Beautiful silks my ass.

175g pure silk singles

A little while ago I purchased some lovely red silk thread (made by a company called 'beautiful silks' apparently) from a destash. The thread was purchased specifically so I could knit it up into my sisters Christmas present. Clearly the silk gods are against me as I have had nothing but trouble with this stuff since I got it.

When it arrived, it was in a large 175g skein of single ply. It was a HUGE amount of thread and, understandably, I was pretty stoked.

Wound onto bobbins
in preparation for knitting

But when I put it on my swift in order to get it ready for spinning, I found that winding it up was going to be impossible. The little bit that I managed to get onto my yarn winder became tangled within seconds. So I decided to wind it onto a couple of bobbins with my spinning wheel. No problem, except that as it was winding onto the bobbins it was slipping around a lot and looking problematic in general. It didnt FEEL like silk, it has a sticky plastic-y quality and it wasnt behaving anything like any silk I've ever used before, but I ended up getting it all onto two fairly full bobbins and there it stayed while I looked for or designed a suitable pattern to knit with it.

After trying to knit it

So not long ago the knitting began, and as the yarn wound off the bobbin, it quickly became so insanely tangled that I had to give up.  I tried for more than an hour just get it moving enough to wind off even a metre, but nooooooo. It was stuck. And it obviously had every intention of staying that way. So in pure frustration, just to get it off the bobbin  (so I could use it to spin something worthwhile) I got out my trusty scissors. Yes thats right...I had to cut the crap off the bobbin.

And now I have this.  

A whole bobbin cut into short lengths.  Into the bin it goes.

I thought I'd be clever and Navjo ply the second half of it so that I could at least salvage something from this adventure, but unfortunately the same thing happened again.  So the whole damn lot has gone in the bin.