to tangle into bobbles.
The wear decides. A warm layer for standing around a winter camp: woolen, for the air. A coat surface that reads as neat, a smooth band, a warp that has to survive tension on the loom: worsted, for the parallel strength and the low fuzz. Twill's clear lines and worsted's sheen grew up together in the cloth towns of Europe for a reason: combed warp-faced cloth wants combed yarn. And when you spin for it yourself, the twist rule from the learn page applies to either prep: single direction in the singles, the opposite in the ply, and the yarn stays balanced and free of kink.
Band weaving on this site's drafts gallery runs on yarn in both characters — the wool bands in the Viking Age archive carried hard-twist warps for wear, and the difference between their crispness and a woolen blanket's loft is this whole page in miniature.
Card a cloud, comb a ribbon, and cut some string this week. — the bench crew
