SpinnySpinny

I’ve finally gotten to writing the page about hackle blending I wanted to do. I don’t actually have a hackle, but you can do pretty much the same thing on a smaller scale with a wool comb. I did one of my blended yarns this way to get a striped top. The article shows how to make a two color striped top.

And after much yarn tossed in the trash, I’ve finally started the tussah silk for the fine skein. Dunking the fiber made a huge difference so now I’m planning how I want to dye the bombyx. I’m thinking of doing the silk swatch as an embroidered piece. I’m still toying with the idea of using it for brocade weft. The idea of pick-up pattern weaving is not a pleasant one, however.

The silk experiment is a success, and it’s a lot easier to work with this way. The fiber is very pretty, all soft and fluffy like that, but a pain to work with because it tries to escape at every opportunity. Now it looks like something wet and dead, but it spins better. Maybe if I get my act together, I’ll actually dye the bombyx to make it less dreadfully dull. The tussah at least has an interesting soft gold color.

As for the other tussah project, I realized last night that I have to wind off and empty the spindle. And it doesn’t look anywhere near full. But I’m spinning it with a sorta-long draw technique and the silk just slides all over the place. That 15g spindle now weighs 36g and I can’t get the fine yarn I was. I want to wind it on a bobbin for better storage but I’m actually thinking I’ll skein it to have a look. If I ever actually intend to do anything with this, I should try to spin something vaguely like it with the rest of the fiber.

I’ve started spinning some tussah silk top, trying to figure out how I want to work with it. I have tussah and bombyx top for the fine and extra fine yarns. I know it will be hard to get the finer bombyx to spin anything other than extra fine, so I’m trying fine with the tussah. It’s not that easy, either.

For a while now, my random spindle project has been some handpainted tussah. I like spinning that, so I thought about why and tried some of the undyed tussah on a spindle. The painted one drafts differently and is easier to control, it’s like the fibers are more likely to stick together rather than fly all over the place. So I tried an experiment and wet some regular tussah. After it dried, it was easier to work with because the outside layer formed something like a crust and held together more.

So I pulled off about 40g of it and wet it in the sink. The squeezed out fiber looks seriously nasty, like a pile of wet crumpled newspaper. But fleece doesn’t look all that nice when it’s wet either. I didn’t want to actually dye it, so I just dunked it in warm water. We’ll see what happens when it’s dry.