Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I bought a wholesaler’s closeout of natural-brown 90% cashmere 10% nylon cones at–are you knitters ready for this?–$15/lb, and I bought ten pounds of it, all they had. And then they found a few more in their warehouse and I bought those too. They were giving it to me at their cost to get rid of it. It needed a strong washing, and not just for the mill oils. It was single-ply and cobweb fine, impossibly fragile; I plied it on my wheel into all kinds of useful, stronger thicknesses, scouring after spinning, and I made so many things out of it for several years. Afghans, yarn that my mom knitted up into the most glorious Aran sweater, you name it.
Till I was down to the very last few pounds. The idea of actually running out of this resource after all those projects… The rest of it kind of got tucked away, waiting till I could bear to let it go.
At some point, though, I wound some off, 64 g here, 66 g there, and threw them in the dyepot, one into a little red, the second a bit of purple.
I got some Handmaiden laceweight silk awhile ago. Hey. While I was working on the shawl in Cashmere Superior and Dianne’s laceweight, the fuzzy and the colorful, I wondered if this new silk would look good with those two, and it would definitely add strength…
So today I tried it. Plied the cashmeres first, then the silk around the other two. The yarn is balanced; no twisting in the finished skein, it hangs straight. So my being so out of practice didn’t hurt it.
The silk glistens, the cashmere fuzzes around it. 160 yards, drying now, waiting. There’s a whole lot more, potentially, where that came from.