Originally published at WormSpit. You can comment here or there.

I haven’t been writing much lately, but a LOT has been happening.  Chris and I moved house, I’ve written an article, getting ready to film a presentation for a museum – I really need to write it all up, but not tonight.

Tonight, I’m stuck with spiders.  In the past couple of weeks, we have found five brown recluse, or fiddleback, spiders, in the house.  They’re not aggressive, or dramatic – but they push my buttons.  For some reason, I can hold bees in my hands and let them lick the honey off, but these *particular* spiders freak me right out.

My grandmother was bitten by one many years ago.  I was probably ten or eleven at the time, maybe a little older.  She got a necrotizing wound on her forehead which required daily medication for many months, and eventually plastic surgery to replace a void in the flesh.

If I didn’t have several hundred silkworms currently chomping away, and a video to shoot for a major museum in two weeks, I would probably go get some heavy-duty spray and “nuke ‘em ’til they glow so you can shoot ‘em in the dark.”   I’m usually more of an Integrated Pest Management type, slow and careful with chemicals – but there’s something about these particular pests.  I’ve ordered glue traps, and will start out with those and see if I need to move up to wettable powder around the baseboards.

One thing that they don’t mention in the literature (that I have found, at least) is that if a recluse is hiding out beneath the treadles of your loom, and you bump the loom with the vacuum, it will run out and bounce up and down on the carpet.  I don’t know whether it’s a threat posture, or if it was just freaking out from the vibration – but it’s not what I’d call reassuring.

Photo behind the jump, for those of you who don’t care for big pictures of wiggly critters…

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lendrum has made it SO MUCH EASIER to produce sewing thread. This is a three-ply tightly twisted organzine. I’m using three filaments per ply, and it’s making up to about the weight of Size C from Belding Corticelli; I hope to be able to make some Size A as well, for finer weaving.

This is the three ply, approximately 20 twists per inch each way.

Because the raw silk is stiff, the skein stands upright, like a stick.

The silk, boiled off. Yes, I used this picture earlier.

Laid across a spool of Belding Corticelli Size C sewing silk. I want to make Size A, too – but I may end up having to adjust the filament size to get there. We’ll see what a 2×3 looks like!

Originally published at WormSpit. You can comment here or there.

I found this item on Ebay a while back, and have been finding more and more of its information.  This photo isn’t of the individual piece that I got (it’s from another site that had one on offer) but it’s identical.

from the seller’s description:

“Thread Counter Micrometer for Cotton, Linen, Silk and other Textile and Fabric. This brass and steel precision instrument measures the density of woven and knitted fabrics as well as wire meshes. Made in 1910 by E. V. Cook & Co. in Manchester with 5 graduated scales on rotating silver rules as follows: 1. Inch scale divided into quarters. 2. Inch scale divided into ten parts. 3. Linen measure (L). 4. French millimeter (mm). 5. French Ligne (F), a traditional unit of distance in French speaking countries, equal to 1/12 French inch (pouce). The magnifying lens ocular (X15) can be easily adjusted. The instrument comes with a leaflet with operating instruction and a box (size: 10X8X7.5 cm) lined with purple velvet.”

I’m looking forward to using this for counting the twists in tiny threads.

Originally published at WormSpit. You can comment here or there.

I found out that I can do this in the course of a (longish) evening:

That’s a bobbin full of four-strand tram.  I can do the tram much faster, because it’s twisted about five times per inch, instead of 20.  This is going to be a soft, shiny yarn for embroidery.

It’s cool that you can see the difference in twist just from the sheen… the shiny one on top is the tram, five twists per inch; the one on the bottom is three-strand singles for organzine, at 20 twists per inch.

Read the rest of this entry »