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A tutorial: how to make roving with a drum carder

A tutorial: how to make roving with a drum carder

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This week has been hectic. I haven’t had much time to do any felting. I did a little bit of stitching on my seascape, but not enough to show you and a little bit on a set of shoelaces. Mostly I made pasties for the market. They are more popular than we anticipated and we are down to the last few.  This is a few about to go in the freezer. They get bagged once they are frozen.

I thought you might like to see this post from way back at the beginning of our blog journey. This is one of the first posts I did.

After you have carded your wool and it is still on the drum you might like to have it as roving instead of a batt. This will show you how to use a simple diz to do that.  You can make a diz out of almost anything. mine is a piece of plastic cut from the side of a plastic sour cream container, it has a hole in the middle for the wool to come through. you pull a small bit of the carded wool through the hole and turning the drum backwards slide the diz around the drum pulling the wool through in a long rope as you go.  the diz rest directly on the drum. You control the amount of wool in the rope by how fast you slide it across the drum as you go around. If its too hard, you are trying to pull too much wool through the hole.

Ann

Batts and Roving

Batts and Roving

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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:

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

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThis is what the roving looks like unwound:

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

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe other side:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI put half and half gooseberry and grey through the carder, and made roving:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWhen I was putting the batts and blends away in my Workshops Supplies tubs, 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:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI 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!:

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