A Saga of Silk in the Gum: Chapter 1, Winding the Warp

Above photos: first, gossamer-weight silk on the cone; second, a detail of one strand of silk yarn; 

last, a microscopic look at the same yarn (about 100x).

Thanks to the valiant de-stashing efforts of a friend, I now own about 3 ounces of raw silk organzine, which has a grist of about 18,700 yards per pound. It's wonderful yarn because it's reeled silk -- a.k.a. thrown silk or raw silk -- meaning it came straight from the cocoon. A single strand of silk filament from one cocoon typically ranges from 2,000 to 5,000 feet long. And it's very strong.

Silk reeled straight from the cocoon is still "in the gum." When the silkworm spins a cocoon, the filament it creates is coated in sericin -- a gummy substance that makes each ever-so-fine strand adhere to others, in order to create a sturdy, solid cocoon. To make silk yarn, these filaments are gathered to create one strand of silk, which is plied with another strand to create silk yarn. It's a very delicate, laborious process.

Even after it's spun into yarn (such as the yarn on the cone shown at the beginning of this post), silk in the gum is not easy to handle, because of its tendency to twist back on itself. Also, the stiffness of the yarn causes challenges: If it's not under tension and it's on a cone, it unravels all over the place, fast. Elastic socks (cut into a tube) don't help much, in my view. Neither do "yarn bras" (otherwise recognized as the green plastic webs we put over wine bottles to keep them from breaking). I use them to store the yarn, but not when I'm winding a warp.

(A slight but necessary digression: Nearly all of the silk used by weavers today is degummed, so that it's silky and shiny and gorgeous. Further, nearly all of the silk used by weavers today is spun silk, which is made from fiber left over from the reeling process or from damaged or imperfect cocoons. Spun silk is not as strong as reeled silk -- because the filaments are much shorter -- and for that reason it's much fuzzier, so it often pills. I've sometimes resorted to a seam ripper to separate two warp yarns that were bound together by one of these pills, or "nits," as I call them.)

In contrast, despite how tricky it is to handle, reeled silk is a genuine treasure, creating fabric with a drape and hand that's hard to find with any other yarn. Plus, it takes dye beautifully.

Above: detail of a scarf I dyed and wove using degummed, reeled silk.

It's a 12-shaft Echo pattern I call "Pagoda." 

Reeled silk still in the gum is used to weave silk organza, a gauze-like fabric with a stiff hand and a matte finish. Above, a silk organza scarf shibori-dyed in black by Ana Lisa Hedstrom, which I was lucky enough to buy at the Conference of Northern California Weavers (CNCH) last year. 

Again, back to the story. I've got this fine silk yarn in the gum and I want to degum it after weaving, using a shibori-resist technique, so that portions of the woven fabric will be degummed (becoming soft and shiny and pliable, like silk Habotai) while the rest of the fabric will still be in the gum and stiff (like silk organza). The idea is to create contrasts in texture -- a dimensional fabric -- with lots of interesting pleats and bumps. 

Below is the pattern I plan to use. The red-colored ends in the drawdown show where I will add the shibori-resist yarns, yarns that I will pull tight and knot to create a sort of "package" of the fabric with tight accordion folds. When washed in soda ash and Orvus paste to remove the sericin (gum), the edges of the folds will be exposed to the solution while the interior of the folds will not. At least that's my theory. I'm going to weave up some small samples first, of course, because you never know. Best-laid plans and all...

You'll note that I've got red ends at the corners of the diamonds in both warp and weft. That's because I plan to sample it both ways: using warp tie-ups to create horizontal pleats and, for another sample, using weft tie-ups for vertical pleats. Once you draw the fabric in using these yarns (which have to be very strong or they'll break and ruin all that weaving), you will have a tight package of pleats ready for degumming. The pattern is #78120 from handweaving.net.

For the warp ends that I'll use as shibori ties, I plan on using this Nymo beading thread (shown below) because it Simply. Won't. Break. My fingers may hurt, but my shibori ties will be intact. Again, that's my plan.

But first I have to wind the warp. I called my friend, Deb Kaplan, a brilliant weaver from Boston, and asked her about winding the warp from cones -- knowing full well that it would be a challenge. She suggested I first wind the yarn onto spools, which I don't have so I substituted bobbins. She also suggested using a manual bobbin winder rather than an electric one, because a manual winder is slower, making it much easier to keep an even tension as I wind the bobbins.

You want the yarn to look like this as you wind it onto the bobbin.

Not like this. (Excuse the background. Weavers need stuff.)

To get just the right tension, you might want additionally to wind the yarn around a chair leg or anything rounded and handy. Here, I used part of a steel utility shelf.

Deb suggested I wind two ends at once in the warp cross, which I often do. Of course, winding the warp is the ultimate even-tension, straight-line-to-the-warping-reel kind of challenge. A creel would be helpful in this case, but alas, I don't have one, so a shoe box will have to do. (Final Sale, $31.73 at Macy's.)

