The silk Peduncle; Nature’s Weird Little Stem

Post 2: “The Hatchling”

My fiber journey began about a dozen years ago when I discovered the magic of making yarn on a spinning wheel. Needle felting wool sculptures soon followed, and before long I was happily exploring all sorts of unusual fibers.

While browsing online for silk to spin, I stumbled upon something called peduncle fiber, and “yarn.” I put yarn in quotation marks because, well, this stuff is so wildly peculiar that knitting with it would be a whole other adventure! I purchased this oddball “yarn” certain I would later find a marvelous way to use it.

A tussah silk cocoon with it’s Peduncle stem. Does that even *look like* something useable?!

Village women harvest Tussah silk cocoons and save the little stems, called peduncles. After soaking stems to soften the fibers, they pull apart the gooey, stringy material and casually roll it over the bottom of a pot to give it a little twist. Once dried, the strands look remarkably like tiny woody twigs. They retain plenty of sericin (the caterpillar’s natural glue), which makes them curiously stiff.

And that’s when my imagination took off: Silk that looks like twigs! I could make a NEST!

Hatchling nest **entirely of silk**…(except that yellow sewing pin holding a silk leaf in place). Peduncle silk twigs. But what silk is the green cocoon “egg” thing? or the fluff? Or the leaf? We’ll soon find out…

For a couple of years, a large needle-felted armature had been taking shape in my craft room, patiently awaiting that elusive spark of inspiration to bring its final personality to life.

I like to create a crumpled paper mockup to test proportions and position. This paper cutey sat atop a shelf amusing me long after the sculpture was under way.

Then, early this year, the Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival announced that SILK would be its featured fiber. What perfect serendipity! At last, I had an excuse to dive into my collection of oddball, uncommon silk forms and put them to work in a needle-felted Fiber Arts entry. The possibilities were suddenly swirling!

The wire armature is filling out with needle felted wool

The discovery of peduncle silk was just the spark I needed. Suddenly, I could envision my woodland elf-like creature holding a delicate nest in its hand.

But then another idea fluttered in… What if the nest perched right on top of its head? I loved that whimsical notion even more…because the hands would be free to hold the actual Hatchling!

Of course, imagining it and bringing it to life are two different things. How would all these curious varieties of silk play together? What would happen when they met my still-evolving woodland creature?