Fiber Arts Friday: Milk Fiber

I wanted to do a new post for Fiber Arts Friday, hosted by Wonder Why Gal and her alpaca farm, instead of recycling one of my other weekly blog posts about making stuff. So today’s short entry is about something I forgot to add to my blog post last week: milk fiber.

A cellphone picture of some milk fiber that I'm working on.

I got this as a sample from an Etsy buyer who had forgotten to ship my order and threw this in as thanks. The colorway is really quite beautiful with its mix of chocolate, rose, and tans. I’ve never spun milk fiber before and was intrigued; I’d seen it in fiber shops before and it seemed very soft and pretty, but how would it spin?

It spins about as easily as any other fiber; it drafts very nicely and seems to want to be spun quite fine, so I’m spinning it on my very small Golding spindle. Occasionally I lose control of the draft but for the most part it’s a very enjoyable small spinning project. I plan to ply it 2-ply to maximize the yardage I’ll get and I’m hoping I get enough to at least make something small with it.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure I’d ever go out and actually buy milk fiber. From what I can find out in my research online — which is very little — milk fiber is processed similarly to soy silk in that it comes from extruding the proteins (only in this case milk instead of the discarded waste of soy processing) into a spinnable fiber. I can’t seem to verify this, but some spinners say that this requires some harsh chemicals to achieve, and I like to avoid buying and spinning fibers that require lots of chemical processing — I mean, with wool and alpaca fiber, for instance, you feed the animals, they give you natural fertilizer for the garden and wool for your clothes that simply requires some soap and hot water. What could be easier? (Yes, I know soap is a chemical, but you have to draw your line somewhere.)

And that’s the other thing: what does milk fiber offer that other fibers don’t? I can’t seem to sort that out. It feels about as soft as soy silk, but I can get that softness from, well, soy silk or even good old-fashioned silk. It doesn’t seem to offer me a property that no other fiber can give me, and seems to require harsher processing to achieve — wool gives you warmth and memory, alpaca gives you even more warmth but with softness, silk gives you strength with softness…the list goes on. I can’t seem to figure out what it’s supposed to do better than fibers with a similar hand, like soy silk. This fiber kind of reminds me of Ingeo, a corn-based fiber that appeared on the spinning market a few years ago but I’ve not seen since.

So while this fiber is certainly pretty and I appreciate the seller throwing it in as a sample, I don’t know that I’ll be buying it anywhere and will be sticking to fibers that I know offer some property that I need or desire in my spinning. How about you, spinners? What are your thoughts on milk fibers, or any of the other new fibers that seem to be exploding onto the market?

Check out other Fiber Arts Friday posts!