Below, my shoebox creel with bobbins in place (with yarn coming forward from underneath the bobbin, hoping that gravity will also help tame it a bit). Ready to begin warping. 

Samples to come, probably a good couple of months from now, as I already have a warp on the loom....

 

Thanks for reading!

Bombyx Mori silkworms munching mulberry leaves, courtesy of Wikipedia

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Post script: My shoebox creel didn't work. The yarns unwound and got tangled all over the dowels. So I resorted to a simpler approach: I put my two bobbins in two plastic yogurt containers that I placed on the floor.

Believe it or not, the weight of the bobbins themselves created enough tension for me to successfully wind my warp. I did take care to divide the two ends of yarn with my fingers, to keep them from tangling.

It worked! Warp wound. More to come...

The Story of a Scarf

I'll start with the basics: This is a 12-shaft weave, using three hand-painted warps in 60/2 reeled silk, at a sett of 60 epi, using an extended parallel threading, with a 120/2 spun silk weft.

Oh and it's not quite finished (what you don't see in the photo is the unplied fringe on the back of the mannikin).

I call this design "Pagoda" because the pattern looks like the multi-tiered roof of a Buddhist temple. See the the cascading pattern in the middle of the photo? And the colors remind me of Asian silk fabrics. Plus the cultivation of silk itself originated in China.

The story behind this piece is that it wasn't really planned at all!

It simply started with the yarn, which was undyed reeled silk from Habu. I purchased it for a bargain price when our guild was selling the yarns and equipment of a good friend, the late, abundantly creative Joy Duskin. I didn't even realize it was reeled silk -- which means silk that is thrown (or wound) straight from the cocoon, the most treasured silk of all. (Most of us purchase and weave with spun silk, which comes from incomplete pieces of the silk filaments and is less sleek and durable.)

I had never woven with reeled silk -- and this was in the gum, to boot! ("In the gum" means that the sericin from the silkworm's spit, which helps maintain the structure of the cocoon, has not been removed, so that the silk is stiff and has a matte finish. Silk can't be dyed in the gum. Also, removing the gum improves the luster, hand, and texture of the silk.)

The yarn sat in my sewing room for at least a year -- until I got together with two friends, Molly McLaughlin and Deb Kaplan. They both know lots about silk and Deb patiently showed me how to de-gum my skeins in hot water and soda ash.

This story is getting way too long, so let's cut to the dyeing: I wound two warps and hand-painted them with MX fiber-reactive dyes in two different colorways -- and THEN decided that they were too close in their hues. So I hand-painted a third warp. That's why you see a band of color in the center of the photo and different-colored bands on either selvage. I was planning an Echo design, which is typically threaded color A, color B, color A, color B, etc. For this scarf, using three hand-painted warps, the threading was A-B-A-B for about 4 inches, then A-C-A-C for about eight inches, then back to A-B-A-B for the last four inches.

Below is my design line, which I created on 8 shafts instead of 12, which left room to create a parallel threading 6 ends above the original design line. I chose not to put this on a network, just to see what happened.

Original design line on 8 shafts

The threading on 12 shafts: 

My original design line plus a parallel line 6 shafts above

In Fiberworks, here are the steps involved.

1) I expanded the number of shafts to 12 by going into the dropdown menu labeled "Tieup," clicking on "Shafts and Treadles," and increasing the number of treadles to 12.

2) Next, I clicked on the "Warp" dropdown menu, then clicked on "Parallel Repeat." I left the box checked that says "Add Shafts Above" (because I already created 12 shafts to work with), then I clicked on "Shafts shift by 6," and then clicked "Apply."

Next I created a classic Echo (also used for Rep) tieup, which is an ascending twill tieup with half the shafts up and half the shafts down, like so:

And then I created an advancing point-twill treadling, but that was all long warp floats and definitely unweavable.

Still, it was easy to solve, just by adding a parallel treadling. Using Fiberworks, this was done by clicking on the "Treadling" dropdown menu, clicking on the command that says "Extended Parallel," then putting the number "5" in the box labeled "Treadles Shift By," and then clicking on "Apply." (I shifted by 5 treadles instead of 6 as I had in the threading because I wanted to use only 10 treadles. So I divided 10 by 2 to get the correct parallel for the tieup.) This is the way Rep is treadled, on an extended parallel treadling. But the scarf isn't traditional Rep Weave, because I use only one weft yarn rather than the two (one thick, one thin) that characterize Rep.

And here's what the final drawdown looks like. (The red lines in the warp tell me where I need to shift my color arrangements from ABAB to ACAC, remembering that I'm using three hand-painted warps.)

Here's a closer look at the scarf itself.

And one more view...

I hope to enter this in an exhibit next year -- and I will let you know if and when it's accepted! Thanks for reading.