Spindle Obsession

Yesterday I took a little break from the wool I’m spinning for the Tour de Fleece and started working with the silk cap I bought at the Estes Park Wool Market. I had never before bought silk in a cap form, so I thought it would be fun to try. Here’s what it looked like before I started:

Following the instructions I’ve read in a few places, including Knitty.com, I separated a thin sheet from the rest of the cap like so:

Here’s a single sheet of the silk:

As you can see, there was already a hole starting to form at the middle, so I just made it a little bigger and started pulling and lengthening it so it started to resemble a piece of circular roving.

Next, I broke it at at thin part and continued to pull it out into a thin roving. Here’s the result:

I’ve just started to spin it on my Bosworth mini drop spindle. I plan to spin it as fine as I can, and eventually turn it into a 2-ply. Fun stuff!

Have you spun silk before? How did you prepare and spin it?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

My second day of class at Estes was also a fiber blending class. However, unlike the first day, this class was a lot more free form, with less talk about blending specific percentages of colors and more about playing.

There were several specific exercises though, to give us ideas about how various combinations of fiber might turn out. For example, one exercise we did was blending some fibers together to get a base color, then blending the base fiber with varying amounts of black or white fiber to see how it changed the base color. You can see the result of that experiment by looking at the purple skeins below.

For me, the most interesting part of the class was getting a chance to play with fiber that I wouldn’t otherwise have tried. For some of the exercises, we worked with partners, which was fun because it got me to try colors and fibers (witness the sparklies in skein in the top middle) that I wouldn’t necessarily have picked on my own.

I’m really glad I got the opportunity to take both of these classes. They’ve given me a bit more confidence about working with color and different fibers to create new effects. Now, instead of just choosing a roving and spinning it as-is, I feel like I’ll be able to tweak what I buy a bit so I’ll end up with just the yarn I want.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!