Snail Spirals

Oh. My. Goodness.



Ok, seriously? I love this carder. It is solid, well built, does exactly what it is supposed to do, and does it very well.



Ooo, shiny. That yellow sticker isn't kidding, though. Keep your hands away from the business end of this machine!



The bonus fibers it came with were: 8 oz of tussah silk, 8 oz of white mohair, 4 oz of fawn alpaca, 4 oz of bamboo, 4 oz of faux cashmere (nylon, very soft), and 4 oz of Icicle (also nylon, very sparkly). I'll be doing lots of gleaming blends after my sweater batts are carded up.

I started out tonight with the compacted Border Leicester/Romney roving. I knew that whatever wool I put through the carder first was likely to pick up a bit of dust and grime from the manufacturing process, so I didn't want to jump right in with the good stuff. This wool is not something that I'm deeply emotionally attached to, so if it was totally wrecked I wouldn't be heartbroken, and a little grime wouldn't even show anyway. If it's there, it will wash out.

The wool went from this compacted and slightly matted roving that wouldn't draft easily:



To this, the inaugural First Batt:



A lovely thick and lofty batt, ready to spin. Since I was just loosening up existing roving, I only did one pass through the carder, and it did a great job. It's ready to spin. That first batt was 34 grams (1.2 oz), but the rest were slightly heavier. I'd say 55 grams (~2 oz) is about the limit for this carder, and you'd have to load it carefully and evenly. I carded all the Border Leicester/Romney in about half an hour, and got 6 batts (4 biggish ones and two smaller ones).

Yum.



These will be very nice to spin, and are a huge improvement over the matted roving. Just lovely.



I took a break for a late dinner, and put Emma to bed. Then I dove right into Buttercup's fleece! I've been thinking over the past week or so about how I want to approach this yarn. I want the end product to be a well-blended, smooth yarn, suitable for knitting cables, and I want the color to be fairly consistent from skein to skein.

To achieve this, I decided that I would card each of the dye batches separately first, just once through the carder. This will even out each color within itself and make the wool easier to work with. Since I dyed in 100-g batches, there will be two batts from each batch. I'll have to keep this in mind as I'm blending, and take some from each. For the two main colors (green and brown-green), I will have many batts of each; 8 of the green and 6 of the brown-green. It will be a lot of jumbling-up. I will probably do it by weight, and calculate how many grams from each batt individually, to keep the proportions the same in each finished batt.

In any case, to avoid damaging the carder the first step is to pick the wool. This just means manually opening up each lock, literally pulling the fibers apart from one another with your fingers. This lets most of the VM fall out and lets me pick out any second cuts and neppy clumps that slipped by my first inspection before washing. Not that there really was much VM or many second cuts in this fleece. Buttercup's fleece is a very nice Corriedale, well sheared and skirted, and coated fleeces are always a pleasure to work with.

I started with the brown batch. On the left you see the picked wool, and on the right is the first batt, after going through the carder once. ONCE! Isn't it pretty? I was really pleased, and somewhat surprised, to see how it came out. That batt is almost spinnable as-is, smooth after one trip through, from picked locks! I expected the Border Leicester/Romney to come out nice after one pass, since I was re-carding roving, but this was just a picked mass of wool! Beautiful.



I finished up the brown batch, and have it safely stowed in a storage tub. I can't wait to see that tub fill up. The carder does such a nice job, and I'm over the moon that it's mine. I forsee a long and happy relationship.

As long as I'm careful of those teeth!