Untangling...

Yesterday, I got an a frantic call from a friend to go over to her house for an emergency unscrambling... she had taken her precious bundle of Habu pure raw silk and tried to wind it by looping it around the legs of her coffee table and pulling on the end. She thought that it would slide smoothly around and around the table while she wound it on her spooler - kind of using the coffee table like a swift, but a swift that doesn't turn around...

Okay! This sounds like a job for.....UnravelingSophia!! Hey - that name's not just for show, you know! I even have a superhero cape!

This is what I found when I arrived:



Ah, the hubris of humans when encountering the natural silks! How we love to think we've subdued the strands with our spinning and our natural dyes. Not so. These threads - these teeny tiny smaller-than-laceweight threads - were so full of sproingy static electricity that they kept leaping off my fingers and back into the tangled mass. They were wiley, those threads!

Then the bright idea part of brain decided to send me a message - Use the power of the (water) Force! it said. I asked my friend for her laundry water bottle and spritzed the silk. Immediately, it snapped to attention and obeyed. Ah, how satisfying!



Unfortunately, the tangled threads were too intertwined to find any semblance of a skein so I couldn't wind it from my own swift. I had to untangle, wind, untangle, wind, untangle, wind a little tiny bit at a time.

Once I had a hand-wound ball from the mess, I threaded the end on to the ball-winder, and made a nice center-pull ball. This was more to keep the threads from re-tangling than anything else. With a yarn this apt to escape its bounds, I recommended that she really unwind it from the outside when she actually knitted with it. And, I cut off the toe from a pair of her nylon stockings and slipped this over the now nicely-behaved ball with the end sticking out... Nice and orderly...



My job here was done and it was time for me to fade away into the sunset... "Who was that masked woman? I wanted to thank her!" (special prize for anyone who correctly identifies where that pseudo-quote came from!)

Really, this took hours and hours and was one of the most arduous yarn-untanglings I've ever attempted. There were several times when I thought I'd never succeed, and never get to the end of it! I love the Habu, but it needs to be treated, very, very gently.

In other news, my fabulous swap partner from the Vintage Swap on Ravelry sent me (along with lots of other fabulous treats) a skein of midnight Blue Indigo Moon sock yarn!! My first skein ever of this yarn - I love it!