SpinnySpinny

Here is a picture, for a few more (and larger) you can go to the regular page: Dillo and Feorlen Get Married.

My jacket is navy dupioni with paisley tie twill lining. Instead of the suggested fusible interfacing I used organza. There is one snap at the waist, covered in a round black frog-type knot. Using all silk means it weighs nothing. The dress is blue rayon of some sort, very much like another I have in purple Tencel. It is fairly heavy but drapes well.

I’m working on a jacket from a re-issued vintage Simplicity pattern. I want it to be extra-special nice so I’m actually doing the lining for a change. And to make it as comfortable as possible (as in, not feel like I’m wearing a plastic bag) it’s all silk. The shantung fashion fabric is great: it has enough body to handle complex seams yet a bit of drape and feels wonderful. The organza interfacing (not nasty fusible) preserves the hand of the fabric rather than turning it into cardboard. Sure, basting the layers together took more work but it was worth it.

Now, the lining is another story. It’s a lightweight silk twill, in a paisley that screams “I’m a Necktie!” But for a lining, that doesn’t matter. (It is indeed tie fabric and I have a bolt of it.) I had hoped that a twill would be somewhat better behaved than a satin. But it will not lie still and every time I look at it my cut pattern piece is a different size. It’s almost as bad as charmeuse. Way more than the organza. I’ve had to use tons of pins to get it to stay put long enough to stitch.

So far I’ve gotten the jacket and the lining each assembled, the lining took almost twice as long. Now I just have to put them together.

I finished the yarn this morning, it’s still drying. I haven’t even measured it yet. But it looks really good:

Now to get to work on the plain gray to go with it.

I thought I had posted this picture already, but no. I’m almost done with the first half of the wool/silk, I’ve decided to make a 2-ply weaving yarn. I’ve got plenty of the natural color wool to go with it. The silk has some noils in it and I didn’t want to try to use it as warp without plying, so I’ll just do all of it the same.

I’m picking out some of the larger lumps from the silk, but mostly just spinning. Normally I want perfectly smooth yarn but the haphazardly dyed silk just isn’t going to let that happen and I have to get over it. I split the batts into strips and pulled each into a long roving. After all that I wonder if it really is faster to drum card than comb, but I would have never gotten the same color blend that way.

The finished fiber is about 170g, enough for a small project. I made two color layered batts because I wanted a high contrast blend that would survive being spun fine and plied and not be totally a solid color by the time I was done. I have no idea what I will do with the yarn, so I went with a somewhat less adventurous color. One of my other possible choices was magenta.

The fleece has been sitting around for years, it came from South Australia and is some sort of Corriedale cross. I sorted out the rest by color and length but this stuff was shorter. I don’t even know where all the silk came from, other than several years of spinning workshops. For now it’s going back into the fiber closet because I still have some Merino to finish spinning.

Started with this pile of fleece (plus a little of plain white)

and this collection of workshop samples

a little blue dye and a lot of carding later: