Put a Pearl in your spinning

It’s been a roller coaster ride again as usual. I have been dyeing and blending and spinning lots of fibres and oh wait til you see what is in store tonight  !!! 

Apart from that we had a close call with another vehicle..this time a food truck..coming close to delivering its total load including the truck in our house (it rolled over at 1am in the morning, the driver was okay but obviously phazed and we got him out of the cabin eventually ...you can read all about it on my facebook page btw...lol incl photos), the mobile phone tower of our internet provider went "kaboom" so now we have no internet from them and have to run around like crazed tech gnomes finding work arounds with another mobile provider; it kept on raining and being too cold to get the fibres dry, so the woodfire was stoked up only to find that the fan pushing the heat out had broken down, oh and the coffee machine has started giving up the spirit, which is a major downer because insomniac me and Paul live on that stuff...lol   Apart from all of that...i am very happy to get everything that i wanted to get done ...done and able to offer you another fibery and spindle update this week not to mention a RESTOCK of the Glow in the Dark Yarn that last week seemed to disappear like a ghost after Halloween.... lolol

Also, there has been lots of panic and excitement building up here because the handknitters guild show is on Mid May (look out for the posters I will be putting up on my social media with all the details later this weekend!) so, that means tons of yarns to dye and I am still spinning a mountain of angora and guanaco and some very special wallaby blend and possum blend yarns!! So yeah, there will be lots and lots more going on very very soon, bit more on that on a later date. 

For this blog update I have something very special for you:
Pearl Bunny Tops ! lots of new colourways too like "Indictment party" , "Eternal Optimist", "Machu Peach-U" and "Mermaid Reality Show".

I am especially enthusiastic about this blend that has an amazing new and strange fibre: Chitin. That is pronounced KAI-tin btw, not Shit-in (yes...i am 5...lol)

 Anyhoo, Chitin is one of those elements that I always am on the look out for , just like the stainless steel blend from years ago that I unleashed on all of you. I am always looking outside of the box to combine either technology, science, bizarness, call it what you like, into my special blends. 
This one took a bit of doing and literally years of combining science with the craft of blending different fibres together. But, let me start by explaining what exactly brought me to add shitin ..eh..i mean..Chitin... to my fibre blends ready for handspinning :

Chitin was discovered by the French chemist and pharmacist Henri Braconnot in 1811 and, after cellulose, it's the most important biopolymer in nature.
In fact, it is made of the exoskeleton of insects, shellfish and Shells. Chitin is a polysaccharide. Chemically speaking it looks like a long-chain in which pearls are molecules of N-acetylglucosamine.
The N-glucosamine is a very important substance for the human organism, in fact, it is the precursor of hyaluronic acid and it is used in therapies for the functional recovery of the joints.

Chitin is also widely used in the medical world to make suture wires because it can be degraded by enzymes present in human tissue. It is also used as wound dressing, enormously important to treat burn victims.
 Chitin has a remarkable strength and it accelerates the healing of wounds. (want to delve deeper into some research?

Here are some publications in the international journal of Niological Macromolecules:

 www.brommarin.com/blog-en/blog-posts/publications%20chitin%20scaffolds%20tissue%20engineering.php

As a medical anthropologist, the medical application of a fibre always peaks my interest and so I did some more research. So wait , there is more !

Obviously I will not tell you to eat the Pearl bunny tops, but Chitin has many other applications than medical suture wires and wound dressing.

It is also extensively used in food and pharmaceutical products. It is often used as a food thickener and stabilizer, and it can also form edible films.

Chitin is also used in supplements to manage healthy cholesterol levels and body weight. Additional uses of chitin include the support of kidney function.
Some early research shows that Chitin supports the body’s natural ability to heal skin damage and nerve regrowth.

Now something that really alerted me to the oddity of this fibre is based on , well, is it a protein or cellulose fibre? The chemical answer to that question is , well, interesting to say the least.

Chitin, being derived from shells, made me think it was more like a protein than a cellulose fibre since there is obviously no cellulose in a crab. So I looked deeper into the chemical structure of Chitin and here it is:

Chitin is a “polymerized N-acetylglucosamine.” The only thing you need to remember from that extremely long a word is “glucos”  and “Amine” which opens a whole other box of contradictions, because Glucose is a cellulose and Amine is a Protein. Could it be the best of both worlds then? And the short answer of it is : YES!

In my top notch dye laboratory (please note the sarcasm) I tested this odd fibre with both fibre reactive and acid dyes ! Bingo ! The fibre  takes both acid dyes and fibre reactive dyes! Very odd isn’t it?

In the chemical structure of the Chitin you can see the OH (hydroxide) Highlighted in pink , which is helpful in reactive dyeing , and the NH and NH2 , which are necessary for acid dyeing.

So there you go: chitin is one of those bizarre fibres that will bind with both acid and reactive dyes. However, when you closely look at the structure you can see that there are way more hydroxide “binding sites” (just look at how many OH’s there are for short ). So after all that research I have to admit it’s like a cellulose/plant fibre that loves acting like a protein/animal fibre… I hope I satisfied your inner bio chemist and can't wait to do some of your own research..eh .. spinning..
The blend spins up like a dream! It is a bit cool to the touch, has a gorgeous drape, feels very silky. Totally different from any blend with bamboo or soy or seacell (seaweed) or even tencel. I love working with it and it will make an excellent jumper as well (or socks) since the tensile strength is huge and it also has excellent anti bacterial properties (read that as : it is great for combating sweaty feet and armpits).

So, here they are: Pearl Bunny Tops (I thought that was a better name than calling it Bunny Crabs....let's not go there LOL)

Please don't hesitate to contact me at any time if you have any questions okay? Always happy to enable.

Today is the LAST day to sign up for the clubs Quarter 2 !! So if you dont want to miss out on a monthly parcel of fun and excitement, please go to the club section on the website here: https://ixchel.com.au/collections/clubs

Have a wonderful weekend !

Big Fluffy Hugs

Charly

https://ixchel.com.au/collections/whats-new