Beautiful Silks

My outing to Beautiful Silks on Saturday afternoon yielded a bag full of goodies.

I couldn't possibly sample their entire range, so I bought a few fabrics, some recycled sari silk and a small amount of high-twist mulberry silk yarn. They're all destined for my dye pots. Some will also require me to develop my sewing skills a little further if I want to hem them into scarves.

Meanwhile I'm just enjoying the beautiful drape and lustre of the fabrics. 

Small, Soft, Warm

I knitted up this little neck wrap this week:It's a combination of merino and silk, hand-dyed in purples. The forecast here is for a maximum of 12 degrees today, with showers and possible hail. I may be looking for something just a bit more bulky to wrap around my neck, but the first sunny day I'll be wearing it. It's so soft and warm and the colours are even richer than they appear in the pic.

Silk Simmer Sauce

With two Fridays off from TAFE and a few Monday mornings off from the Neighbourhood House for Easter, yesterday morning really felt like a holiday. Not that I don't have projects on the go and a long list of chores backed up for the break, but there was time to kick off a few experiments. Here's one: It's a strip of knitted wool-silk simmering away in an enamel pot on my stove. I've been observing how shibori dyeing on knitted wool can bring in some coincidental light felting to make a marvelous structure. I wanted to see how the First Editions wool-silk blend would stand up in the pot. The colour isn't actually part of the experiment, in this case it has come out of the sample--twenty minutes of steady simmering is not recommended care for most luxury fibres! The results are good or not so good depending on your point of view--no felting. That was despite the prolonged simmering followed by a shock of cold water when I tossed the piece into the sink. Good to know when I'm washing that particular fibre, but I guess I'll put something else at the top of the list of things I hope to felt easily.

Remember When

I appliqued and embroidered this silk top a dozen or so years ago. When I could no longer wear it--we won't talk about weight gain issues here--I passed it on to a friend. She recently mailed it back to me--again no mention of weight gain. It was years since I'd looked at it and I wondered what I would think. I like it enough to keep it even if I never wear it again. It was one of my early experiences of thinking "outside the box" with my design--literally, as the gum leaf and blossom design spills out over the edges of the background floral cotton square. I'm still fascinated by gum blossoms and leaves, though I think I'd be a bit more adventurous in my colour choices these days.

Wedding Pretties

I've just had my friend D on the phone. Her eldest daughter is getting married in January. She's at the wonderful stage of imagining and exploring all the exciting possibilities for frills and fripperies in, would you believe, Baby Pink! Thankfully for me, the stage of imagining that I could make the wedding dress--since I made several gorgeous dress up items in her growing up--is well past. The wedding dress has been purchased and if anyone makes the bridesmaids' dresses it won't be me. That just leaves the fun parts. D is planning an embroidered ring cushion. Together we just imagined the silk dupion, ribbons and emboidery floss into one of my dye-pots. Then I added matching silk hankies for the men. And ooh! what about little wrist purses for the bridal party.

Confession time--I'm not known for my frilly pink tendencies, but these three pieces of fabric were in the top of my "silk box". I don't expect any of them will actually be used, but here they are in their pretty inspiration. Now I just have to wait for some colour swatches--apparently a paint swatch from Bunnings is the thing! Then I can start playing with colour. Nine months out from the wedding, it all sounds like a lot of fun. And if all goes smoothly and there aren't too many last minute changes, it could continue to be lots of fun. Though I've experienced enough wedding preparations to know that somewhere along the line will be some complications and even tears.

Now as for today's realities--putting pretty baby pink aside. I have spinning and knitting to work on and a quilting class tonight. Oh, and no car. In non-textile news: my car was involved in an accident on the weekend--thankfully only the car was damaged, and the people are all ok. But it will be a few days before I know whether it will be fixed or written off.

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.

Still on the Silk

The trouble with spinning fine yarn is that a small amount goes a long long way! I guess in the end that's a good thing. I spent more time yesterday on my silk and to my great satisfaction, I got as far as plying it off. I even had a visitor in the evening who could point the camera for me, so here's an action shot: There are two tightly twisted singles of spun silk tops coming from my bobbins to the left of the picture. They are twisted together in the opposite direction and wound onto the bobbin on my wheel. My right hand is controlling the twist. So there you go. Now I need to wind the yarn off the bobbin, give it a little soak and let it dry. All going well, it should be ready to show off to my group on Saturday.

