I’ve been having a ball with this stuff. It’s so pretty, and easy, and . . . silky! Here is how I spin from a silk hankie. (I learned this from a great article on Knitty.)

Alright. Let’s start with the good stuff. These hankies are made up of lots of stretched cocoons stacked on top of each other. I read on a website that it takes about thirty to forty cocoons to make an ounce of silk, so this would be somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty cocoons.

I’m really curious to see if it’s cheaper to raise the silkworms yourself (assuming you have a ready supply of mulberry leaves) or just buy the preprocessed hankies.