Dressed distaff before… I thought this might give you a gigge. When I wrote the “Dressing my Distaff” post I could not find the photo of how I dressed the distaff before I dizzed handpainted braids in one long strip or thought of adding the twist. This worked fine, but… Read More »Dressing my Distaff 2
Dressing my distaff with dizzed sliver or carded roving has been an evolution. In the beginning I placed the lengths of dizzed sliver/roving in a bowl (see above). As my lengths of dizzed fibre became longer, I needed to figure out a better system. This is when I turned to… Read More »How I Dress My Distaff
My last two handspun, hand knit projects were stranded knit hats. I used a gorgeous natural dark brown for the MC (main colour) and a handpainted braid from Crafty JAKS in their “Sea Stars” colourway for the CC (contrast colour). I choose Sea Stars because to me the colours and… Read More »A Distaff & A Lock-Pop
As mentioned in Part II, my hands get quite warm and sometimes moist when I spin silk. Not a good combination at all. As the silk starts to stick to my hands, the fibre source becomes disheveled causing the fibre to draft poorly. Several years ago, I decided to see… Read More »Eri Silk, Part III
The handspun textural accents in this scarf were spun from hand-painted eri sliver. The fibre preparation had a silky soft hand and a satiny sheen. Quite a contrast to my first experience spinning eri fibre from India in the early 1980’s. At that time, the traditional degumming process subjected cocoons… Read More »Eri Silk, Part I
First, why load the sliver onto a distaff in the first place? There are several good reasons actually: It gives you a chance to slightly attenuate the sliver if it is compacted from packaging or dyeing. Eri silk is almost as fine as Bombyx. Even the slightest breeze can blow… Read More »Eri Silk, spinning on a top whorl spindle
Shameless self-promotion……In May 2021 I had the pleasure of working with Felicia Lo and her team at the School of SweetGeorgia (SOS) The result is an online video where I share techniques and thoughts regarding how to spin a better yarn. https://www.schoolofsweetgeorgia.com/courses/nuances-to-spinning-better-yarns/ Some of the learning includes: the need to… Read More »Nuances to Spinning a Better Yarn