Knitting with silk thread

Today I search the web for some information how to knit cactus silk thread into a pulli or other kind of project. I found nothing at all. But I found hiw to knit silk thread with. It's an awsome project. I tried to knit my royal blue cactus silk and -as I said in my first note - it was very difficult. The cactus silk is as slippery as the silkworm-silk, and the stitches drop anytime. It sometimes tangled. So the cactus silk is very similar to the silk. 

But the result is worth the suffering. If I ever finish my pulli I'll share you the photo.

I show you some of the wonderful things made of silk (unfortunately not by me):

How to make cactus silk threads?

I found a site where you can find the method how Moroccan people make the cactus silk thread. This is the link:

http://craftsoftheworldonline.blogspot.com/2013/01/vegetable-silk-also-known-as-sabra.html

They have a webshop, too, where you can find some items of cactus silk.

"Also known as Cactus silk, Sabra silk is a natural fiber harvested from sustainable sources of Saharan Aloe Vera Cactus (the Aloe Vera plant being part of the Agave family).

The fabric is a 100% vegetable silk blend of extracted filaments from the aloe cactus grown in Morocco. It is sought for its quality, strength and beauty since millennia. The process to produce sabra silk has not changed for centuries. Once the Cactus plant is collected from the long agave plants, the long spiky leaves are crushed and the fibres washed and hammered, then the leaves are soaked in water to separate the fibres & filaments and then these are spun and woven to make "silk thread" which are then dyed in different colours. The textile produced has a high elasticity and this makes Sabra-Silk free of wrinkles.

You might have come across - when walking through the narrow lanes of the Medina in Marrakech –men threading fine, almost invisible, fibers on spools. These are then twisted into thread by small battery powered twisters and tacked along the walls of the medina while they were being created. The colourful threads of the cactus silk are then sold in spools."

 

Tapestry with silk

Weavers can use the pure silk threads to make fine tapestries. I found an ancient example for it, a french antique on from the middle-ages. You can see here:

 http://www.thewadsworth.org/mythofpsyche/

"Made of wool, silk, and gilded-silver, these designs were based on fifteenth-century engravings and were part of a series produced by an unknown manufactory in Paris around 1660. While exploring the allegory of Psyche as told in the second century Latin novel Metamorphoses, this installation addresses the history and use of tapestries through its narrative reinterpretation during the Renaissance and Baroque eras."

You can see this tapestry in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, USA.

"I want to colour in my life with it."

There is a hungarian poet - Dezső Kosztolányi - who wrote a poem of the colours. The title of the poem is

I dream of coloured inks. Of every kind.

The yellow is the finest. Reams and reams
of letters could I write in yellow ink
to her, the little schoolgirl of my dreams.
I'd scrawl something that looks like Japanese,
then try a bird, most intricately scrolled.
And I want other colours, many more,
like bronze and silver, emerald and gold,
and then I want a hundred more, a thousand,
or rather, I will have a million:
dumb-charcoal, funny-lilac, drunken-ruby,
enamoured, chaste or brash vermilion.
I ought to have some mournful violet,
a palish blue, a brick-red-like maroon,
like shadows seeping through a stained glass window
against a black vault, in August, at noon.
In reds I want a blazing, burning one,
and blood-red, like the blood-stained setting sun
and then I'd go on writing: with a blue
to my young sister, mother will get gold,
I'd write a prayer in gold ink to my mother,
a golden dawn with golden words re-told.
I'd go on writing, in an ancient tower.
My colour set, so fine and exquisite,
would make me happy, oh my God, so happy.
I want to colour in my life with it.

This was the poem what popped in miy mind when I first saw the silks.

Embroidery with gold silk thread

I've found some wonderfoul patterns and things to demonstrate what kind of embroidery can make with our silk threads. These embroideries are created with gold silk threads. See the examples:

And these are hungarian embroidered feit coats for shepards:

Ages ago the nomad people used silk threads to make embroidered feit tents to live, too.

The Price

Somebody asked me the price, so

10 g silk               12.50 USD

If you buy at least 1 kg, the discount is 20%., so 1 kg silk is 1.000 USD
If you buy the whole 78 kg, the discount is 40%, so the price is 39.000 USD.

How many?

One of my friends who have read this blog asked me how many spools we have. So there are 2 kg spools, 1 kg spools and 10g spools.


Colour                             2kg                                   1kg                                   10g

Black                                  2                                                                              100  

White                                 1                                                                                99

Gold                                                                                                                    100

Old Gold                                                                      4                                     100

Beige                                                                            6

Orange                                                                                                                100

Blue                                                                              7

Royal Blue                                                                    3

Light Blue                                                                     3

Silverblue                                                                                                           100

Skyblue                                                                                                              100

Dark Blue                                                                                                           100

Eggplant                                                                       7

Cyclamen                                                                     2                                    100

Pink                                                                             7                                    100

Powderpink                                                                  3

Mallow                                                                                                               100

Red                                                                               7                                      99

Cherry                                                                                                                 100

Bordeaux                                                                                                            100

Olive                                                                             3

Grass Green                                                                  3

Sea Green                                                                                                           100

Turquoise                                                                                                            100

Benetton Green                                                                                                   100

Dark Green                                                                                                         100

How to buy our silk?

I forgot to add the link of the ebay url where you'll find our silks:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/100-pure-cactus-silk-thread-/290957758049?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&var=&hash=item43be6f0e61

You'll see there only a few items, but if you want some more to buy, you can contact us here, or wait for our webshop-site which would be available in the beginning of october. 

If you want to buy 1 kg spool at least, we can give you discount, too.

Our Journey to Morocco

Two years ago me and my friends traveled to Morocco, Marrakesh. There - in the Souque - we saw a lot of goods made of cactus silk. The colours of the cactus silk threads were vibrant, bright and vivid. So we were overjoyed. I so wanted those amazing silk threads, to make some handcrafts of these. 

My friends also wanted the thread because of some business, in Europe or in America there aren't any of these kinds. So we bought the 100% moroccan cactus silk threads: in 16 colours, in various sizes of spools. Yes, we bought 100 kg!!!

I knitted a royal blue casual pulli but that was a very hard work, I had to use 12 filaments of silk to make one thread to knit. But the pulli is wonderful.

Nevertheless now I know that this silk is for embroidery and tapestry. 

But we cannot sell these silk in commercial ways in the market because the spools aren't standards. 

4 thread makes a "cord" that is spinned up to the spool. It is not supposed to be for machine use, instead for handcraft, patchworking, needlework, handweaving,, knitting, tapestry etc. For machine works it is only applicable in spools!   

So now we have 80 kg of these pure cactus silk threads, and we want to sell these to people who are able to make embroidery or weaving. 

The threads are available to buy in ebay, but we'll sell these in our webshop-site too. 

If you are interested in our goods, please check us out in ebay, or go to our website.

To taste, these are the muster of the 1 kg spools (the Black and the White silk are in 2 kg/spool, too):

And we have some other kind of coloured silk in small spools, these are 10g/spool:

The product sepc: 830 g/10.000 m, strength 207,5 DPF, one 10g spool is about 75 m in length of 4 filaments (total length is 300m), a 1 kg spool is around 7.500 m in length of 4 filaments. The small hank is about 10g in weight.

The goods are in Hungary, Europe.