Denier

My daughter found a deal on some 500 thread count sheets at Marshal's. 500 TPI (Threads Per Inch)!?! That's crazy talk! That would mean each thread was less than two thousandths of inch (.002") in diameter. So I looked it up when we got home, and thread count is the sum of the number of threads in both directions, so it's only 250 TPI. Whew, had me worried there for a moment. But thread count is a rat hole that can consume the rest of your life. We don't want to go there. But while I was looking around I find this bit about Denier in Wikipedia:

Denier is a unit of measure for the linear mass density of fibers. It is defined as the mass in grams per 9,000 meters. . . . The denier has its standard based in nature, a single strand of silk is one denier. Therefore, a sampled 9,000 meters length of silk will weigh one gram.

Nine kilometers of silk weighs one gram! That's six miles! Un-fricking-believable! So I went looking for a picture of 9 km of silk fiber. Problem is it is really hard to get down to one fiber. Even the silk pulled directly from the cocoons of silk worms is multiple fibers. A single fiber of silk is from 5 to 10 micrometers (millionths of a meter) in diameter.

Silk is made of protein, and proteins are made from amino acids, and amino acids are mostly made of Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen. Picking on Carbon, because everybody is always picking on Carbon, the diameter of a carbon atom is about 300 picometers (trillionths of a meter). So a single thread of silk is about 25,000 atoms wide. Hmmph. I would have thought fewer. I guess atoms are smaller than I thought.

Filature/Reeled Silk Yarn - 20-22 Denier

And then we have this little blurb:

The Tussah silk yarn is a newly designed color with a soft/low twist for 2009 Spring. It was made for a project in New York City fashion show, wonderful bright color and very smooth & soft hand. Our team was inspired by melt-down global economy, everywhere stimulus package, eco-friendly alternative energy and 2009 uncertainty.

Some people just really have a way with words. Snark, snark.

Update March 2016. Replace missing picture. [Old picture came from here.]

Update May 2023. Link in previous update message pointed to [silkindian dot com] which generated a security warning from Blogger.