Banana!

If you have watched the extras on the despicable me dvd you will know why I like to run around shouting BANANA! If you haven't you really should, it is funny, has to do with minions and will mean one less person that looks at me like I'm a weirdo. (It is here, illegally I assume but you are welcome :D ).

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That over, on to the spinning stuff. For my do something different I posted this:

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A few people thought it was an April Fools post, but it was not meant to be. I was going to write all about it, but went for an (almost) wordless post in the spirit of the challenge. I then said I would write about it in the comments, so here it is.

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Obviously you don't literally spin with bananas- they would not fit through the orifice! In fact, what you spin with looks like this:

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Super fine strands of silky fluff. I suspect it actually comes from the leaf, not the fruit and if I was a less lazy person I would go and look it up (seriously, how lazy is that?! I could google it from here!).

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Being largely self taught and all that jazz I will probably annoy the proper spinners with my lack of terminology, but here goes.

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It is a very smooth silky fibre, beautifully soft and I would describe it as almost more like hair than wool.

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It has a long staple length, the bit I measured was 5 1/2 inches. This meant I had a bit of trouble with my drafting, but I got the hang of it in the end (after making a bit of a mess).

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The fibres are super fine, trying to measure the staple length was a pain because I could hardly see the thing! If you look at this picture you can sort of see individual fibres around the edge of the mass. See that thing that looks almost like nothing? Yup, that is it!

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I suspect maybe this is more of a blending fibre, I don't know that you would make an entire thing out of it other than for novelty value, but I will know more about that once I have tried knitting with what I have spun. It would add beautiful sheen and softness to anything although the long staple might make blending tricky.

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Obviously being a vegetable based product it is a veggie friendly way of getting the silky effect into a batt/roving.

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I spun this on a drop spindle, I still find I have more control than with my wheel, plus all my bobbins are busy (note to self- obviously need more bobbins). As always I have spun it rather thin, this was not really intentional. I will most likely use the wheel to navajo ply it when I have finished.

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As you spin some of the fibres tend to stick out of the yarn a little, giving a slightly hairy effect so the resulting yarn may have a tickle factor.

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A downside to this stuff is that even after a short session of playing with it I looked like I had been wrestling with a moulty cat, there is serious collateral fluffing!

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Because I am a super geek I have designed this to use as a spinning record:

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It has space for notes, fibre type, staple length and a little bag for a sample each of fibre, yarn and a tiny swatch. s I will fill out the first one when I have finished spinning the sample I have. s s I had a quick google, because I felt bad about being so lazy when you all came to read about it- it seems the fibres comes from the bark of the banana tree, they are cut down, soaked, and then processed into fibres. The eco friendliness of the product is also mentioned (biodegradable, cellulose based product etc), as well as the fact is is veggie/vegan friendly.