Saturday, August 19, 2006

Four 5 Silk Blend Skeins

Spinning-wise, I’ve been slowly working on the four silk blend rovings which came with my silk package. But now that I'm getting ready to spin the remaining fleece samples for my rare breed sweater, I've needed to finish the silk blends in order to clear off my bobbins. Here are the results:

Leigh's 4 silk blend handspun yarns.From top left clockwise:
Carded camel down and tussah silk blend
Merino and tussah silk blend (the same yarn with which I had this problem.)
Black alpaca and silk blend
Bluefaced Leicester and tussah silk blend

Each blend was commercially prepared and weighted between 21 and 32 grams. I aimed for the same size yarn for each at about 18 WPI. My two favorites were the merino/tussah and the camel down/tussah. I like the color combination so perhaps a knitted scarf might be a possible project!

The 5th silk blend is one of cotton and tussah silk noil. I carded it on cotton hand carders:

Leigh's hand carded cotton and tussah noil yarn.
It measures 18 WPI as well, though I don’t plan to use it in a project with the others blends. I will have several small skeins of it when I’m done, and am thinking about trying to weave with it.

Next I can start spinning my Manx Loghtan, Leicester Longwool, and Karakul samples. Then I can get on with the designing and knitting, both of which I'm looking forward to.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Anonymous said...

Hi Leigh, Thanks for your reply. I've got some Galway Cross that I got for a song at a recent fibre event where I was demonstrating. Would be happy to send some to you. Already washed, not carded though. If you'd like to email me at info(at)olannban(dot)net with your postal address, I can get some to you.