I love silk. Once it's actually in yarn. Before that, not so much. It goes everywhere. All over my clothes, all over the studio. I've even managed to get silk in my mouth and up my nose. And let me tell you, that is not very pleasant. But I really love spinning and knitting wool-silk blends. So over the years, I've found a few tricks that make prepping wool-silk blends go a little bit more smoothly. And in today's episode, I'm going to share four of them.
Hello there, darling Sheepspotter. Welcome to episode 113 of the Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and I have the best job in the world because my job is helping you make more yarns that you love. I just finished a big, really big, like 2,100 yards worth, a big combo spin that consisted almost entirely of commercial wool silk blends in cone top form. And every night I would end my spinning session just covered head to toe in silk. It's just an unruly fiber.
So here are four tips for making your own wool silk blends with a drum carter. I cannot promise that they will prevent you from getting covered in silk. They actually probably won't, but they will help you get a good blend that is lovely to spin. So first off, prep your hands. This is tip number one. Silk will attach itself to any and every rough spot on your hands as you work with it. So I want to share this amazing tip to prevent that from happening.
I learned this in a class on knitting with silk hankies taught by the yarn harlot many years ago, and it really works like a charm. So you just mix. And also, you have the ingredients. I'm willing to bet that you have the ingredients. So mix a couple of tablespoons of sugar, regular old granulated sugar, with some olive oil. And for some reason, salt does not work. So you really want a couple of tablespoons of granulated sugar and some olive
oil. And then you're just going to slather that all over your hands, do a little exfoliating, and rinse your hands. And I know this seems like it's too simple to make a difference, but it absolutely does. So many thanks to the Yarn Harlot, a.k.a. Stephanie, for that tip. Second, cut the silk. Tip number two. My next tip is to cut the silk to the same staple length as the wool you're using. Spinning wool silk blends can be tricky because silk is smooth and slippery and it's very long.
If it's longer than the wool in the blend, it can be difficult to keep the proportions of wool and silk consistent as you draft.
And in some cases you'll you might encounter places in your fiber supply where you've kind of used up all the wool in that spot and you're suddenly just spinning silk now if that's okay with you you do you as always but if it's not okay with you ensuring that both the wool and the silk have the same staple length will make your life much much easier remember my one and only rule for blending fibers.
It is all about the staple length. The closer the staple lengths of the different fibers are to each other, the easier it's going to be to spin. If you are working with very long silk fibers and you don't cut the silk and it extends over the doffer strip, so if it's wrapping around a good part of your main drum on your drum carter and it's spanning over where you would use your doffer stick to take that bat off the drum carter, you're going to have trouble.
Because you won't be able to, silk is extremely strong, you won't be able to break those very long fibers. And so this is just another excellent reason to cut your silk before you use it. Tip number three, if you want a thorough blend. So silk is paradoxical in that it both wants to fly all over the place and clump up. I am not sure how both of those things are possible at the same time, but silk wants to do both of those things.
So if you want your wool and your silk to be thoroughly blended, you probably want to be prepared to card your bat multiple times, more than you would for a well-carded bat that was just wool, say. And you can speed this process up and save yourself some passes by loading the silk onto your drum carter so that the fibers are parallel to the axis of your liquor in so that they will be going crosswise across your feed tray and then you'll feed it in from there in that position.
This in my experience is the best way to use the teeth of the carding cloth to break up the clumps of silk. After the first pass, I will break the bat up into chunks. I will spread them out so that I can see my feed tray through them. You always want to do that. You don't want to overload your drum carder. And then I'll put the fiber again through sideways.
So I'm just wanting to give the carding cloth the best chance to really break up those clumps of silk and allow it to integrate more fully with the wall. Tip number four, layer the silk in a wool sandwich. So tip number three was about combating silk's tendency to clump. And tip number four is about combating silk's tendency to fly all over the place.
So you may find that if you put silk through your drum carter, it will resist going on to the carding cloth of your big drum and kind of irritatingly wrap around the liquor in. And one way to avoid this is to create a kind of silk sandwich. So in the sandwich, you've got two layers of wool. That's your bread. And then in between them, you've got silk. That's your roast beef or your turkey or your cheese or whatever. That's your sandwich stuff. So you really want to keep these layers thin.
You should always be able to see through your fiber to the wood or the metal of the feed tray to avoid overloading your carter. But this will, Still, it's a really useful thing to know because the wool in the sandwich is going to encourage the silk to feed onto your main drum and not get all wispy and wrap around the liquor in.
If you are having trouble getting the layers thin enough then what you want to do is try an open-faced sandwich so you've got a layer of wool and then on top of that a layer of silk, and then you're going to feed that through your drum carter upside down so with the silk on the loading tray and the wool above it. And that also will just encourage your silk to behave a little bit better as it feeds onto the drum of your drum carter.
Another option is to just bypass the liquor in and apply the silk directly to the large drum. This is a useful technique if you want to confine the silk to specific areas of the bat. If you want to distribute the silk evenly through the bat, though, I think that the sandwich method is probably a better choice. So, I've talked about four tips for making wool-silk blends on a drum carter.
Prepare your hands, cut the silk to match the staple length of the wool, feed the silk into the carter with the fibers parallel to the axis of the liquor end, and even better, do that with silk encased in thin layers of wool.
So that is it for me this week thank you so much for listening i sincerely hope this episode has been useful to you as always you can comment on and discuss this episode in a dedicated thread inside the flock which is sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive hand spinners you will find a link to the thread in the description of this episode in your podcast app I will be back next time with some words of advice about spinning commercially
prepped fiber blends in which the staple lengths of the fibers involved are not the same. Until then, I hope that you make some time to spin something. I think you'll find that it does you good.