Materials comparison: nettle and silk

I’m back at events with courts, which means I’m back at the kumihimo project.

Nettle

I made a quick test run of a 8-strand cord out of my off-white nettle fiber yarn.

Nettle cord with yarn ball.

It came out about half as thick as the 16-strand hemp, which makes sense to me because they’re about the same coarseness.

Two kumihimo braids, thinner off-white nettle and thicker green/brown hemp.

It came out about as thick as the 16-strand cord of 10/2 cotton that I made in 2019.

Off-white nettle cord with green and white cotton cord.

Silk

After that was done, I started setup of my filament silk. (I think it’s filament silk, at least, as it’s very difficult to work with - catches on everything and tangles if you look at it wrong. It’s kind of loose 2-ply. I don’t 100% remember the description from when I bought it.) In an earlier session I really struggled to unwind the skein onto my bobbins. I had enough green and white already wound from then to use now, at least.

I was surprised to find that once wound onto bobbins (8-strand, as I wasn’t sure how much I’d wound and wanted to not run out…) and tied and arranged on my foam disk, it was quite different subjectively than the other materials I’d used. Most other materials stuck in the grooves of the foam disk; this allows me to pull them nice and taut when I braid. I also don’t typically use a counterweight in the center, I just pull on the finished cord once in a while, and it maintains its shape just fine.

The silk I was using constantly slid through the slots in my disk. Pulling a strand into or out of a slot caused the whole thing to wobble out of being centered. I also found that the center cord twisted during this such that it was no longer going through the disk, and instead poked out the top. I had to add a bobbin to it as a counterweight, which helped a lot. The round plastic clamshell bobbins that I usually prefer kept sliding off the center cord until it got long enough to hold them (about 1 inch). I used only one bobbin as a counterweight though I believe I once read that you should use about 1/2 the total weight as counterweight (which would be the weight of 4 bobbins for an 8-strand cord).

I feel like it would be easier to braid with this silk on a marudai. I don’t really know if I have room in my apartment/car/life for one, but it wouldn’t have the tension/sliding issues, I think.

Since I am only using 8 strands, the silk cord is coming out very thin - about as thin as a single strand of the nettle yarn.

Green and white silk on the disk with a single strand of nettle for comparison.

Here’s a couple more shots of the work in progress:

Silk kumihimo cord on disk - front view. Silk kumihimo cord on disk - back view.

It does feel very strong for its size but I haven’t pulled on it that hard, since it’s short and sliding is an issue.