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 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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Making Stuff, Week 3: Spikes.

I got back into a groove this week now that things have quieted down in other areas of my schedule and I’ve started a couple of new projects and made progress on others. To start with, I dyed more of Benz’s white fleece red for the commissioned yarn I’m working on that will be plied with his black fleece. That has to dry fully before it’s carded and spun, which gave me a great chance to get some other things started.

Now that I’d finished the sage-green alpaca/Tencel yarn I needed a new project for my Lendrum. I’m not ready to spin the yarn for the Silverton Sweater yet — I want to card all of the batts I’m going to need first. This way I can see if there are any variations in the batts that would require me to do some mixing or breaking up in order to spin a consistent yarn. And since I’ve only washed, carded, and blended half the fiber I need for the project that meant I could start another one.

I poked through my fiber boxes and found two batches of fiber I’ve had for about four years: roughly a pound of super soft chocolate brown alpaca and one pound of natural, undyed Corriedale. I remembered that I wanted to spin the two together for a sweater but had never decided on just how. I thought that a 2-ply sportweight yarn that was made up of one alpaca single and one Corriedale single would be really nice, so I took that with me to Saturday’s spin-in and got one bobbin of each spun so far.

One alpaca bobbin and one Corriedale bobbin.

I’d never actually spun Corriedale before and it definitely felt very nice. It was easy to spin, and though it’s not as soft as Merino its hand will be tempered a bit by the softness of the alpaca it’ll be plied with. I’m letting these sit and set twist while I spin another two bobbins, one of each. Then I’ll ply those since that will use up the four bobbins I currently have for the Lendrum (not counting the plying bobbin).

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Making Stuff: Week 2

I’ve decided that since I do a lot more than spinning it would be a much better use of a weekly blog post on making stuff to, you know, make it about all the stuff. I knit, I spin, and I’ve even developed a little dabbling interest in making jewelry over the last year, so why limit it to spinning? So this week we’re just going to consider last week’s post a test run and continue the weekly theme under the title of “Making Stuff.”

I haven’t had as much time this week as I normally do because we’ve been really pushing hard on a deadline at work. (A little side note: did you know that the game I’m working on has been announced? If you haven’t already, check out Monday Night Combat at Uber Entertainment. We’re all pretty excited.) But I did manage to squeeze in a half hour or two here and there this week, and most of that was spent getting to know my new Lendrum.

Oh, my Lendrum! I’m so excited! Last week I bought my first-ever new-for-me spinning wheel, a Lendrum double treadle with all the accessories — plying head, fast flier, lazy kate, the works. For almost ten years I used a borrowed Louet S10 that dated from the 1970s. It was a great wheel, but really only great in the sense that I was ignorant of how other wheels felt and having learned to spin on this one (after graduating from a drop spindle) it was what I was used to. That doesn’t mean I look back on it as a bad wheel, quite the opposite. But it had its quirks — including a vicious knock that happened every rotation, something I tried for years to get rid of but could never find and fix the actual source — and began to feel limiting once I’d been spinning for several years, and I frequently looked in envy at the newer, more modern wheels that other spinners I knew were using.

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