Our recent intern Emi e-mailed us this week detailing her plans for a summer of alpaca fun when she returns to Japan.
Firstly she'll be visiting a Mawata manufacturer who make duvets. Mawata or hankie is a method of stretching silk cocoons over a wooden frame and drying them to create squares of raw silk. Emi and Carrie investigated this on You Tube and the Yarn Harlot's blog after talking about hand spinning when Emi was last here. The Yarn Harlot describes using hankie to make a pair of mittens and instead of spinning using a traditional wheel she just pulled the silk into a strand of fibre ‘something (very vaguely) resembling a light worsted weight yarn’. Fascinating, huh?! Emi has lots of silk pupa a home and hopefully this hands on training will allow her to use them to great effect!
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2011/02/02/mine_mine_all_mine.html
Another visit Emi is making is to a Japanese alpaca farm called Nasu. Their website is beautifully designed although their take on the healing power of alpacas is an interesting one (we used Google translate – we aren’t actually fluent in Japanese!). The most interesting thing though has to be alpaca muffins which aren’t made of alpaca but camembert and if anyone knows the link between the two, answers on a postcard please! The cookies look interesting too and Emi has promised us a taste when she returns – we look forward to it!
http://www.nasubigfarm.com/index.shtml
No comments:
Post a Comment