The silk noil is short--about 1-2" long. It is very soft and spins up slightly fuzzy. I'm using my cotton cards and doing a single pass of the silk noil on the carders, then rolling it off on a thin dowel to make a silk noil puni. It took 20-30 minutes to make ten punis today.
I'll be spinning the singles on my Bosworth book charka. I have no idea how long it will take me to finish this project! One ounce of fiber isn't a ton (literally), but when it is being spun very fine like this it can take a while. My test puni (just like one of the ones in the photo) took about 30 minutes to spin. I wonder how many punis it will take to fill a spindle from the charka. (FYI, and just so I remember, I am starting with 36 grams of silk noil. The finished skeins are to be 1 ounce or 28.35 grams. The extra is for the wraps per inch card--every skein needs one--and in case I run into waste in the carding process. So far, the waste has been minimal.)
2 comments:
You are trying lots of interesting fibers. Silk that short must be slippery to work with!
So far it is not significantly different than cotton, which is also a short staple. ...Although I must admit that all I have done is a bit of test spinning and the carding of the noil in preparation for spinning. I'll post again in a few weeks and let you know what I think of silk noil after I've finished spinning it!
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