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:

Start Somewhere

A caterpillar once asked, "Who are you?"  I am a daughter, sister, and wife.  Friend and confidante.  Writer.  I'm a pet owner, cook, and sock-folder.  And I'm a knitter.  I wear a lot of hats (most of my own creation), and that's how I like it.

Last weekend, I attended Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat, where I took classes with the famous Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.  She has been my knitting idol for years, and I was giddy at the thought of getting to learn from her in person!  In case you were in any doubt, she is every bit as funny, fabulous, and knit-tastic in person.  Really, she blows me away with her skill.  But she's also genuine.  Authentic.  She's the real deal: a real person who happens to have published several books, can knit at more than 60 stitches per minute, and travels all over North America to share her crafting wisdom.

In the middle of my second class with her, she started lecturing about something that seemed very familiar to me.  She was talking about something that I had already studied and practiced.  That may not sound like such a big deal, but to me it was like the heavens opened up: I knew the things that the Yarn Harlot knew!  She has a couple decades of experience on me, but for a few minutes in that class, I could have been the teacher.  I could have been her.

And it hit me that I want to be!  Okay, not THE Yarn Harlot.  I'm not going to steal her identity, get a perm, or give up on meat.  But I want to write, teach, and live knitting.  Woven through the tapestry of my life, through all the things that I am, is this obsession with fine alpaca yarn, nickel-plated circular needles, stitch markers.  I love project bags, entrelac, and charts.  My relationship with Ravelry is at least co-dependent, if not based entirely on maniacal stalking.

Who am I?  I'm a twenty-something.  And the caterpillar's question left out all the things that I'm still trying to become.  I am a writer and a knitter, and I want to become so much more of both.