...drumcarder magic!

There are many amazing fiber artists out there who dye fantastic colorways - but after a couple years of trial and error with food grade dyes on fiber and yarn for my personal use, I discovered that just isn't the medium for me. While I now have proper dye pots and professional acid dyes, so far, it is only for dyeing semi-solids for batt fodder. The graphic designer in me just wants a lot more control over blending and placement of colors than I've been able to achieve in a dye pot, so the drum carder is my very best friend!  Sometimes though - you want to muddy the palette! And the drumcarder works just as well as kettle dyeing for that too.

This is an example of a dyed braid I received in a swap that was really soft, but my complexion does not appreciate purple...with lots of shiny pink & red add ins, bamboo, firestar, and angelina. I divided up everything into three parts before carding. The right side is the first batt after one pass thru the carder. You can still see the white and pink segments clearly here and some light purple.

Now you can see how "pink" it all become after a 2nd pass thru the drumcarder. The right is the single of just this mixture spun, and the bottom left is the first skein of yarn, one ply is another lighter pink batt I splurged on last summer. It's still a much cooler pink than it would be without all the dark purple blended in, but I'm very happy with how it turned out.

...the bargain fleece

You know that feeling you get at a fiber festival, when you find that deal you just can't pass up?

I love that feeling...except when it makes me buy things like this fleece.

This was originally a little over a pound of Babydoll Southdown fleece - in a yummy natural chocolate color. I washed it this summer with some easy to scour Jacob, and several pounds of alpaca fleece. I thought it was clean.

I have, after buying this fleece, read Babydoll Southdowns described as the VM magnet of sheep or alternatively, made of velcro. I believe it!

This is my picker after a SINGLE pass of washed fleece. After carefully picking out a couple ounces of fleece that was in fact clean. The wool is so dense I didn't actually scour it all the way thru, so much of the fleece was still full of hardened lanolin - and only felt very vaguely sticky after pulling apart by hand.

Speaking of pulling apart by hand - after noticing the amount of neps the picker was producing I tried hand teasing the locks carefully and discovered that the entire fleece is brittle. The only thing going for it at this point is that there's no bug damage - it's just very fragile wool that was barely over 2" in staple to begin with.

Like a bad book I couldn't put down, I just had to "finish" part of this fleece. With the exceptionally short staple and amount of neps, I used my hand cards to prepare just over an ounce of the picked fleece. Then managed to spin it into a bulky 2 ply.

The bright side of this, is that I only paid $3 plus tax for the entire fleece. So even if it's going in the compost pile this weekend, it was a relatively inexpensive, if painful lesson in bargain fiber shopping - and both cats have enjoyed the "pillow" for the past few days. The yarn would go in the compost pile too, but I decided to keep it for a fleece to yarn demonstration at local crocheting guild this month.

...blogging!

I'm compulsively creative, so this is just another outlet for the chinchilla like inspirations and ideas bouncing around inside my head.  This is dipping my toe in the blogging world for the first time, so it may take a little while for a schedule or clear format to evolve.

Coming up will be posts about drum carding and lessons learned from bargain raw fleece.