Silk the final frontier....................

Like many spinners I started with an easy fibre - I think my first spinning was done with a Portland fibre and plied with Corriedale.  Also like most new spinners it was thick and tin and over twisted and under plied - but it was my very first yarn and I was proud of it!

Time moves on and your spinning improves, as does the variety of fibres spun - recently for the SpinDyeWeavers display board I have been helping out by spinning some British breeds and dyeing using nature's harvest.  All this has been great fun, some fleece is a joy and some you can understand why they make carpets................  but they are all different and were and still are bred for a particular purpose.  For the natural dyeing I used a Cheviot (mainly because it was the cheapest British fibre available from World of Wool) and it is rather coarse - well it is a Hill breed, with a fleece designed to keep out the wind and rain and rather more important to keep the sheep warm!

Well after all this I decided that I needed a treat and perhaps a bit of luxury, pampering in fact.  So I delved into my stash and found a 25gram samples of silk that I had dyed back in May 2011 using Procion MX Dyes.

The brown was gifted, but the turquoise I still had, and here it is spun up

What an absolute delight it was to spin - Demelza definitely a wheel for silk, a double drive and crossed on the flyer to get more twist - this is so fine I could do cross stitch with it....

This, not very good photo of the crossed yarn on the flyer, shows Lavender's Blue being spun.  Well I just had to experiment with dyeing more silk - this is Tussah silk (that's wild silk where the grub is allowed to live) which I dyed in the oven, using Landscape, Saltmarsh, Dusk and Sun Orchid....

The colours were inspired by the lavender growing in our garden which the bees love.....

A Tussah Silk Moth - isn't it beautiful, so more colourful than the Bombyx Mori?

Here's some more dyed silk, again Tussah (I like the idea that the grub gets to become a Moth!)

Which I call Mr Tangerine Man

Spinning Tussah silk is very different to spinning Mulberry Silk (or the silk from the Bombyx Mori moth where the grub is smothered before it can eat it way out of the cocoon) very smooth and soft and spins up like a dream, you hardly have to draft at all!

This I called Golden Rain, again oven dyed (at the same time as Lavender's Blue, so two for the price of one) with Landscape Broome and Dusk and spun cobweb

 

 

Another thing with silk that makes it so rewarding is you don't need vast quantities - all these are 50 grams and produced enough yarn for a shawl - so luxury at a bargain price!