Carding together one pairing after another, some brilliant, some not so great, going through my fiber stash, excited to discover. For this one I settled on undyed completely stiff, dull flax tow, with brilliantly colorful dyed saree silk. At first I thought, no way, there’s no way these two fibers will come together beautifully. Well, I surprised myself, once I was finished carding.
The saree silk threads can be found in this form which are the strands of silk that are cut from the looms used in the saree industry, but also are available as carded into roving or batts, as well as cut into fine ribbons, and are widely available to spinners and crafters these days. This is the former variety, the loom threads, and which are wadded up with some very long, some impossibly tangled, and the blend of colors are dizzying.
I cut the lengths– giving a try once again to the lesson taught in Spinning Exotic Blends from Longthread Media — and I simply picked out of the carders the larger tangled snarls. The flax well, it is a different source, still the fibers are more organized than my other flax tow, but I’m not sure if it is tow, or just flax top. At this point I will just assume it is well combed flax tow. Overseeing the marriage of these two on the carders was a sense of complete disconnect, that melted into a relaxed sense of possibility when I started to spin with a bit of difficult on my Turkish spindle, very nubby and the flax feeling like horsehair, but then I switched to the spinning wheel and it worked like a dream, smoothly blending the fibers into a more uniform tweed single. I ended up winding the little sample back on to the Turkish spindle mostly for photographic reasons, and then plied it with wheel too. I would like to experiment further with this pairing, but wet-spinning so that I can get a finer more uniform single without the stiff flax fibers flying about.
In hindsight I should have added more saree silk proportionally, for even though it dominated in color, it is such a diminutive fiber texturally next to the bristly flax tow, and the end result was stiff and not at all supple. Or maybe, like linen, the flax just needs a few washings to soften up. It wasn’t an easy match, an unlikely pairing which in the end, one is simply left to judge for themselves.
♣ Blending Notes ♣
- Recycled Saree Silk: Recycled Sari Silk Threads from Paradise Fibers, color mix Spectrum, approx 50%
- Flax: “flax roving” from Laughing Lamb Fibers , approx 50%