Silk Worms and Bad Math

Silk.  Pure silk.  You may think of a silk scarf or blouse: smooth, cool, shiny fabric that costs too much and gets ruined by a grease stain.    I'm thinking of unspun silk: shiny but soft, stringy, and still costs too much.

Last weekend, I took a class with the Yarn Harlot called "All About Mawata."  Mawata is a silk hanky made of many layers of stretched silk cocoons.    We learned the entire process of soaking the cocoons, extracting the "passenger" (a dead silk worm), stretching the cocoons over a frame, and drafting from the hankies to make an unspun yarn that we can then knit.  There's a really great site that explains the whole process with pictures and useful hints, but I thoroughly enjoyed the class and think it was worth paying to learn this new skill.  Something about the group setting with a hilarious teacher over an afternoon dedicated solely to crafting made the technique really stand out in my mind as unique, beautiful, and fun.

After the class was done, I did something a little crazy.  I went straight to the Marketplace next door to find ALL the silk hankies.  Credit card in hand, I was ready to fight for all the best colorways.  Silk hankies are something you don't find at big box craft store, and even a lot of local yarn shops don't carry these treasures, so I thought the pressure was on to stock up.

Now, mawata is not measured by the yarn like a lot of yarn, but it's measured by grams or ounces.  We learned that a lovely silk cowl (probably the biggest project you'd want to make from mawata) will take about 40-60 grams of silk.  The first booth I came across that offered mawata was charging $1.20 per gram.  I bought almost 80 grams, enough for two cowls.  Oooh, I was so happy!  But it cost almost $100, my entire budget for the Marketplace.

No big deal, I thought.  I'll just look at the rest of the vendors.  I don't have to buy anything else...

It turned out, all the other booths were selling silk hankies by the ounce.  A single ounce is about 28 grams, so with my dirty, dirty math skills I decided I would need about 1.5 ounces for my cowls.  (Oh, and in my head, I was going to make ALL the silk cowls).  Here's the kicker: every booth that was selling mawata by the ounce charged $10 per half ounce.

Quick and dirty math: 1.5 ounces (42 grams) costs $30.  That's only 71 cents per gram.  My original 80 grams should have only cost $57.

I went ahead and bought a few extra hankies at the lower price, just in case.  My whole haul from the Marketplace at Madrona: