Snail Spirals

I was finally, finally able to get back to working on my sweater wool this weekend. Has it really been a full month since I had that lovely table full of carded batts? The first thing I had to do was to divide up all the single-color batts and recombine them for the blended batts. Honestly, I think this step was the sticking point for why I haven't worked on this since I got everything carded the first time. The logistics of managing all that recombining were a bit intimidating.

On to blending! I have 1380 g (3.0 lb.) of washed, dyed, once-carded wool, in 15 colors; a total of 30 batts. Each batt worked out to about 45-55 grams, which is a workable amount for the carder, so I wanted to end up with 30 blended batts as well. I needed to split each batt into 30 pieces.

I was originally going to do this by weighing each batt, doing the division, and weighing out each piece. That quickly went out the window, for fiddliness and because my scale doesn't do tenths of a gram.

Instead, I split each batt down the middle, split each half in thirds, and pulled each sixth into five pieces.



It was easy to do, and the batts were carded well enough that doing it this way was "close enough" to even. The resulting 30 chunks of wool went into 30 separate grocery bags. (Please don't hate me for the shocking number of plastic bags I found in my cupboard. I'm horrible at remembering to bring my canvas bags to the grocery store. I promise I'll do better - I'm quite embarassed by this plethora of plastic! When I bike to the store, I bring my own bags/backpack; it's those spur of the moment grocery stops when I'm in the car that do me in. I should just leave the canvas bags in the car, and remember to put them back there after unpacking the groceries.)

Anyway - 30 separate piles of wool. This is what my living room looked like after all the batts had been divvied up.



Each bag had its handles tied and went back into the big box, so the wool chunks wouldn't fall out and get mixed up. By this point, it was about 1:30 am on Friday night/Saturday morning, and I should have gone to bed. I didn't, though. I kept one bag of wool tufts out and had to see what it looked like carded. Hee hee! I just couldn't go to bed without seeing what the blend looked like.

This jumble of tufts:



turned into this batt after one pass through the carder:



I layered the colors onto the carder in order, first all the greens, then the teals, then chartreuse, then red, then brown. It came off the carder a lovely puffy layered rainbow.



That's pretty, but I want a more homogeneous blend for this yarn. So I split the batt lengthwise into four pieces:



pulled off chunks, attenuated them a bit, and sent everything through again. After the second pass through the carder, I had this batt:



Now that's what I'm talking about! The colors aren't completely blended into mud, but overall the effect is even. Uniformly streaky, I guess. Every section of the batt has every color, at some point in its thickness.



The wool carded up beautifully, without neps (yay!) or clumps. Fluffy, puffy, softy, lofty; this is pretty wool. I'm very happy with the blending. I was going to do a third pass, but that would have blended it too much. I want to be able to see the sparks of the accent colors in the finished yarn.



By this time it was 2:00 am. Like a good little girl, I rolled the batt up, put it in the storage tub, and went to bed.

This morning, I tore off one sixth of the batt to spin a test skein.



Love love LOVE it! This is pretty much the exact yarn I was aiming for. This sample skein is chain-plied, but the final yarn will be a true 3-ply. Other than that, it's just right.



This sample is:

28 yards
8 grams (0.2 oz)
10 wpi
1587 ypp

I spun this semi-worsted, with a forward draw from the end of the strip of batt and very lightly smoothing in the twist, but also allowing the twist to enter the drafting triangle. It's very lofty and elastic.



This is so incredibly satisfying, to go from a raw fleece to that yarn.