Shouldn't Silkworms be Wooly Worms?

Whoa baby,

My silk and wool arrived yesterday. Oh, didn't I tell you? I orderred 60 silkworm cocoons and 4oz of quickspin wool. OMFG! The wool's super soft and actually has a nice sheen to it(which surprised me, because I expected it to be coarse and sans shine).

I ordered it all from Mountain Shadow Ranch's ebay store. Lovely lady named Teresa Simons owns and runs the place. She also runs an adopt a sheep program(I think I mentioned it in an earlier post), and golly but I like the idea of getting letters from an adopted sheep in the mail. Alas, I'm nowhere near close to needing the ammount of fleece that comes from a sheep(4oz is alot!, and a sheep yeilds something like 5lbs in total).

I haven't pulled the wool out of it's protective baggie yet(not ready to spin, what do you want from me?). It's packed in tight. It's one of those big food storage baggies. I just know once it's out of the bag it'll at least double in mass. Well I don't know, but I feel it.

Processed some of the cocoons today. The listing promises that at least half of the cocoons in the B2(well it's second quality, but the term at silk dealers is B2) would be excellent quality with only about half of them being stained and or dented. Well I'd say that's not close. Mine well, I processed the dinged ones today. The ones with naturally occuring stains and dents(guessing those caterpillars weren't good spinners). Well there's 20-something that were dinged and the box is still 2/3 full. Teresa at Mountain Shadow Ranch even tossed in a few extra(probably because I sounded so gosh-darned excited in my emails). Anyway, the discoloration doesn't hurt mawata making one little bit, nor do the dents(though I must say the dented ones seem to soak up water faster, something I need to keep in mind for the future).

I dyed them with food coloring after processing them, a process you can read about at http://www.wormspit.com I'd link directly to the mawatas page, but the whole site's positively fascinating. I have to admit I thought it was run by a woman. Can't help it, for every Joe there's about 50 Jo's and for every Michael there's at least 50 Michelles who knit, crochet, weave, and do anything else artsy or crafty. I mean, watch That's Clever sometime on HGTV, for every 100 women there's 1 man it seems. Not fair, surely more men craft, but do you hear about them? No! Meanwhile there's usually at least one guy in a knitting class or spinning class. So I'm sorry Michael for thinking you're a woman. If it makes you feel any better I think you're pretty j/k(sorta, pretty smile at any rate), there hopefully the compliments make up for my thinking you were of the female persuasion.

Anyhoo, back to the mawatas. I dyed them purple and teal. They turned out really nice in a Bob Ross happy accidents sort of way. I like what happened, some of the blue in the purple and teal came out really blue, and some of the red in the purple's peeking through. Very pretty indeed. Tried to make them sparkle like my sparkle cotton crochet thread. Didn't work out so well(I gotta fiddle with the formula some more, and probably should put it on a single roving split into 4 vertical pieces, for a very fine sparkle thread through a plyed yarn), I'm learning.

So now I have a surprisingly big pile of silk roving. I thought 20 would make a teensie pile, I was wrong. Don't get me wrong, it's not the size of the empire state building or anything, but it's quite huge to have come from such tiny cocoons.

My approach to stretching the mawatas into roving? The cat's cradle approach. I hold it like the start of a cat's cradle and pull and sorta turn the loop as it stretches. The thickness is pretty consistent. Not perfect, but not horrid either.


So I was thinking I might spin these just to try out my spindle, but really I do want some relatively consistent yarn to make something out of so maybe I'll just hold my horses and wait till I finish the wheel(but ooh I'm itchin' to start spinnin').

Wheel design has changed. Got some rollerblade bearings and they look to be far superior to the bearing I was going to use for the drive wheel. Now going to use the rollerblade bearings for all rotating parts. Glad I didn't cut a hole for the garage door bearings, then I'd be up a creek for sure.

Figured out how to drill a hole in acrylic by hand without causing it to crack. Going to apply some of what I've learned practicing with tiny acrylic scraps to building this thing(I thought I'd be finished by now, but my mom's in the hospital, and criminy just thinking about your mom in the hospital is stressful so I've mostly been knitting as it's calming).

Okies, I wanted to tell you something else about Mountain Shadow Ranch. They have exotic fibers! Cashmere, Vicuna(and I'll make the little squiggly thing on top of the n later), silk, and other unusual fibers as well. The really unusual stuff is called "ewenique". Puns are good :D.

All done for now, gotta get batteries charged for my digi-cam. I really want to be able to show y'all some photos.