My father-in-law has tropical milkweed growing around his house, and when we were visiting, it was going to seed; putting out lovely fluffy seeds. Hm. Can I spin it?

We gathered the fluff and I separated out the seeds. I didn’t have a spindle or flicker or any fiber processing tools with me (what was I thinking?!?), so I hand teased out the fiber and borrowed a pencil to attempt to spin the fiber.

I would have preferred to spin these short fibers with a supported spindle, but after many determined attempts using a pencil to hold the spun single, I was able to at least achieve the semblance of yarn. The single was very fragile, so I doubled it to make a 2-ply yarn. The bit of yarn is brittle, but very soft. It is a thing to spin milkweed down, as I researched later, but most of the resources I found blended the milkweed with other fibers to give it strength. As my strand stands, it is really just an exercise in attainability, to see if I could. The yarn isn’t suitable to much purpose, however, it was a very enjoyable experiment.