Makeshift Spindle Sleeve

Happy Canada Day!

Thought you might like to see some red and white today in honour of our national holiday.

The ball of silk top I'm spinning is rather heavy, for something so small. The fibre arrangement gets out of order very easily, unlike wool.

To start, I used the black bag to hold the silk top on my arm as I spun with the drop spindle. I found that friction on the slightly rough hemp/silk fabric caused the silk top to snag as I fed it out of the bag onto the spindle. Both my black shirt and the bag looked like they'd had a skirmish with a frantic Persian cat.*

I was running out the door on World Wide Knit in Public Day, planning to spin at a local yarn store, when I decided I had to have a better solution, right then. I cut the sleeve off a slick silk blouse, pinned the bottom shut, created a strap from more safety pins, and jammed the ball of silk top inside.

The sleeve worked. Well worth the fifty cents I spent on the blouse at the thrift shop a few months previously.

I ran out the door again to my spinning guild without having made the sleeve into a proper bag. To my embarrassment during the show and tell after my turn had passed, a friend sitting across the room saw me using the sleeve, called attention to it, and urged me to send it round the circle for examination. I declined, but hope to send around a completed sleeve in the future. I think I'll leave the cuff on, for fun.


*Speaking of Persian cats and skirmishes, when I was a kid I read that the people in ancient Persia were so fond of cats that they went to war with Persian cats on their arms. I mistook this for "Persian cats in their arms" and wondered how they ever trained their cats not to go running once the yelling started.