I’m spinning some 100% bamboo top for a vegan friend.
Before I get to the spinning tips, a quick explanation: Bamboo fiber and others like it — rose fiber, milk fiber, etc. — are a type of rayon. The simple description is that they mush up the ingredient, add a couple of chemicals, and extrude it the way you would regular rayon. Except regular rayon is a plastic and takes far more water to make, as well as involving more chemicals. Bamboo is better for the environment all around.
Anyway. This is my first time spinning pure bamboo. I’ve used it in wool blends before, but never spun it by itself. It’s slippery as hell. I tried spinning from the end of the top, like I would with wool/wool blends, but it was a disaster.
So I turned to the internet.
FiberDog Fibers on Reddit (link) said they spin it from the fold like they do silk. I tried it. This works wonderfully! It would definitely work for silk top as well.
Another explanation: Silk top/roving is made from short pieces of silk. This is ahimsa silk, also known as peace silk. For reeled silk, the unhatched silk moths are boiled alive and then the cocoon, which is one long fiber, is unwound. I refuse to use fiber that results in mass death of animals. With ahimsa silk, the moths break free from their cocoons naturally and flutter off to live their (admitted short) lives. So my silk spinning is exclusively top/roving. I also don’t buy silk garments, as most involve the boiling method of harvesting.
Silk top is also super slick, and the fiber lengths are similar to bamboo top. I’ll have to try this.
Another tip for spinning bamboo: if you can do English style longdraw, you know this trick already. Draft fast, then, if you need to, pull the half-spun yarn between your hands to stretch it out to an even thickness. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a short video.
It makes spinning the bamboo much easier. Hopefully these two tips help someone. I know they’re helping me a lot.
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