My Love Affair...With Silk

I think silk is THE wonder fiber. It's lightweight, warm, hypoallergenic, it dyes magnificently, spins easily, you get a lot of spun yardage per pound of silk, there are nearly countless varieties of silk to spin and silk fabrics to work with, it feels wonderful, requires minimum care and upkeep, and I don't think there's a fiber to compare with it, all these things considered.

So I'm kind of in love with the stuff. I just finished up four ounces of bombyx silk top I dyed last week, which yielded close to 1000 single-ply yards. Here's the just-dyed silk and the finished yarn...

Now I'm spinning some carded silk and plying it with a very fine bombyx. I just started on it this morning and made this sample...

And I have a silk piece in a new show at The Ink People Center for the Arts in Eureka, that opened last weekend. The theme of the show is "Gold," and my piece is called Silk Into Gold. I actually wear this piece in the wintertime...it's 100% bombyx silk, hand dyed, handspun, handwoven. It's quite warm and it has heft, even though the warp sett is 30 epi (ends per inch -- which means how closely set the warp ends are -- finer threads, more ends per inch).

A reminder to my silk-spinning readers that I have many varieties of silks to spin at my Etsy site, such as:

• bombyx top
• tussah top
• bombyx hankies and caps
• merino/bombyx 50/50
• merino/tussah 80/20
• alpaca/merino/tussah 50/30/20
• silk/bamboo 60/40
• silk/cotton 55/45
• tussah/baby camel 50/50

And for the spinners among you who haven't tried silk, you really need to. IMHO, you haven't really spun 'til you've spun silk!

Happy Spinning, and happy weekend all!