Dreambird

[firstfrost]

Another finished project!



I made this shawl a while ago for Heidi, and it was a fun pattern to play with, so I ended up picking up some more yarn to make another. Amusingly, the original was made from "sea silk" and this one is from "milk", both biosynthetics (though I guess sea silk has a lot of actual silk in it too, plus the biosynethic seacell). There are a lot of weird things people are making yarn out of nowadays.

cellulose:rayon
seaweed:seacell
casein:does not have a cute name yet? "milk protein yarn"

Comments

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

There is milk yarn? Wow, that's pretty cool. Do you know if it's cow's milk or sheep's milk?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

The yarn itself doesn't say, but it seems likely to me that it's cow's milk, since you have to use it in bulk, and sheep's milk is a lot more expensive?

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I would imagine you're right...but ever since i found out that people were making some drugs by genetically engineering rabbits and then milking them, I've been curious about non-cow milking for non-food purposes.

[merastra.livejournal.com]

That looks positively amazing. :-) Kind of hard to believe you can knit something so translucent and trendrily but with coon patterns too.

Speaking of tendrily, we saw another octopus today, wedged into a rock. They sure are clever little creatures. :-)

[kelkyag]

Pretty!

Milk protein yarn seems pretty baffling, though. Milk seems too useful as food to be made into yarn, whereas the biosynthetics made from things like shrimp shells are using stuff that would otherwise be trashed. (As far as I know.) Though I think there's more demand for milk fat than for milk protein, so maybe it really wouldn't get used, and/or maybe the yarn can be made from milk that's gone bad?

[kelkyag]

Having just tripped over this ... apparently plastic-from-milk (from casein in particular) goes back to the late 1800s, and it has some nice aesthetic properties, but use of it dropped off dramatically after WWII. I suspect spinning it into pleasant fibers is quite new, though.