Adventures with the Drum Carder

In an effort to avoid the cocooning that we tend to do all too much of in the winter here, we had a very lovely dinner with Chelle and her family last night; it's always nice to get out of the house & spend some relaxing fun time with friends. After dinner, while the guys chatted, we (Chelle & I) couldn't resist some serious goofing around with fiber. She had a fabulous new drum carder from Fancy Kitty, but was still a bit tentative about using it. Now, I'm no expert on drum carders, but I used them a bit back at Yarn School, and the main lesson I came away with from that experience is this: Throw whatever you like into the carder, it's almost impossible to make a mistake. So, we started cranking away on the thing and made a couple of batts.

The first batt was mostly brown wool with a little grey & green thrown in, and some bits of blue/green silk hankies just for fun. We didn't separate the silk nearly enough, which made it a bit difficult & clumpy to spin. I think next time I'll pull the silk into much thinner & shorter bits before feeding it into the carder. We just kept feeding this thing until it was quite fat and lofty; it weighed about half an ounce.

The second batt we tried was burgundy and brown wools, and some burgundy silk bits that were smaller (but still a little too big.) This one was lovely, and a little smaller at 3/8 oz. We could have made it bigger but it was getting late.

Chelle kindly gave me both batts to spin up, which I did... spinning from the batt is a bit different from spinning from a roving strip, but not significantly so. I had a couple of fat spots where it got away from me, but for the most part it came out to a nice worsted yarn when I plied the two singles together. The two colors, so different, worked together in a rather unexpected way! There's not a lot of it, but maybe enough to trim a collar or something. I like it.