Making Stuff, Week 7: My New Drum Carder

So many things to write about this week! And the first one isn’t something I’ve made but something Matt’s dad made…my new custom-made drum carder! I’m so excited! But before I get too ahead of myself, let me just remind you that I’m posting this for WonderWhyGal’s Fiber Arts Friday extravaganza, so don’t forget to check out what other cool stuff people are doing.

I’ve said before that Matt’s dad loves making things. He’s seventy-five and retired, and he’s been machining and making things pretty much his whole life, and the stuff he makes is very good. He loves new projects and if he’s not already working on something for himself he’s looking around Matt’s house for things to make or improve. And a few months ago when he came to visit I was in the middle of drum carding some of my alpaca’s fleece into batts on my Louet Junior drum carder.

I bought the carder used at a pretty good price. I had saved up my pennies to get a drum carder but after researching I knew there was just no way I was going to get one of the really nice full-sized popular models for any price I could afford right now, and hand-carding all of my alpaca just simply wasn’t going to cut it. Even used, nice carders like Strauch or Pat Green go for several hundred dollars, and motorized carders can sell for, at minimum, $1000. After researching and then looking in my wallet and then researching and looking one more time in my wallet hoping that the bills had just magically multiplied like bunnies while I wasn’t looking — only to realize in dismay that they hadn’t — I settled on the Louet Junior, a half-sized model that seemed to get a fairly equal smattering of great reviews and “meh” reviews. Given that, like most spinning equipment, drum carders always seem to have good resale value and tend to go fast as soon as they’re put up for sale, I figured that at worst I could resell it if I wasn’t happy with it and save up for a different model.

When I showed Matt what I wanted to get he said, “you know, my dad could probably make one of those.” I admit that I wasn’t really sure — it seemed like drum carders had specific, precise measurements. And then I realized that we were talking about a man who can machine things within 1/1000 of an inch.

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Making Stuff, Week 6: Blood Oranges

It’s a short post this week, once again timed to coincide with Fiber Arts Friday. It’s short because I’ve forced myself to concentrate on mostly one project this week: the commissioned yarn I’m making for a coworker, a yarn I’ve already featured here (100% alpaca from Benz, 2-plied as one red and one black strand each). It’s taken longer than I thought because it turns out he needs more yarn than I anticipated, which required more washing fleece, drying fleece, carding fleece, dyeing fleece…

But in between all of that I did manage to do some more dyeing experiments, sticking mostly with the red family so I could see some consistent changes. I didn’t take individual pictures this week of all the individual batches after they were dyed, but I did take pieces of each fiber and mark them for my records. First I dyed the last of my Falkland wool, about an ounce, with a 2:1 ratio of Burgundy to Scarlet, and then I dyed one ounce of Merino wool with the opposite ratio, 1:2 of Burgundy to Scarlet. The shades turned out really pretty and distinct enough to notice. Finally, I dyed another couple of ounces of Merino with a roughly 2:1 ratio of Fire Red to Salmon, something I was just interested in seeing the results of since Salmon is so orangey-pink. That turned out to be a very pretty dark, dusty pinkish-red.

I stuck with the red this week because I figured this way, after seeing all of the dyeing results and keeping samples for my records, I could card them together into a blended batt along with the bright orangey salmon Falkland I had leftover from my beaded yarn experiment. Looking at all the colors together before carding, I had this image that they might look like the colors of a blood orange when put together.

A Merino/Falkland batt. I'm calling the colorway 'Blood Orange'.

Sure enough, that’s almost exactly how it came out. I didn’t carefully weight out the percentages but rather wanted to experiment as I carded it together, but I’m sure it’s roughly 50/50 Merino and Falkland. I blended it in roughly organized layers: The Scarlet/Salmon mix first, then some Salmon Falkland, then some Fire Red/Scarlet Merino, then some Scarlet/Burgundy Merino, then some Salmon Falkland, then some Burgundy/Scarlet Merino, followed by more Salmon Falkland. I left the batts at one blending pass to retain the color banding. I ended up with just over six ounces.

Spinning Term: “Batts”
Batts are flat rectangles of fiber that have usually been prepared with a drum carder — a machine with two barrels of teeth that “card”, or align, the fibers together. Batts are different from top in that the fibers do not have to be all the same length, and drum-carded batts will produce more blended batches of color when created with dyed fibers. Because they are fluffy rectangles of variously-aligned fibers instead of long strips of perfectly-aligned fibers (as in top), batts, when spun, typically produce a woolen yarn, one that is lofty, airy, and warm.

The yarn I plan to make from this will be a roughly worsted weight yarn, spun semi-thick-and-thin, and then plied with some kind of glittery, dark thread. I still have to determine how I want to spin the batts — I don’t want them to blend too well so I don’t want to pull them into roving (which would only serve to help the fibers blend even more), so I’m thinking of simply pulling off hunks and spinning from the long side to get a definite woolen result. We’ll see how that goes. I really can’t wait to spin these and I’m hoping I’ll be able to begin them this weekend at the Issaquah Spin-In.

Don’t forget, check out more Fiber Arts Friday posts!

Being the Barn Boss

We set aside time this morning to take care of farm chores and, since it had been about a month since we last did it, those farm chores included toenail checks, halter practice, and body scoring on the alpacas. This is only the third time we’ve done it in the six months we’ve had them and we seem to get better each time. Today we feel like we really made progress in being The Barn Boss with our most spirited alpaca, Cinnamon.

