I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people talking about felting with eri silk, but I’m having some source amnesia so I should probably go google it. It’s certainly sproingier than mulberry silk, and gets spun rather than reeled, so it doesn’t make quite as smooth a yarn. Hold on, Imma go look that up. Meantime, here’s the eri silkworm video I’ve been showing everyone lately:
Fibre crafters: I have two vintage pure wool, woven blankets in a rather appalling shade of surgical-appliance pink check with a cream background. They need some darning as they've been heavily used but they're super warm and comfy and buying anything comparable would likely cost well into the hundreds these days. Q1: Can I dye them and if so, how Q1: if yea, darn before or after dying Q3: how likely is dye to affect the fibre softness
yes, you can dye it! you can use natural dyes, food dyes, or commercial fabric dyes, and which you pick affects the process. darn before dyeing and make sure you use wool to darn it. that way it will end up the same color. it won’t affect the softness. the only way i’ve had dye affect the hand of the fabric was if i used too much alum mordant.
The cocoons came! I took 10 and simmered them in baking soda and dish soap, which is not the recipe given any of the resources I found, but I wanted to see if I could achieve the same effect without going on a shopping trip specifically for this project. tasty. The brown floaty bits are crunchy leftover pupa shell that come out when you squish the cocoons. Result the first: They were certainly cleaner, but didn’t seem particularly degummed. I ended up simmering them a second time, with More Stuff added, which loosened them up enough that I could pull them apart with my fingers. They were still pretty stiff, though, so I’m not sure I actually should have. And most of them left a stubborn little interior envelope that refused to give up its threads. I’m thinking simmer those again. But er mah gerd unraveling the cocoons is so satisfying. look at the floofs I made!
Hokay I did another batch, slightly bigger, about the same length of simmering time as the first, but with More Stuff from the beginning. Result: This looks about like I think it’s supposed to. Cocoons came apart very easily, but also the threads got very tangled together. Here’s what they look like unraveled: They came apart so easily, in fact, that some parts still have cocoon-shaped bits that came off in layers. And they also formed more readily into yarn-like locks/strands. Here are the two batches side-by-side for comparison: So, the results I’ve gotten are definitely different, but I don’t know which one is actually better? I’d expect the newer batch to have longer/more unbroken strands, because I used less mechanical force to unravel them- but they’re so tangled together I’m not sure if they’ll stay that way. Anyone here know more about spinning silk than me? (Even just knowing about spinning means you know more about spinning silk than me.) The only how-to I’ve found about eri silk is this one gal who pulls and spins her yarn straight from the cocoon with just her fingers, which actually looks pretty interesting so I might try that with the next batch, but I wanted to try with the whole combing and spinning process first.
i've spun silk but only from roving, not from cocoons. i'd think it'd actually be easier to get yarn (as opposed to ultra smooth ultra fine thread) if the fibers were a bit shorter and broken up more.
That’s interesting, and kinda helpful, because all the sources I’ve been wandering through have been talking about the staple length of silk like it’s the Holy Grail, which makes me worried about Oh No Ruining It with all this experimentation, instead of just enjoying the material. (Which I am. So much fun to pull apart, yey!)
Extremely long staple length is good for making super fine, super strong silk thread! It's not at all important for a knitting yarn :) And it is much, much easier to learn to spin with more medium staple lengths, at least in my experience.
Basically, in spinning in general, with all sorts of fibers, long staple lengths are much more difficult and laborious to achieve, so long-staple fibers gain a sort of quasi mythical air to them. They're very amazing for what they're good for! But they're not at all necessary for good yarn in the end.
I tried the thing where you pull the yarn directly from the cocoon, as demonstrated here. Results are very rough; I had some trouble getting the twist to stay in, and have yet to get the hang of splicing ends together when the yarn breaks. I did some of the cocoons wet, and some of them after they dried. Here’s the result: Spoiler: lorge Wet yarn on the left, dry on the right. The yarn I pulled from wet cocoons came out longer, and is stronger and more cohesive than the dry yarn, but the dry is much softer and fluffier. The wet yarn also has a more visible luster to it, but it’s almost papery to the touch. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I guess? Maybe I’ll try mooshing both types together or sthg. (I was like >< this close to improving a drop spindle out of a chop stick, a paper clip, and a potato.)
Behold my masterpiece of stone-age technology! (I couldn’t find a paper clip, so I had to use some iron-age technology in the form of a kitchen knife to whittle out a notch in the chopstick.) Results so far: Fluffy! This is the first time so far that I really got a sense that, yep, this sure is some yarn that I’m making. I was going to simmer another batch of cocoons today, but the simmering pot got co-opted for chicken soup production and is still in the wash. (Washing the dishes is still in my task queue, right after reading some fanfic and gazing vacantly at the wall.)
