Luna's Baublebilities

I just bought an Umbrella Swift.  I know - pretty strange, right?

Maybe not.  I recently ordered some silk and silk blend yarns and threads from Aurora silk and Dharma Trading Company.  I plan to start a line of silk, wool and cotton embroidery threads.  I'm really enjoying my adventures in Crazy quilting but I hate the fact that I can't easily get my hands on really great threads without breaking my hobby budget.  I dyed some DMC cotton pearle about a year ago and I liked the result but I'm ready to play with some new textures and it feels like a good time to experiment with a new, but related, product line. 

The first package of silk threads arrived last night.   Oooooohh!   They are so soft, so shiny, so perfectly wonderful!  They are also impossibly slippy and full of static.  Silk has an electrical charge which makes it particularly susceptible to static cling - that is part of the magic in a silk dress, the fabric has a life of its own as it simultaneously clings and flows around the body.   Last week, my friend Suzy showed some impressively tidy and tiny weaving she had done with sewing weight silk thread.  She had a great deal of trouble with her thread while preparing her project and now has a leftover mass of tangled silk thread - thanks to slippery, staticy silk.  She was told this weekend that she needed an umbrella swift to avoid the problem in the future.

Those of you who work with fiber are nodding your heads knowingly. 

An umbrella swift is a curious contraption that expands to fit the width of you skein of thread or yarn and spins as you pull yarn off to load your warping board, fill your shuttle bobbin, make a ball to stow in your knitting bag or, in my case, make smaller skeins for dyeing.  I was going to try to do without one, making my ids or my husband hold the skein apart for me, but I found a Lacis umbrella swift for under $40.00 online today. 

It is on its way and will probably arrive just in time for me to start experimenting with new colorways.  Yay!




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