Are you talkin' to me? Are YOU talkin' to ME?

Because these are the first farm animals we’ve ever owned I’ll admit that we were really skittish and shy about how to handle them at first. Don and Jody of Jo’s Fleece Fields have helped us a lot with that, but really it just comes down to working with them more and more, which is why we’re trying to make sure we get some deliberate handling in about one a month even if they don’t need a toenail trim. Even though we’re not a farm in the big sense and our boys don’t have to be handled except when they get sheared and they get their toenails trimmed, what if — as unlikely as it is — we had to move them in an emergency and we were still uncomfortable with halters? And of course we want to be fully comfortable for all of this when shearing day comes up in early June. In order to do this, we are making a concerted effort to step up to the plate as Barn Bosses.

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Making Stuff, Week 5: Alpaca/Silk, Dyeing, and Non-Optimal Results.

I thought this week I’d actually try and time my weekly Making Stuff post to coincide with Fiber Arts Friday at lovely WonderWhyGal’s blog, so be sure and check out lots of other great posts from people making awesome stuff.

I started off this week with an attempt to free up some bobbins — my Lendrum is new and I haven’t had a chance to go out and buy more bobbins for it yet — by plying the Corriedale/alpaca yarn (not from my own alpacas but a commercially processed one I bought a long time ago) I’d started while the wool from the commissioned project was still drying after the dye bath.

Corriedale (natural white) and alpaca (natural brown) yarn, 2-ply. Made about 400 yards and I've still got plenty to spin.

I love the feel of this yarn, but as I look at it I’m not sure I love the end result as a yarn that I’d use myself, and I had originally thought I’d knit a sweater from it. I don’t know what it is about yarns made with one strand in one color and another strand in another color: I fall in love with them in my head or on the shelf at the knit shop, but when I bring them home and knit that awesome sweater I plan to make with them, the result just isn’t me when I put it on. I can’t figure out why. Sweaters made out of anything but a yarn no bigger than sport-weight that is mostly solid color just don’t look right on me, and these two-toned yarns I insist on making tend to look very bulky on me.

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Making Stuff, Week 4: Keeping Records

This week I continued with my socks-from-the-ground-up project, taking the fiber that I blended on my hackles last week and spinning it up this weekend after it was dry from dyeing. Now that I’m finished with that I can go back to my commissioned project since the dyed wool for that is now dry and ready to card, but let’s show off some sock yarn, shall we?

Turquoise and Purple sock yarn, with a little bit of my boy Benz in there.

If you recall from last week I had a total of six ounces that I’d blended on the hackle and I’ve been wondering if that was going to create enough yarn for a pair of socks. The final yarn’s resulting yardage is 320 yards, so I think I’ve got just enough for a good pair.

I really, truly love the way dyed wool looks on the bobbin, so I snapped this photo before I plyed it.

A bobbin full of beautiful wool. I love the way dyed wool looks on a bobbin.

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Fiber Arts Friday: Milk Fiber

I wanted to do a new post for Fiber Arts Friday, hosted by Wonder Why Gal and her alpaca farm, instead of recycling one of my other weekly blog posts about making stuff. So today’s short entry is about something I forgot to add to my blog post last week: milk fiber.

A cellphone picture of some milk fiber that I'm working on.

I got this as a sample from an Etsy buyer who had forgotten to ship my order and threw this in as thanks. The colorway is really quite beautiful with its mix of chocolate, rose, and tans. I’ve never spun milk fiber before and was intrigued; I’d seen it in fiber shops before and it seemed very soft and pretty, but how would it spin?

It spins about as easily as any other fiber; it drafts very nicely and seems to want to be spun quite fine, so I’m spinning it on my very small Golding spindle. Occasionally I lose control of the draft but for the most part it’s a very enjoyable small spinning project. I plan to ply it 2-ply to maximize the yardage I’ll get and I’m hoping I get enough to at least make something small with it.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure I’d ever go out and actually buy milk fiber. From what I can find out in my research online — which is very little — milk fiber is processed similarly to soy silk in that it comes from extruding the proteins (only in this case milk instead of the discarded waste of soy processing) into a spinnable fiber. I can’t seem to verify this, but some spinners say that this requires some harsh chemicals to achieve, and I like to avoid buying and spinning fibers that require lots of chemical processing — I mean, with wool and alpaca fiber, for instance, you feed the animals, they give you natural fertilizer for the garden and wool for your clothes that simply requires some soap and hot water. What could be easier? (Yes, I know soap is a chemical, but you have to draw your line somewhere.)

And that’s the other thing: what does milk fiber offer that other fibers don’t? I can’t seem to sort that out. It feels about as soft as soy silk, but I can get that softness from, well, soy silk or even good old-fashioned silk. It doesn’t seem to offer me a property that no other fiber can give me, and seems to require harsher processing to achieve — wool gives you warmth and memory, alpaca gives you even more warmth but with softness, silk gives you strength with softness…the list goes on. I can’t seem to figure out what it’s supposed to do better than fibers with a similar hand, like soy silk. This fiber kind of reminds me of Ingeo, a corn-based fiber that appeared on the spinning market a few years ago but I’ve not seen since.

So while this fiber is certainly pretty and I appreciate the seller throwing it in as a sample, I don’t know that I’ll be buying it anywhere and will be sticking to fibers that I know offer some property that I need or desire in my spinning. How about you, spinners? What are your thoughts on milk fibers, or any of the other new fibers that seem to be exploding onto the market?

Check out other Fiber Arts Friday posts!