Dear Tilli Tomas:

I love your yarn. It is beautiful. I mean, really- silver-colored silk with chips of turquoise? (exotica: atmosphere) Orangy-coppery-amber with chips of a similar color, but translucent? (exotica: novea melon) And winding the orange skein on the bus on my way to ochem lab, when the sun hit the silk and the chips, and it just …glowed… mmm. It made me very happy.

Happy enough that I almost- almost- stopped gritting my teeth hard enough to hurt.

Almost.

The reason? There was no continuity in the plying of the silk yarn and the thin string upon which the chips were strung. Sometimes very tight. Sometimes so loose as to be nonexistent, and running in parallel. Which meant that all the little chips would slide down into a clump, and then they would twist around other little clumps, and become totally enmeshed in a giant clump of deadly, teeth-gritting, stress-inducing annoyance. And I couldn’t get it on a swift. Although that was probably a good thing, since it allowed me to fiddle and poke and resist-the-urge-to-rip-and-instead-untangle all the aforementioned bits of annoyance.

Most of which could have been avoided by a more careful control of the spinning. Or plying.

And seriously, at 40 dollars a skein? I kinda expect it to be well-spun.

Not (in places) a length of fiber running parallel to a string strung with stone chips- you know, something that I could have made for the cost of some orange string, a bag of stone bead/chips, and a skein of silk yarn. Say, 10 bucks total. 15 if the beads/chips were high-end.