Warmth

I'm getting to the bottom of the list of silk yarns for my Spinning Folio. Thankfully this end of the list deals with various forms of "silk waste": lumpy, bumpy interesting stuff. Yesterday's skein was coloured even! Raspberry merino tops blended with sari silk waste--"throwster's waste"--on my hand carders. I selected pink and orange tones and got this warm mix. Just as well since yesterday was also the first day this year that I've kept my heater on all day. I appreciated having some warmth in my hands.

I went on to blend some white silk waste with mohair and wool. Two bobbins are spun and ready to be plied. After that all I need to do is work through a list of cellulose fibres and put everything in order ready to hand in. But today it's beading. I'm off to the Neighbourhood House soon for my first session of Jewellery Making.

End in Sight

Here's the checklist I'm working from to finish my Spinning Certificate Folio requirements. I got myself a bit more organised over the weekend and checked off the skeins I've already completed. There are a few more silk blends to do on this page. I'll happily tackle those this week. I love working with silk and I've already done the fine smooth ones last year. Now I'm looking forward to some interest textures and colours with the various forms of silk waste. The next couple of units were felting and dyeing--I got those all done at the time. Then there's a section on various cellulose fibres: bamboo, tencel, soy etc. And that's it!

Lumpy Bumpy

After a week of spinning silk tops to make a fine, smooth yarn, yesterday morning was a great contrast. We worked with various forms of silk "waste". On this bobbin I've mixed silk noils with some wool: Noils are the irregular fragments of silk product which are discarded when the smooth silk is reeled off the coccoons. So there's no way to make a smooth yarn out of them. There are short ends, snags and lumps of silk in random clumps in my bag of noils. But the important thing is that even though it might be "waste", it's silk waste. And silk waste is not to be wasted.

I love lumpy bumpy yarns. Spinning the noils on their own is challenging, because the fibres are all different lengths and predominantly short. Short lengths are hard to control in the spinning process. Mixing with wool helps to hold the yarn together. We had the option of using coloured wool, but I chose white. That's because I'm looking forward to dyeing what I've spun up. The silk and wool will take up the dye differently. I'm hoping that the noils will dye as brilliantly as silk normally does. If that works, I'll have random flecks of brighter coloured silk in amongst my dyed wool. But first, I have to spin another bobbin of this stuff and ply the yarn. Then I can get on with some of the other forms of silk waste we had to play with yesterday.

Order of Magnitude

I've been talking about my fine silk yarn. So, just how fine is fine? The technical definition has to do with the number of times a strand of the particular yarn can be wound around a one inch measure. But I don't have time to do that this morning. I need to be out the door in under an hour, and the place is a mess. I glanced around the living room this morning to find something to give an idea of scale. Ah ha--a pin! Unfortunately this is one of my quilting pins so it's a bit bigger than the average pin, but hopefully you get the idea. Anyway, that will have to do for now.

Today we're spinning silk noils and silk waste--translation: lumpy, bumpy, interesting stuff! I have to admit, I'm a bit over fine white yarn for now.