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:
