fibre arts, my beloved

ᎠᏂ - A'ni - Ahʔnee - Strawberry

Cherokee double wall basket purse - 9 hours

2 & 3 commercial round reed, deer antler button, suede ties, braided macrame cord handles.

adventures in tailspun!! this was a lot of fun :) i’ll be ordering some teeswater fleece and making some more!

bonus pic of my recent spins all together:

i’ve been up to a lot but this tea towel i wove today is the most important thing

plain weave on a mixed straight twill & point twill warp, i might post the twill ones but this is honestly my favorite of the bunch lol. i love dense warps i love rep weave & shadow weave & this is…. not really either but those two brain cells are definitely rubbing together.

Collected from webs of the Joro spider, a type of golden orb weaver. Yes, it's naturally that golden

This is from the support threads, not washed at all. The sticky inner web wasn't used, as it's goopy and full of debris. The support threads are also the longest and the strongest, so i can pluck off 1-2ft sections at a time (usually combining a few separate strands into one thread)

And some photos of the back + the hoop contraption, made with spare parts:

A video of how ive been getting the joro spider webs, i take the support lines from their anchors first. This causes the females to run off (the males are usually more stubborn and sometimes drop down to the ground). They're not looking for a confrontation, but i still mind their locations in case they try to crawl on me. Their venom isn't fun but its also not strong enough to worry a human (save for an allergic reaction)

But yeah, i pretty much just steal their webs. They rebuild them if necessary. I can then twist the string, moving and overlapping fibers as necessary.

I pick debris out with my free hand (when I'm not holding a phone that is). Sometimes I'll be able to get a whole web; sometimes I'll have to just take the part that's within reach. their webs can be huge, communal behemoths with 1-3 females and like, 1-7 males each. Some support strings can be seemingly 10 feet long with strength to match.

The yellowness of the silk seems to be the source of the stickiness, especially in the central web. It washes off, but i imagine remnants of it remaining in the string is good for keeping it stuck together (similar to plant gums in cellulose cordage) The amount of stickiness seems to vary per web, maybe because of age? dunno on that count.

One cool thing i noticed was that one web i got to first, i collected it and thought nothing of it. I returned to that same bush and spider a couple days later, and it had drawn a squiggle on its web! It looked like a scuffed version of the zigzags you'll see on garden spider webs. Notably, they're both orb weavers (i think), so I wonder if it's an innate behavior? I've even seen a fee of the spiders shake their webs slightly, not as much as garden spiders though.

The finished string still has some debris. It's just gonna happen if you're not directly "silking" the spiders. According to a project in madagascar, over a million spider milkings would need to happen to make a spider silk shawl!

I havent been able to find as many as i did the first times i went looking, as my mom's decided to wage a war on them with an electric tennis racket. But the ones deep in the woods i can theoretically keep coming back to! I've also gotten a lot more efficient at collecting the silk and maximizing its use.

As much as theyre a harmful species here,it also is pretty futile to kill them. The neighboring yards all have them as well, as do the neighboring fields and woods. Might as well let them live, but still actively decrease the surface area of webs to help out the local bugs.

And that way, you get to practice a very niche sorta stringmaking! I take the tiny thread i wound around a stick, soak it in hot tap water briefly to loosen debris and decrease stickiness, and then i turn it two-ply. I just tie different "batches" together using a square knot

Above is two angles of the same spool, the double ply thread wrapped around it as neatly and parallel as possible. A nice variable golden yellow color, even if theres a bit of debris left. The spool is about an inch across in this photo with some overlapping threads, for reference.

So that's just a ramble about my spider silk ventures so far!

I am slow and also fiber prep takes so long... buy hey you can apperently go gorilla when washing aplaca, it just won't felt!

the first 50g didn't turn out perfect, I should have added more twist to the singles but it still knits up very nicely! I did some swatches on my knitting machine! It is cool to see how the tension changes the fabric :D

I'm getting a late start because I had to finish the Fluffy Yarn first (not yet skeined or washed so no pics, but it is Done). Which, I suppose, technically still counts towards the "spinning every day" goal, so I only started one day late.

My goal this year is to spin one kg of wool, so about one and a half sweater quantities. Will I be able to accomplish this? Who knows! I feel it's ambitious but not crazy. Contrary to the Tour de France, which is insane.

First batch is these two braids from my dyeing spell in spring:

About 400g Cheviot which I did not split into even amounts because I'm an idiot, so the blue braid is much larger than the green. 400g isn't enough for a sweater, so I'll need to combine it with something else. I have these two to chose from:

Beige didn't-write-down-the-breed wool (carded) from local sheep that I got at the shepherd's day a year or two back (top) and grey Corrie (bottom).

I was gonna do a poll, but I mean. Obviously it's gotta be the Corrie.

That brings me to about 650g total which should be just enough for a sweater.

The dyed braids came as "multicolor" wool, meaning white and grey fibre carded together. The colour difference was kind of subtle in the undyed fibre already, and now it is almost invisible but still there when you look closely.

This is probably the best blue I have ever done it's so nice. I want to peacefully drown in this colour.

English cheviot tops 100gm each in 2 colours, dyed by Waratah Fibres

Yellow is about 310m

[ID: a handknit jumper. the front features a seal sitting on a rock in the sea, with fish falling into its open mouth. On the back is a bucket, throwing the fish up and over the shoulders to the seal. end ID]

"Sealed with a Fish", from Wild Animal Knits by Melinda Coss. Knit with John Arbon Devonia and Devon Naturals DK yarn.

First day of Tour de Fleece spinning, with this lovely Icelandic mix on the spindle.

The plan this time is a gimp yarn that I hope leans more toward a flame/spiral

I'll make a set with the blue as the slubby single and the green with the thin, consistant single and vice versa

just finished this sweater in the middle of a heatwave (third wave woohoo...) !! probably my most ambitious knit so far, i honestly didnt think i had it in me lol but im so happy with the result despite the many mistakes and impecfection

Skein of the purple-green bfl fibre, my first fractal, undeniably alien-monster yarn ٠࣪ ⚛︎