struggling with silk

Yesterday my brain was having some down time – I was tired, ok! – so I decided to do something pretty brainless.

The day before I had used some of the gorgeous single ply silk from Stitches and Spice on my exhibition embroidery. It was LOVELY to work with, but I was a bit scared about it. You see, after cutting a piece off the mess that is otherwise known as a skein, I didn’t really know what to do with the “skein”. How should I control it?!

I knew that if I didn’t get it under control, I’d never be using a piece of the thread again because it would be permanently living in knot-land. So I grabbed the cardboard tube which I had scavenged when we finished a roll of cellophane a few weeks ago, and cut 4 cm off the end.

I sanded the rough ends with a sanding block, to make them completely smooth as we are working with silk here! I then started to wind the silk onto the roll. Well, about an hour or so later, I finally had this:
It looks lovely and neat, doesn’t it? Let me tell you, it didn’t always look like that!

In theory, I should have been able to undo the skein from its tag, open it out, put it around my knees and wind it off onto the skein. Well, that’s what would happen in the ideal world! But because I’d already cut a bit off, and then tied it back on the tag in my own way, it was never going to happen with this skein. So it meant laying it out, and carefully untangling it and winding it on.

As you would expect, it got hugely knotted, but because the silk is so lovely and smooth and slippery, none of the knots were not undoable. With perseverance (and a lot of it!), I got it all unknotted.

So then I started winding some of the others that I hadn’t already used. I had about a 50% success rate with this. All the ones I attempted, I did get neatly wound onto rolls, but about half of them went through the knot process to get there. Each time I got it neatly and easily unfolded and looped around my knees, I felt quite triumphant, because that meant it would be a 5 minute process, rather than up to an hour.

I will keep persisting, because they just look so much neater, and eminently more useable wound onto the rolls.

Speaking of brainless, though, I made a bit of a boo-boo this morning. Some of you may have been treated to a little bit of a preview of a stitch along post. I’ve partly pre-written a few posts, and one of them had an incorrect date, and decided to post itself, unfinished, this morning. I have now removed the offending post, but it may have been slightly “seen”. Oops! Sorry about that!