New tools are fun

I’ve already told you that Annette lent me her drumcarder to help process my MDSW fleeces. Once you have a drumcarder in the house, you want to card everything!

When I finished carding Tamarind’s fleece (the chocolate brown), I cleaned all the fiber off so it looked like new. Then I decided to card the blue and green dyed fiber S1 brought me back from Canada. This is what it looked like when she brought it home:

I experimented with a few ways of opening the fiber before putting it on the drumcarder. First I flicked it:

This was fine, but it was more efficient to open it with hand cards so I transitioned to that. It was so fun to load on the fiber and see the layers build up:

The first batt I made was the big one, and it was VERY hard to get off the carder. After that, I went back to weighing fiber and only loading on 1 ounce for each batt. I have about 4 ounces here, but one batt is twice as big as the others:

Don’t you just want to SQUISH them???

Those batts are waiting patiently for me to spin them.

Then I cleaned the drumcarder again and started thinking about Muesli’s fleece. Muesli is a mix of gray and brown, and I didn’t want to mix them together and just get a homogenous middle gray. I sorted the fleece into light, medium and dark:

I’m planning to knit the Humulus sweater with Muesli’s lightest colors as the main color, and Tamarind for the yoke pattern (for maximum contrast). I had two baskets full of the lightest gray, but I took this photo after picking one of them. I cranked and cranked and ended up with 21 batts:

The color is a bit off because it’s inside, but you get the idea.

I’ve already started plying Tamarind. I haven’t spun all the singles yet, but since I only need a small amount of the brown, I’ve decided to switch to Muesli. I want to start knitting this sweater sooner rather than later.