Mmmmm! Fruit Salad

Its safe to say that this week has been very productive. Not only have I been trooping along with hubby's second sock, Ive managed to spin my longest skein of yarn to date and also ending up in an aching wreck thanks to the army assault course from hell!

My latest skein of yarn weighs in at 200g and is all pure merino, I've decided to call it fruit salad because it reminds me of those pre pack fruit salads you see in Asda or Tesco with a mirage of colors. Not only does it look yummy, I tried my hand at nubs and also got 42 yards for my efforts, which may not be much to some people but its quite a lot to me considering I only used to get about 20 meters.

Heres a Photo of Fruit salad



I almost don't want to put it on Etsy, thats the problem. I want to keep all my yarn, maybe it's a phase because I'm a new spinner, who knows?
To see more Fruit salad photos check out my flickr photostream

I also have some photos from my Dye-A-Thon from the bank holiday break.

Heres one of my de-gummed cocoons



And heres a few photos of the fiber that I dyed the day after the first photo is of some degummed and gummed cocoons dyed with food colourings



The next photo are BFL and cocoons that I decided to dye with kool aid



On the next photo you can kind of tell which fibers are dyed with kool aid because they seem to be brighter and the colour is consistent. I wouldn't rule out using the food colorings again as I quite liked the muted subdued colors. I especially like that the silk fibers have selectively taken up more and less dyes in each areas giving it a very random effect.





I think I may have the dyeing bug now, watch this space...

Let the De- Gumming commence!!

I don't know what it is about Bank holidays, but I always feel a need to do something completely random. In today's case because I know I have tomorrow off I decided to try my hand at de- gumming some silk co-coons that I'd recently bought on Ebay.

I've never actually done this before, but after buying some hand dyed degummed cocoons at Wonderwool I thought what the hell!

I found a really good tutorial for de-gumming cocoons on a website called pamdeluco.com so I've now set off on it and their on the hob as I type.

Here's a current up to the moment picture of what they are looking like so far..



Now according to the tutorial, it may take 30 mins to de-gum or 2 hours or even longer!! it really depends on what the species of the silk, to which I currently have no idea what mine are, oh well I didn't really have any plans for tonight anyway!!!!