It's here! It's here! It's here!!!

After being tied up in Customs for an entire week, my package of hand-reeled silk from Laos has arrived!  It’s a big box full of 1-3 oz skeins:

As you can see, it’s a pretty big box, and it’s PACKED with yarn.  11 lbs of it, to be precise.  “Almost enough to swim in it!” said Mike, upon seeing it.

The yarn is quite irregular, with some large slubs, and is very loosely twisted.  Here’s what a loose skein looks like:

In weight it varies between 30/2 and 60/2 silk.  Here’s a photo that gives a rough idea:

This is actually the coarse end of the scale, and the looseness makes it look bigger than it actually is.

There is definite variation in the skeins – some are more like 60/2 silk, some are more like 30/2.  I suspect that’s because they were made by different people – this is all hand-reeled and twisted by hand using these tools:

(I lifted these images from the organization’s website – please do check them out, at http://www.mulberries.org – they have glorious photos of the entire silk-rearing and silk-reeling process.)

All the skeins are beautifully lustrous, with occasional slubs of noil.

What to do with them?  After I finish the cashmere coat, I  plan to warp up with a sample and see whether it’s suitable for warp (because it’s very loosely twisted, it may not be) and if so, dye a little bit and weave up some samples!  It will be lovely to see what it’s like, woven up…

My dream for this silk is to weave a wedding dress from it, if and when Mike and I get to that  point.  It would make an absolutely gorgeous wedding dress!  (Heck, I might even weave it up for someone else’s wedding…I just want to make the dress!)

I am so, so pleased that this has arrived – I have been searching for more of this yarn ever since I returned from Laos, six years ago.

Yay!!!