Reeled Silk

These are some of my finished silk yarns.

This is a twisted and plied thread called organzine. The sewing pin is there for scale; it's fairly fine. Each ply of the thread (singles) is 4 of my hand-reeled filaments. This makes a good thread for warp, for stitching, and for various other textile applications. It is shiny, but also fairly strong.

Another shot of the same organzine.

This gold-orange organzine skein is made entirely from cocoons I raised by hand. It won First Place in Handspun at the Contemporary Handweavers of TX show, 2005 in Austin.

The skein is .75 ounces, about 750 yards. It's approximately 16,000 yards per pound.

These are bobbins of silk for a tablet-weaving project. The golden bobbin in the front is organzine, which is a plied yarn - the filaments have been twisted in one direction, and then twisted back in the opposite direction with another strand. Organzine is stronger than the flat silk, and is used for warp and ground weft, as well as for many other techniques. The other bobbins are flat silk.

Here, you can see all of the flat silk and organzine put together for a project. This is for a tablet-woven ribbon, blue background with white lettering, a black border with gold spots, and green and brown brocade. It's the first project I've made entirely out of my hand-reeled silk. The blue, gold, white, and black are organzine; the little bobbins of olive and green are flat silk.

These blue spools are for a trade project. All of ones in front are untwisted tram, in shades of Jacquard Teal and Brilliant Blue.

The blue spools. The second and third from the bottom are organzine, the rest are tram. Top three are the Brilliant Blue, bottom three are Teal.

This is another set of dyed silks for a special project - these will be used to stitch an image of a Tensan silkmoth.

Here's the source photo of the moth, with the spools set on it to show where the colors will go.