Yarn Lab: A Luscious Blend from Sanjo Silk

In the January/February 2022 issue of Handwoven, Liz Moncrief sampled using Sanjo Silk's Silk Linen Yarn. She liked the yarn so much she wove a beautiful scarf using it for her final sample. You can find a link to that pattern towards the end of this post. - Susan

One of my new favorite yarns is Sanjo Silk’s Silk Linen, a Swiss-made blend of silk and linen that I buy at the Silk Weaving Studio on Granville Island in Vancouver, Canada, where the yarn is dyed in-house. During the COVID-19 border closings, I have missed occasional trips to the Vancouver area from northern Washington State, but thankfully, a few clicks on the Sanjo Silk website keeps my looms humming.

Photos below by Matt Graves unless otherwise noted

THE YARN

Silk Linen from Sanjo Silk (7,440 yd/lb; 65% silk/35% linen), 24 colorways.

The dyers at the Silk Weaving Studio use an acid dye for the Silk Linen. This particular dye strikes the silk with a consistent hue but gives the linen just a hint of the color, resulting in a heathered look overall.

Though I think of this as a “shaggy-chic” member of yarn royalty, Silk Linen has all the elegant glossiness of silk and the interesting crispness of linen once it’s washed and ironed. That’s not all—it also has occasional slubs of linen and an overall slightly uneven spin to give the yarn character. These characteristics can also sometimes cause a sticky shed, but I found that high tension helped my sheds open up cleanly. Using light hair spray on an open shed also works well (and washes out during wet-finishing).

I used Silk Linen for both warp and weft in all of the samples. I handwashed the swatches and laid them flat to dry, except for the waffle sample, which went into the dryer on medium heat for 20 minutes with no appreciable change in the fabric. I believe this yarn would also work well as weft on a 20/2 pearl cotton warp.

Huck Lace