Batts and Roving

The last time I did a World of Wool order, I got some Botany Lap Waste. If you've not heard of this it's basically a huge bin they have at WoW, where they put the left over tops from the ends of carding runs, and when you order some they grab 500g out of the bin and you get what you're given, but it is cheaper than Merino or blends and sometimes you get a lot of the luxury fibre like yak, alpaca etc. This time it seemed I got the ends of someone's bizarre order of various greys, including what looked like natural grey Merino blended with trilobal nylon (why?!) I don't know why they can't have a 'neutrals' choice for browns, greys etc. The rest of my bag was a kind of dyed steel grey Merino,  some green Merino which looked like it was their Gooseberry shade, and some pinky pale lilac I didn't recognise. I carded them all up into batts then put them through again with other Merino to make some blends. I put the lilac through with various shades of purple and a few blues. Then I used a diz (a brass picture hook with 3 holes) to make roving:

I made another batt with the same colours, but added some orange, pinks, yellow, red, and some brighter blues:

This is what the roving looks like unwound:

I put the gooseberry batt through the carder with some green shades and light/bright blues. I meant to make roving, but forgot, so I might put it through again. One side:

The other side:

I put half and half gooseberry and grey through the carder, and made roving:

When I was putting the batts and blends away, I discovered some other odds and ends from when I did MakeFest last year. I might blend some of these greens with half the gooseberry batt I forgot to card:

I found some gorgeous (even if I do say so myself!) texturey batts I'd forgoten I'd made too. I might have to save these for when I get a spinning wheel to make some texturey yarn!:

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!

Recent Things

I made some mixed white wool batts on my drum carder recently. I like to use different wool breeds together because they felt differently to each other so you get interesting results and it's different every time. I made 3 batts altogether and used Lincoln, 23 mic Merino, 18 mic Merino, Norwegian, Texel, Cheviot, Devon, Teeswater and Shetland wool tops.  I also added in some carded mixed lambswool and Falkland fleece for texture, and Border Leicester, Mohair curls, Bluefaced Leicester, Wensleydale, and Alpaca for crimp and curl. I also added some silk for extra shine.

I thought I'd use the batts as the inspiration to put together another wool and fibre pack to sell on etsy, using white/natural as the theme. I added some cotton scrim and some of the 'luxury' embellishment fibres I have: Bamboo staple fibre, Egyptian cotton top, Ingeo, Banana, Ramie, Flax and Milk protein fibre. And also some silk fibres: silk threads and throwster's waste, silk carrier rods (don't they look so ugly before they're soaked and separated?!) and one of my favourites, silk noil. I love the way it felts, but I also love the way it smells and sounds as it's separated and stretched out :)

I went to Abakhan on Wednesday for some supplies (they were out of delrin clips!) and couldn't resist getting some gorgeous georgette fabric in a few designs. This is one of them:

I also couldn't resist the braiding, so got 3 designs:

I hadn't had chance to do much over the last few weeks so I decided to make time on Friday and laid out and felted a nuno felt piece with one of the new fabrics I bought. I knew I should have added some wool around the edges of the fabric, but I laid it out upside down, with the fabric on the bottom and knew I'd mess up if I tried to flip it :)

I picked colours from the fabric to make a muti coloured patchwork back:

It textured really nicely: