Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Meet Fred

This is Fred. He just arrived today via UPS.


He's bigger than I thought he would be. It's probably a good thing I didn't opt for the larger version as I probably would not have had room. As you can tell, my fiber room used to be one of the boy's bedrooms.

Leave this home only if you dare for you will lose your bedroom! Our downstairs bedroom (where eldest son slept) is now a walk in storage room as we have only four small closets in the whole house (built in 1910 when folks used wardrobes and did not accumulate STUFF!

Anyway, I'm having fun already. The first thing I did was run some of the Sheep's Shed Studio black and white roving. I was amazed at how fluffy it became. All I had to do was roll the batt over and it was like a short piece of roving (actually just shorter than what I normally work with at one time). I did a bit of pre-drafting and low and behold, I had PERFECT stuff to work with. Truly amazing!

Then I took this same batt (flattened it out a bit and broke it up a bit) and laid it back on the tray. On top of it I put a couple of tiny locks of purple mohair and ran it through. Pretty nice but it was missing something, and I dug out the pink mohair and used about half as much as I did the purple. I'm wondering if a pinch of green wouldn't punch it up. I may try but don't want to create mud either.

Then I cleaned off what I thought was all of the merino stuff and ran some of my teased rambouillet (Kate's fleece). Check it out.



You can see where I missed some of the white. Lesson learned... first go through should be just a little bit of something to "clean out the previous stuff I missed in the clean up". In any case, I'm very pleased. This is so much nicer than what I was working with before. There are no nebs!! I can still see some junk (vm) but it's MUCH better than it was as the teasing took out most of it.

Might require some tweezers.

2 comments:

Barbara said...

Oh my gosh! Isn't drum carding just the best?

I love my drum carder and it isn't nearly as nice as fred.

I love blending different fibers and colors for fabulous batts.

DJ said...

Hi, would you mind sharing where you purchased Fred? I am mildly interested in getting a carder myself. Well, actually I'm wildly interest in getting one, its my budget that is mildly interested. LOL
Thanks,
DJ in SW MI