Category: Drum Carding

Scraps

Today I stood in the kitchen and I could see two jobs to do next.  Either I tidied and cleaned the lounge floor or I cleaned the fluff from my drum carder.  Before I’d really thought about it I’d picked up the drum carder cleaning brush…

My daughter (almost 4) has been asking about the drum carder for a bit, and seeing me clean it she was again asking questions about how it worked.  So, we went and found my box of fibre scraps and some suitable fibre for holding it all together (I chose some silver-grey Haunui fibre) and we had a play.

We chose colours together.  Then I cut up some leftover handspun yarn – this was a first for me!  I wrapped the yarn around a book, then cut it into short lengths.

cut-spun

We carded up a batt – but my daughter thought it was a little too subtle, so we revisited the colour selection, making three piles of fibre to drumcard into batts.  By this stage my daughter was very engaged with the process and happily turned the drum carder while I prepared fibres and fed them on.  She also issued instructions about the colours and fibres that should go on next.  We made glitter and cut-bit sandwiches (with thin layers of fibre for the bread) for the drum carder to eat (the large drum is apparently the drum-carder’s tummy!).  We ended up with four batts.

wildcard

At the moment I’m not sure what I’ll make with these (or even how I’ll spin them), but I’m sure they’ll end up being made into something for my daughter.

Time Travel on Days 13 to 15 of the TdF

Today’s lesson – when grabbing my camera from the desk in my study, make sure it’s got the memory card in it and I’ve not left it in the card reader slot in my computer. So some of the photos on here are from the camera on my phone (which fortunately goes everywhere with me).  But before I talk about today I need to catch up on the TdF.

On Thursday (day 13) I continued with plying the Shetland/Soybean blend. It’s not finished yet but I did make some progress. Yesterday (day 14) I managed to get to 11pm without doing any spinning. In the end I fancied something calming and soothing so sat at my Dryad and continued spinning the Falkland tops.

Today is day 15 and was Creating Space.  I took spinning, drum-carding and felting to do. I’m not sure why I thought I would manage to do all of these things in about 6 hours (with time for lunch) but I’ve always been an optimist.

I wanted to make a start on the “Bowties are cool” yarn. My plan is to have felted bowties and the yarn itself to be core-spun. I started work on making some batts. Initially I fished out the colours and fibres I wanted to use and put them together and looked for some pictures of the Time Vortex from the new Doctor Who series (I personally like the vortex for the 10th Doctor, so this is where I concentrated my efforts). Then, uncertain of what I was going to do. I drank some tea and did some spinning:

bfl-spinolution

I then had another look at the pictures and my fibre and made some decisions, which resulted in four piles of fibre:

piles of fibre

I drum carded each of these.  I didn’t manage to cram all the fibre onto the carder, so I now have a pile of left-overs.  After a single pass I was starting to doubt my plan:

once

So I split each of the batts into four and recarded into four new batts (thus combining the first batts).  The result is four Time-Vortex batts:

batts

Next step – felted bowties.