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"Glacial" is spun from peacock blue tussah silk (dyed by Winderwood Farm) and white alpaca. Icicle is the blue tussah, plied with itself. The alpaca spun up just like alpaca (alpaca spins beautifully), but the tussah.... I think I've gotten something roughly equivalent to miner's lung from inhaling little flitty bits of silk. The stuff gets everywhere, and into everything. I would not have been surprised to find it in my underwear after a few hours of spinning it. As a more technical note, the tussah fibers were shorter and less silky-straight than normal silk, so the pull out and spin a little more like a very low crimp wool -- more than you'd normally expect from something labeled 'silk', anyway.
"Glacial" was the skein I was trying to make. With all the white from the alpaca, and the shiny light blue of the silk, it looks like the pictures of glaciers you see on the National Geographic channel. Icicle is the amount of silk I had left after I ran out of the alpaca I spun. This was an important lesson: if you're spinning to singles of different weights to ply, you cannot gauge whether or not you have the same amount of each by comparing how full the bobbins are....
Stats for Glacial: 11-14 WPI, 2 ply, 108 yds, thick/thin character
Stats for Icicle: 16 WPI, 2 ply, 66 yds
