Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Recharing Batteries -- With Raw Silk?

When the outside world has been unpleasant, I like to recharge my batteries with soothing moments of playing with fibers -- usually heading to my stash and not poking my head back out until I find an incredibly soft fiber to play with.  It doesn't mean I'll actually start a new project, but rather just play with some soft fibers until I feel that "inner calm" again.  Today has been one of those stressful days.  Now I want to go de-stress by playing with unspun silk!

The beauty of crochet is you can crochet with virtually anything everything that one can knit with, including fibers that have not been fully processed yet.  And since crochet has a natural tendency to twist the fiber you're working with, crocheting with unspun fibers is actually quite a lot of fun!   Unfortunatly my silk is still in it's cocoon form; I have not learned how to harvest it directly from the cocoon into a "hankie" -- so, because I'm after instant gratification right now, I'll leave my want to play with silk for another day, and instead I'll play with some soft wool fibers I got from www.GraftonFibers.com at one of the Sheep & Wool Festivals I visited last year.  (As long as the fibers are soft, I'll re-become a happy camper!)

In the meantime, I thought this video on YouTube was quite interesting because it explains how to separate the silk hankies and then stretch them out into usable fiber.  Should you decide to go to a S&W Festival, pick yourself up a few silk hankies (raw silk from the silk worm's cocoon) and have fun playing.  Remember, it is not necessary to first spin it -- you can use the fiber in it's raw form for a really unique look!


You can read about Linda's adventure of working with unspun fibers here: www.graftonfibers.com.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow Dee,
 I have never seen hankies like this before thanks for sharing:) I learned something new today. Blessings, Sherri

Anonymous said...

OK, so how do you take the silk cocoon and make it into a hankie? Inquiring minds want to know...LOL OK so it's little ol' me who wants to know.

Anonymous said...

I don't remember... did I send you that link?

Her videos are fantastic. Informative and humorous!

All of her videos related to fiberwork are great!  This is an example of what I mentioned in my comment regarding you doing video tutorials we can watch at home!

Anonymous said...

I don't remember... did I send you that link?

Her videos are fantastic. Informative and humorous!

All of her videos related to fiberwork are great!  This is an example of what I mentioned in my comment regarding you doing video tutorials we can watch at home!

Maven