While printing with silk PLA, I had a couple of difficulties. One of the things that I encountered was with retraction. Without retraction enabled, my prints were a stringy mess. However, with retraction enabled, my extruder would grind a flat spot onto my silk PLA.

My lifesaver, it turns out, was two settings inside of Cura.

The way that Cura applies these two settings can be translated as “do not retract more than two times until at least 10mm of filament has been extruded.”

Adjusting these settings proved to be very helpful and allowed me to finish the prints that I had been having trouble with.