I was so excited when my Hanks in the Hood silk hankies arrived that I opened the package immediately and started drafting. I was a little afraid of the process, but the fiber was surprisingly easy to draft and spin, and I started creating my thinnest yarn yet!
Each hankie has dozens of layers. I was keeping track of how many I had used and then I realized that it was pointless since there are so many. Plus, a few times I know that I accidently used more than one hankie at a time, so that messed up my count, too.
The pink, blue and green spun together beautifully. I love the jewel tones! I know I've already said that the silk was easy to spin, but I need to mention this again. Silk fibers are so long that the strands don't come apart very easily, making it easy to focus on spinning the drop spindle.
I wrapped my silk yarn around my 2ft tuperware contaer, I had 222 wraps = 444 feet = 148 yards. Horray! The silk bled a bit when I wet it (GENTLY) to set the twist, but as you can see I was still able to keep a lot of color.
Up until this point, I have been using a 2 ft Tupperware container to wrap my spinning because I did not own a niddy noddy (I now have one that I made myself, but that is the content for a different post!) These 2 ft skeins are too small for my yarn swift, but I really should have tried to use that first. I created a tangle in my silk that I was completely unable to fix, so I lost some yardage.
What should I make out of this handspun silk? I am waiting for my WPI (wraps per inch) tool to arrive in the mail so I can determine what weight the yarn actually is, but it appears to be somewhere between lace and fingering weight. I know I want to make some kind of shawl, but I will need to mix this with some other yarn to get enough yardage.
