Pipers Silks arrived!

Thursday was a great day - my order from Pipers Silks arrived!  It was way faster than I thought it would be as I hadn't thought of even hoping for it before this coming Monday, but the despatch note hit my in-box on Tuesday evening and the package arrived less than 40 hours later.

Above you can see the new arrivals.  There are 4 of the 'Embroidery Packs', which are good value collection builders at 10 cops for price of 9.  In the centre row: 'Nature' (various brown-based shades) and 'Summer Fruits' (purplish pinks and deep reds); and the bottom row: 'Autumn' (golds and oranges) and 'Plush Pinks' (reds and red-based pinks).  I used the colour lists from other packs as well as the on-line colour chart and Susan Peck's helpful advice to select the greens, blues and purples etc that you can see at the top.  I managed not to overtly duplicate any shades I had, although one or two are remarkably similar and there may have been one or two name changes since my first lot were made as I noticed, for instance, that I really couldn't tell any difference between 'rhubarb' and 'dark rhubarb'. 'Dark lettuce' and 'leaf' are almost the same too, as are 'champagne' and 'deep cream', so those are to bear in mind when it comes to time to restock.

This is now my whole collection of Pipers Floss Silks.  Which section does your eye go to?  Mine's really drawn to those lucious pinky purples part way into the middle row (from the left).  I think I bought that set simply as I love that type of colour so much!  Now I'm longing to find a use for them.

I also have black and white of the fine twisted silk 2/20 and a black 4/20.  I've become quite curious as to how all those numbers work!  I can see that the lower the first number, the finer the thread, but what happens when the second number changes??  Anyone know?

When I came to arranging the whole lot in my box, I ran into something unexpected:

If you read my last post, you might remember that I thought I would be able to get all these floss silks into the first two layers of my box, thus leaving the third for finer gauges of thread that I hope to get hold of later on.  So, what happened?  Susan tells me that the company who make the cardboard core of the cop (they call them 'cops' as opposed to 'reels' or 'spools') have increased the width of the tube a little.  So, whilst they fit into the sections nicely still, I can't get three layers in as expected, but only two.  Where I have a mixture of older, narrower cops and newer ones, I can get about seven in each section - eight at a push, but only six of the new ones.

At first, I was a bit disappointed about that, but then I realised that it really has its good points as putting fewer in each section means that it's both easier to see more of the colours and is likely to preserve them in better condition as there will be less fidgeting around in each section to get to the shade I want and the cops rubbing against each other tends to lead to a slight 'fluffing' of the silk (I had to rewind parts of some of my old cops to reduce this after long storage).  So, I've decided it isn't so bad after all.  For those of you who expressed an interest in this type of box as a storage solution for Pipers cops though, please note that you can only store about 108 in it as opposed to the previously advertised 160+.

I can fit about another sixteen cops into these three layers and then I need another box to store finer gauges in.  Oh, what a shame!!!=)LOL.  Watercolour paints, you're getting your own box soon!

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2013