Handpainting Silk Yarn

Hand-Painted Silk Yarn: Here’s What Happens

When it’s time to replenish our handpainted silk yarn offering, we plan a 3-day getaway to our island dye studio. It’s an idyllic waterfront work environment on a beautiful island a few hours from Vancouver on the West Coast of Canada.

OK, now you have absolutely no sympathy for how hard we’re about to work for 3 days….

 

Before we go, we prepare the yarns. Skeins are wound either to pair later with solids for our knit kits, or as individual skeins for our customers to work into their own creative gems.

We begin to plan the colourways. We’re inspired by many things: art, nature, and the world around us. Each time we handpaint yarns, we create new and original colourways; never the same twice.

Once we’re in the dye studio, we soak the yarns to prepare them to accept the dyes. Individual colours are created to achieve the colourways we’ve designed. The colours are tested and tweaked until we’re satisfied that we’ve got what we want. Each colourway has at least 4 colours that are carefully applied and blended on the individual skeins.  It’s a time-consuming process, but very inspiring.

 

The skeins are given time to absorb the dyes and fix the colours. Then we gently wash and rinse them. If we’re lucky, the sun shines on us and the skeins are hung outside in the island sun to dry.

Once we’ve completed the handpainting process we dye solid colours to accompany them in the knit kits. And so marks the completion of another wonderful handpainting session.

Because they’re unique and of such limited production, these lovely handpainted yarns are only available for in-person shopping at the Silk Weaving Studio – Sorry, no online sales for these lovelies. Please come and visit us on Granville Island in Vancouver to see them.

 

 

Mona Sultan – A Designer with Conscience

Syrian born, Mona Sultan is a Vancouver-based fashion accessory designer. For the work we’re featuring here, she has collaborated with textile artist Portia Boehm to create fabulously voluptuous and colourful necklaces. They are available at Holt Renfrew’s H Project and 100% of the net profits from sales will go to the Karam Foundation’s “Innovative Education” and “Learn Not Earn” initiatives, helping to bring the 2.8 million Syrian children out of labour and back to school.

 Sultan uses Sanjo Silk’s 10-005 for the sumptuous tassles on these statement pieces. They also feature fabric off-cuts from previous styles of her signature scarf line as a way to re-purpose samples. They were inspired by Sultan’s years of travel in the Mediterranean region.

See Mona Sultan’s beautiful work at her website. http://www.monasultan.com/

Yahooo!! Silk Wool Spin Fibre!

We are just so tickled to have this new spinning fibre. We've long had 2 gorgeous yarns in this 50% Bombyx Silk 50% Merino Wool combination - 10-217 (30/2 weaving yarn) and 20-056 (12/3, a bit heavier, mostly used for knitting). But now you can spin your own yarn. We had to look twice when we opened the big bag of fibre when it arrived. It's so lustrous we wondered if it was all silk. But NO! Half the content is lovely, soft merino wool.
Can you tell we're excited?

Ceranchia Cocoons - Big & Beautiful

We have a new addition to our roster of cocoons available at Sanjo Silk.

Ceranchia cocoons come from Madagascar. We're supporting a project there that has re-established silk production as a sustainable, ecologically-responsible economy for a region that is much in need.

The men in this region grow the trees upon which the silkworms feed, and they rear these silkworms and gather the giant cocoons. The women then turn the cocoons into beautiful panels of stitched-together amazingness.

The cocoons are double - an outer layer, and a separate inner layer. The outer layer is larger (about 3 1/2" X 2 1/4") and lacy. The inner layer is slightly smaller and more densely spun. The otherworldly gold colour is the natural colour of these beauties.

At Sanjo we have both the individual cocoons (which we provide in packages of 5), and the beautiful panels, which come in a 1 metre X 1 metre size, or a 1 metre X 3 metre size. The panels are currently on display at the Silk Weaving Studio on Granville Island. The cocoons are available on the Sanjo Silk website. http://www.sanjosilk.com/ceranchia-cocoons-22-001/

Not only are they stunningly lovely, but you can get a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that you're helping to support a group of people half a world away.

Painterly....

It's been a little while since we painted yarn, and sometimes we forget how scrumptious it is. This is one of the new colourways under way. It'll be magically turned into knitting kits, skeins of yarn, ribbons, spinning fibre...  As always, we only sell the painted yarns in the studio. They're so limited-edition, and each skein is different. How do you present that online? Our advice is to come in and see it in person. It'll be there in about 2 weeks. (2nd week of September). Enjoy the summer; it will so soon be behind us.