More Silk

One more silk picture: Here are some cocoons which have been stretched on a frame to turn it into a silk hanky. Here's how it works:

• The cocoon is degummed by boiling it gently in water and soap. That gets rid of all the goo which the silkworm uses to hold it together.
• That had been done a while ago and the cocoon had been dried again. So it was soaked in warm water all day to get it thoroughly wet.
• Then C, who was demonstrating just pulled the cocoon apart with her fingers. She hooked a bit of it onto one of the wooden spikes which you can see on the board.
• Then it was a case of stretching and stretching until the cocoon was entirely stretched over the frame.
• Several layers of cocoon later and there you have it.
• The hanky takes a while to dry. Then it's time for more stretching to get it ready to spin.

I always knew silk was remarkably strong, but my hands actually hurt after a couple of hours of spinning yesterday. Pulling those fibres apart so that they can be spun evenly is quite a task. I have a crazy image in my head of a textile gym--spinning wheels instead of exercise bikes, silk to stretch for arm strengthening and large cones of wool for weights . . . only kidding!

Silk, Silk, Silk!

I'm up to my elbows in silk!

Silk caps, silk tops, mulberry silk, tussah silk, silk blends . . . they're all over my big table. I have a skein of wool-silk blend drying in the bathroom--that was my completed task yesterday. Today I'm spinning silk caps. Silk caps are basically stretched out degummed coccoons. I'm spinning a fine yarn, but with the slubs and texture that come from a relatively unprocessed source. I like that.

There was an animated discussion in class on Saturday about keeping silkworms. I thought every Australian child kept silkworms--or at least knew someone who did, but obviously I was wrong. I remember having a shoebox with silkworms as a child. They munched away at mulberry leaves at an incredible rate. When they were big enough they spun their coccoon and waited to turn into moths. The moths were not so exciting to a child's eye. They were dull in colour and all they did as far as I could see was flutter uselessly, lay eggs and die. I must have missed the critical moment of mating. Then there were lots of tiny little eggs waiting to hatch out the following year.

I now know that those coccoons consisted of the marvelous looking shiny white stuff in the pic--mulberry silk. The other is tussah silk--you can see it's duller and rougher looking--but still, it's silk. The silkworms that make tussah silk feed on oak leaves. Silk tops are the cleaned and combed broken ends of coccoons.

OK, end of science lesson! I'm going to have another coffee and get back to my spinning.

Working with Silk

Here's my Working with Silk Kit: Yep, peppermint scrub, hand cream and nail file! The one prerequisite for working with silk is smooth hands. Rough skin catches on the fine silk fibres and spoils both the spinning and the enjoyment. I'm not usually at all precious about my hands, so these bits of pampering equipment have a permanent home in my spinning box. Most of these items came in my Christmas stocking--including the wool-themed emery board. It's nice having friends who understand.

As it turned out, my hands weren't the roughest in the class on Saturday. We have several members who come down from the country. They exchanged stories about stacking firewood, lost work gloves, boots and redback spiders. I must remember that comes as a package deal along with the paddocks, sheep and beautiful views which they also enjoy.

New Girl

We had a new girl in our spinning class yesterday. Her name is Lucy. She is six weeks old. Talk about a picture of pretty pink perfection! At 2.5 kg, she's hardly newborn size.Our tutors found themselves with a new responsibility: taking turns to settle and hold this little one while her Mum had a chance to get some spinning done in between feeds. The library doubled as a nursing mothers room. I got to hold little Lucy while Mum had some lunch. I must say we were all more than a little distracted.

Our topic for the day was silk. We worked with silk caps and tops and had a demonstration of stretching out coccoons to make a silk hanky. I spent the last part of the afternoon blending mulberry silk tops with merino. I now have about 40 g of lustrous luxury to spin up.

Light

It's still incredibly hot.

In Melbourne incredibly hot comes with a hot wind, so I have to shut up the house to try to keep the heat out. That makes a strange half-dark sort of atmosphere. But as a little bonus this caught my eye:It's a stained glass window which I haven't had installed. It sits on the pelmet above my North facing front window. And usually I only see light reflected off it's surface. But this is a little bit of light which is finding it's way behind the pelmet and through the glass. In this half-dark intense summer day I can see it.

Whenever I think of trying to capture light in my textile work, I think of silk--that incredible lustre that only silk has. It captures my eye and in this case, my minds eye.