I think I forgot...

I think I forgot to include the following 411. I finished 1 sock! Yeah gotta get in gear for the other, but working so hard on my wheel. The sock's made of 100% lace weight baby alpaca, for better or worse. I used an adapted lace pattern. Was so much fun that if my Spinning On A Dime experiments work out, I'll be spinning up some lace weight silk yarn with 1 or 2 continuous lengths of the finest polymer cording, for a gently elastic, sturdy, yarn for attractive socks.

Quickly, in case you don't want to read the whole blog. It's full of diy fiber projects. DIY silk hankies/mawatas. DIY dying(with food color, but will use kool-aid as well).

For the uninitiated, silk hankies and silk mawatas are essentially the same thing. They have a kissing cousin called silk caps. Basically they're just stretched silkworm cocoons. You can buy commercially prepared mawatas(I just love that word), or you can stretch them yourself. I suggest going to wormspit.com for terrific links to wonderful tutorials and silkworm facts(it's my main source for silk 411).

I would only add that if you're a first timer, don't dump all your silk cocoons in the degumming solution at once. They absorb the solution really fast, and can get very squishy and hard to handle. So try a few at a time. The solution's reusable, at least for awhile(I keep smelling it, and it's not smelling rancid or stale, but that might not be healthy, so you'll have to take my word for it).

Also, when you stretch cocoons, don't give up. The first 2-5 are awkward. They don't want to stretch for you, but soon you get the hang of it. At some point you build speed, but at first it's slow going and making friends with the wonderful fiber known as silk.