Using a Drum Carder

Recently on the Felting and Fiber Forum, Leonor was asking those of us who'd recently bought drum carders what we thought of them. I said I really liked mine from the Classic Carder company and didn't tend to get fibre building up on the small drum, which seems to happen for some and I said I'd try and do some videos when I got chance. Yesterday I found time to do some videos. The first one took almost an hour to upload to youtube, so I have done some edited versions and I will try to upload the others when I have more time. The first batt I made is using 'texturey' wools and fibres. They are mostly ones I have hand dyed myself, scoured wools like Bluefaced Leicester, Wensleydale and Falkland, carded Icelandic, some Alpaca, dyed Devon tops and some hand dyed silk tops and silk noil.

This is the video, sorry the light isn't brilliant.



This next video is showing commercial wool tops being carded, these go through a lot easier, and the end 'batt' is a lot neater and smoother, more like wide roving than a batt. You can use the drum carder to make your own blends from wool tops which are usually more expensive than single colours. Depending on how you put the wool through will depend how 'stripey' it is or how blended. 



I like to make blended batts with some texture and some wool tops. This next video shows about half of the texture batt being blended with the wool tops batt, I think I added some soy tops, flax and ramie to this too.

I don't often do this, but for demonstration purposes, I put the texture and tops batt from the previous video through again.



I used a shower curtain on the table while making these videos, I hoped the white would help lighten them a little, I don't think it made much difference, but it does show up some of the dust that collects under the carder!