Description
Multicolour hand dyed silk hankies are fabulous to craft with – depending on how you use them, they will yield very different, and fun, results. You can have a nuno felted piece with very delineated colour blocks or a multicolour silk thread ready for spinning or knitting (I explain the latter below).
This stack of Mawata silk hankies was hand dyed in a fashion reminiscent of tie-dye, with a diagonal stripe of pink the middle, then proceeding to blue, then green and finally neon yellow with hints of orange.
If you peel off a section of a silk hankie for nuno felting, you’ll get pops of very saturated bright colours. If you prepare it for spinning, you’ll get a self-striping silk yarn!
There’s a total of 11.8g of silk hankies for you to play with in this stack. I’ve kept them small to make it more affordable also and easier to sample if you’ve not yet tried this little mulberry silk wonder. This is still plenty to work with.
What are silk hankies?
Silk hankies are degummed silk worm’s cocoons that have been stretched into a square shape. They consist of multiple, very thin layers, each harvested from a single cocoon.
Mawata is their original Japanese name, and it means “to spread around.”
Silk takes up colour like nothing else, so the saturation will work great to bring your spinning or wet felting projects to the next level. Silk hankies are quite shiny so they definitely won’t go unnoticed.
How can I use a silk hankie?
- Find a corner of the hankie and peel off a layer. Each layer is very thin and cobweb-like. Moisturise your hands before so the silk doesn’t get stuck to your fingers!
- For spinning or knitting: make a hole in the centre with your fingers and draft the fibres apart until you reach the thickness you’d like to work with (watch the video below). Break off one end so you’ll have a roving of sorts, then carefully wrap it around your hand to form a nest. You then you the same technique you’d use spinning silk hankies as you would any other fibre. The long “nest” you get from this preparation can also be knit as you would any yarn, no other prep required.
- For wet felting (nuno felting): add one or more thin layers to your other fibres for a cobweb effect. The silk will gradually embed with the rest as you felt.
Please note that the last picture shows a stack of several colourways of silk hankies. This listing is only for one of them.
