Just a quick break from the all-carder-all-the-time postings which you may expect over the next little while, to share a cool discovery from when I cleaned my fish tank over the weekend.



A couple background updates since the last installment of The Panda Cory Show:

• I stopped collecting eggs and raising fry from the cories a bit over a year ago.
• The three oldest cories disappeared from the tank, and I'm assuming that they died natural deaths, given that they were 4+ years old.
  
• When we moved last October, I consolidated the 7-gallon tank and the 14-gallon tanks. Taking care of two tanks was too much work, plus there isn't a good place for the second tank in the new house.
• The 14-gallon tank fits perfectly on the counter between the kitchen and dining room, and I really like it there because you can see both sides of the tank.
  
• All the fish (5 glowlight tetras, 2 black neon tetras, 5 panda corydoras catfish, 1 otocinclus catfish) have been doing great since the move, and the plants are growing well and providing lots of cover. This is good because both sides are exposed and they can't go hide in the back anymore, though I did put a pothos plant trailing across counter on the dining room side to screen it a bit.
  
• Since the move, the glowlight tetras and panda cories have spawned at least five times each, and the rest of the fish have thoroughly enjoyed the caviar.
  
• I got 4 more otocinclus catfish last weekend, because they like to be in schools, and the singleton I had was lonely.

Then, early this week, after the new otos had had a chance to adjust to the new tank, I did a routine 30% water change and cleaned the filter. Luckily, I dumped all the water from the filter into a bucket and not straight into the sink, because when I went to empty the bucket, I saw this:



A little baby cory that has been living in the filter! I'm guessing he's about 6 or 7 weeks old, based on the amount of pigmentation on his head, dorsal fin and tail. He was about 3/4" long, give or take. I released him into the main tank, and hopefully he's thriving and enjoying the extra room.

Panda cories are tough little fish.

It's a pretty aquarium, and always provides something interesting to look at when I walk past. I enjoy it.

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!

It is HERE!



It's HERE, my carder is HERE, and I am at WORK!

Torture!

My carder didn't arrive today.

It was delayed in Spokane yesterday, due to "Adverse Weather Conditions."

Sob.

The UPS website says it made it to Portland today, and should be delivered tomorrow.

I finished dyeing Buttercup's fleece tonight:



I ended up dyeing dark brown instead of black as one of the accent colors, because, well... I wanted to. I just thought the brown would go better with the rest of the muted earthy colors. We shall see. If the first batt doesn't come out as planned, I can always overdye that bunch of wool to darken it up. I ended up doing two batches of the chartreuse. I was concerned that the small amount of bright colors would get lost in the dark green, and be unnoticable. I dyed the last little bit of fleece, which wasn't enough to make a full 100 gram batch, red for the same reason. The red over the natural gray looks fabulous, by the way, and there will be a red sweater from a gray fleece at some point down the road.

So in all, I have:

• 400 g green
• 400 g brown-green
• 100 g green-brown
• 100 g dark teal
• 100 g light teal
• 200 g chartreuse
• 133 g red
• 100 g brown

Hopefully 1533 g (~3.4 lb) of fiber will make enough 3-ply worsted weight yarn for a sweater with some cable-y goodness on it. It should.

I also had a helper tonight, running quality control to ensure the wool is sufficiently soft and has a good warmth factor. Note the lovely cozy cat bed immediately behind him.

In anticipation of my carder arriving on Wednesday (THREE DAYS!), I decided to get a whole pile o' wool ready. I got out Buttercup's fleece and the dye last night, and had lots of fun creating a beautiful variety of greens. I worked in 100-gram batches of wool, and dyed in the mesh bags I use for washing. I've found this works very well for ease of handling the wool without felting or messing up the locks too much.



I decided that I want a green sweater, but not a flat monotone green. Using more than one color, or even more than one shade of a single color, gives a much more interesting yarn. The first batch I dyed was straight Spruce.



The next batch was a 2:1 mix of Spruce:Emerald.



I decided both these were more blue than I want for my sweater, but they will look nice carded in with the rest of the greens.

The third batch was 2:1 Spruce:Sun Yellow.



The fourth was 1:0.5:1 Spruce:Sun Yellow:Brown.



And the fifth was 0.5:1:0.25 Sapphire:Sun Yellow:Black.



There is some color variation within each batch, due to the natural variation of grays in the fleece, which ranges from pearly light gray to lightish charcoal. It looks somewhat blotchy now, but I think it will give a fabulous depth to the finished yarn.

