I dropped my spindle and it broke again, in the middle of a walk. Luckily it cracked and didn’t completely snap off, so I was able to wrap the yarn around the neck and finish spinning the roving I had in my bag. After I came home and removed the ball of spun yarn, I put some wood glue in the crack and clamped it up tight.

This ball of yarn is another go with adding bits of color to alpaca fleece. When I was carding the fibers for the rolags, I found something suspicious. In the bag of “100% silk” sari thread waste were strands of metallic gold. Hm. Probably not silk. So I did a burn test on four different colors. I was surprised that two of the colors (pink and neon green) were actually silk despite the vast difference in texture. When I burned them I got the characteristic balls of ash that crushed easily. (My sense of smell is terrible, so I need to rely on other physical signs.) The metallic gold, not shockingly, just melted in the candle flame. Then I tested some black fibers that burned even when removed from the flame (silk does not) and produced fine gray ash with no ball. This may be rayon (here is a good article on the burn test). If you do a burn test yourself, use tweezers to hold the twisted fibers to the flame. The black fibers flared and burned faster than I could say “ouch”. (I did use tweezers, but the ferocity of the burn was surprising.) So I will have to say the yarn I am making uses mixed fiber waste.

I love my concrete countertops.