My Handspun Silk Mawata

Last night I was looking for something easy to spin.



 I found a package of silk mawata in my stash bag (from seejayneknit) and decided to spin it all up. It's time consuming but very satisfying when you finally finish and take a good look at your finished yarn. It's silk, so the fibres are very long and don't need much twist to hold them together which makes for a very soft, drapey (is that even a real word?) yarn. As always, click on a picture to enlarge.

This is the 50g pile of hankies (layers of cocoons soaked and stretched over a frame. This pile is about the size of a paperback book and has about 60 cocoons. To work with it, you find the edge and gently peel off one of the cocoons...

...like this. It looks like a wisp of nothing but this cocoon will give about 2.5m of spun yarn, more if you draft it more and spin it to a finer weight.

To draft, you pick up the cocoon, poke your fingers through the middle and pull it out into a loop. Then you work your way around the loop, pulling it out more wherever it's too thick until it is drafted out evenly all the way around. Then you break it and roll up your length of fibre into a little nest so it doesn't get tangled. Like this:

 It took a two hour long movie to draft out all of the cocoons, believe me when I say you need some kind of entertainment to get through the process with your sanity intact. Silk fibres are also very fine and very strong and by the end, I had a line of small blisters across my fingers where the fibre rubbed while I was drafting and then spinning.

It then took just shy of another two hours to spin it all. Here it is on my wheel, ready to be wound off into a skein. It was very dense and a bit stiff but after washing and drying, it fluffed out and softened.

I now have a skein of pure silk, 165m in length and about a double-knitting weight. Now I just have to decide what to make with it and who to make it for...