Spinning milk fiber.

At the yarn store the little bag of milk fiber was irresistible. Beautiful pearly white, high luster, fine and silky, it was just gorgeous, and obviously I bought it.  

Milk fiber is touted as a environmentally favorable fiber but I don't think it is since it takes nearly 100 gallons of milk to make a pound of fiber. Seems to me that is an awful lot of cow for a tiny bit of fiber.

  To make a long complicated story short, the milk is dried the protein or casein removed ( casein is also used in making artists paints by the way) then it is bonded with acryilate or acrylic at a molecular level.  It is extruded through spinnerets, think spiders extruding spider silk and then used in the textile industry.  The raw fibers are beautiful and quite frankly a bitch to spin.

 Since I spin solely on a  spindle I found the slick fibers to be obnoxious to say the least, maybe if spun on a wheel it would be easier to hang on to.  Though I can spin very fine fibers like silk (which I love) and Merino (which I love more) these fibers had no "grab" and were difficult to attenuate, they tended to drift apart and because of the fineness were prone to breaking if the spindle was the least bit overloaded.

 But I kept at it, though there was much swearing involved, until I had over five hundred yards of very fine, almost thread like singles yarn.  This afternoon I dyed the damnable stuff with acid dyes since  milk fiber is protein based.  It is a very slick fiber but I think it's biggest drawback is it is NOT WOOL.    Anything that is NOT WOOL is probably not worth messing with.

 After it dried I really liked the color though the thread is so fine it does not show the luster well.

 This last photo is a bit washed out, but it is wound on an old cone and ready for lace knitting.  I will show you the finished project,eventually.  Its a matter of deciding what lace pattern to work with.

For the very last photo, Benjamin Button our sweet bird, wishes everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and encourages Ham. Or Beef. Preferably pie of some sort.