After I did those five, I paused to evaluate. Actually, I paused to go to bed. I was so involved in dyeing Buttercup and washing Herkel (more on that in a minute), that I was shocked to look at the clock and see that it was 3:30am. Oops. Off I went to bed.



This morning, in real light, I evaluated. Numbers 1 and 2 are too blue. They will be accent colors. Number 3 is very very nice, and is a keeper. Numbers 4 and 5 also good, and are quite close in color, despite being very different mixes. I'll use Number 4, and I think it will combine very well with Number 3 as the base color for my yarn.

So, I'll dye most of the rest of the fleece with Numbers 3 and 4. I'm also going to dye 100g batches in bright chartreuse green, dark red, and black, as accent colors to blend in along with the blues I did last night.

So, that was last night. While the dyes were going, I also worked on Herkel's fleece. I didn't get all the grease out when I washed the fleece the first time, and consequently it was impossible to comb. The first two bags I washed combed up fine, so I think I may have gotten paranoid about felting it, or tried to do too much at once or something. Anyway, I've been unable to comb any more wool because it's just too sticky. I got it out last night intending to wash 100 grams, enough to ply with what I have already spun, but then I got on a roll and ended up washing the whole thing. It's not completely dry yet, but I can already tell it's much better. Once it's dry, I'll weigh out 100 g and set that aside to comb for the cobweb shawl project. I figure 200 g of yarn should spin up somewhere in the neighborhood of 4400 yards, if I keep going as fine as I have been. That should be enough for whatever shawl I end up designing, but I may set aside an additional 100 g, just in case. I decided to card the rest. Actually, I'll card one batt and see how it goes. This is very fine, crimpy wool, so if it gets neppy on the carder, I'll comb the whole thing.



So I started out with a dye evening, and washed wool to fill in the time when the dyes were cooking. The wool has to soak while it's washing, though, so I still had time on my hands. I put Season One of Battlestar Galactica (which my brother-in-law was kind enough to addict me to hook me on introduce me to over Christmas) on the DVD player and picked open some Border Leicester/Romney roving that sat way too long in its bag and was partially matted and didn't draft well.



I got this wool last summer, in Friday Harbor, from a spinning friend who was destashing. It's local Friday Harbor wool, from Shepherd's Croft, the farm of another spinning friend. I've spun one bobbin full of singles already (that ball in front), and while it came out OK,



the slight matting and difficult drafting made it less than fun. So I'm picking the roving open and will send it through the carder (THREE DAYS!!). I'm aiming for a sweater-weight 3-ply yarn with this, and may possibly combine it with the Tunis I spun a year ago. Each is only 8 oz, but if I get another pound or so of a coordinating wool to tie them together, it will work for a sweater. Maybe I'll contact Annette at Shepherd's Croft and buy a piece of one of her white fleeces next spring, and dye it.

Oh, and that gorgeous basket up there? I picked that up yesterday in Portland after taking Shaun to the airport. We went to Goodwill for a couple pairs of long pants that actually fit Emma's fast-growing self, and there it was: a sturdy wood slat basket with leather handles, reinforced top and bottom edges, and a removable cloth liner, for a dollar! It's 15 inches in diameter and 9" tall. I got the basket, three pairs of pants, a skirt, a dress, and three shirts for Emma, three shirts for me, four Handwoven magazines, a hardcover Harry Potter book, a kid's book and little dolly for Emma, a DVD, and a brand new L.L. Bean backpack bookbag with the tags still on. All for about $50. I love thrift stores.

Well, I'm halfway through the wait until my box from Copper Moose gets here. Five more days. Caroline guessed what I'm getting - a drum carder. Specifically, a Strauch Finest! Yippee!

I've wanted a good drum carder since I started spinning eight years ago, and finally took the plunge. The question of which carder to get has been percolating around in the back of my mind for at least seven years. I went back and forth between features and price, tried out a couple different models and researched on the internet, thought about price some more, and finally came to the conclusion that the Strauch is the one.

I definitely wanted a full-size carder, and chain drive would be a plus. What really sealed it for Strauch is the chain drive, the unique lickerin drum cloth, the brush attachment, and their solid track record of happy customers. The accessories (batt picker, cleaning brushes, teasing board, clamps) that come included with it are great, and the package from Copper Moose includes a free 2 pound fiber bonus in addition to free shipping. Woot! Plus, I knew that Strauch was going to be raising their prices on Jan 1, so it just seemed like the ideal time to buy.

This is the longest week and a half ever.